Michael Rother
Fernwärme

Fernwarme is the last of the first four albums considered by popular vote and critics as the best of Michael's solo work.
Michael enters the '80s and decides to go solo, excluding his adventurous companions from the project: the master drummer Jaki Liebezeit and the famous producer Conny Plank.

So Michael finds himself alone facing a fourth album after the magnificent three in a row over three years. By drastically reducing the team, the sound also became more stripped down with few baroque elements and a lot of Neu!-style motorik. Sparse, repetitive, and sometimes primal rhythms fill this album.

The album opens with a dark, sad, and distressing melody, unlike anything from the previous three records. It's called "Elfenbein" and it incredibly resembles the atmospheres of Bowie's Heroes midway through the album, for which Rother himself denied collaboration a few years earlier (in truth, it was the majors who didn't agree on the collaboration). Then it continues with a solitary, dry, and skeletal guitar, almost like a soundtrack from The Godfather, marking that bare and aggressive melodic line, with a solid motorik and some central inventions typical of his way of composing music. "Erlkonig" is one of the most valid tracks of the entire work, gradually unveiling to us a grey landscape, like the cover, sad and solitary, of a Michael left alone, free to express his moods, surprisingly grey. In fact, these moods seem darker than usual, with the production reflecting the new decade well underway. The brief and decelerated title-track then takes on a slowness and weight in its few notes that fascinates and seems to serve as an intro for the subsequent "Fortuna", where few guitar flashes intervene over a hypnotic percussive rhythm that seems to accuse of the '80s turn, yet remains fresh and never appears cloying. Then the atmosphere seems to relax and unwind slightly with the subsequent "Hohe Luft", where that old time-keeping that made Dinger a legend returns from the depths, and towards the middle, there are those callbacks to Katzenmusik that made Rother one of the most visionary guitarists and composers of our time. The album reaches its final point, first passing through "Klangkörper", with its tribal and primordial rhythms, seeming to be taken from Kraftwerk's first, Tone Float when they were still called Organization, and the concluding "Silberstreif", an oasis of inner peace, which seems to amicably contrast the much darker and serious first part of the album.
This is Fernwarme, and after Flammende Herzen, Sterntaler, and Katzenmusik, the four of a kind was served. But not all aces are equal, they have the same value. Certainly, this is mostly very personal, subjective music. But I believe that objectively this album has something more compared to the previous ones. Indeed, it seems to unite all the previous ones: there's the motorik of the first album, the intimacy of the second, and that homogeneity typical of the third.
In short, here Michael seems to reach the completion of his musical idea on his own, reaching the end of a purifying journey, arriving here stripped down and with clear ideas, that perhaps the world is not all synth, clear skies, and hearts burning with love, but there's also a darker, more introspective part and perhaps for this reason more interesting. There's Fernwarme.