Harmonia
Musik Von Harmonia

“Harmonia is the most important rock group in the world”
Brian Eno.

With these words, the English electronic guru defines the project established in the mid-70s by Michael Rother (a former member of Kraftwerk and later Neu!) and Hans-Joachim Rodelius and Dieter Moebius (the Cluster, another legend of German cosmic music). The latter, unproductive for some time, had withdrawn to the German countryside, to the peaceful village of Forst, where they had created their small recording studio, named after the town that hosted them. Rother was going through a period of strong creative stagnation and sought peace and comfort in the spiritual retreat of Cluster.
Legend tells of epic sessions, completely free from any scheme, rather than musical constraints/constructions, where Rother's guitar guided Moebius and Rodelius's technologies into territories of pure avant-garde melodic synthetic experimentation, while attempting to explore the deepest depths of space. The result had a strong emotional impact even on the protagonists, who decided to use some of those sessions for making a record, and the name they chose for the project came out quite naturally, one evening when Rodelius, trying to describe this music, called it a “perfect synthesis of harmony”.
The cult label Brain (already "responsible" for the release of Neu!'s works) did not miss the opportunity and in 1974 launched their debut, “Musik Von Harmonia”. The music contained here is extremely difficult to define (impossible...???) as even Julian Cope mentioned in the pages of his 'Personal Guide to Great Cosmic Music - Krautrocksampler': “these pieces are difficult to describe. In a way, they are sketches, but also something more, they occupy vast expanses of sound and then vanish into the flowing cosmos”.

I won’t, therefore, attempt to explain what “Watussi”, “Dino”, “Veterano”, or the sublime “Sehr Kosmisch” are; I will merely consider “Musik Von Harmonia” as one of the highest expressive peaks reached by music (in the broadest and most noble sense of the term), difficult to understand if one has never been predisposed and mentally open to travel in space and time.

“There is a region between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the dark abyss of the unknown and the luminous heights of knowledge. It is the dimension of imagination. It is a region that might exist… at the edge of reality” as Rod Serling introduced every episode of his TV series "The Twilight Zone", and perhaps this is where Harmonia's music emerges from.