From Krautrock to New Wave: Conny Plank’s Productions

Kraftwerk eventually distanced themselves from everything that preceded Autobahn, but that breakthrough record couldn’t have existed without the evolution of their first three albums. Too many Kraftwerk fans remain unaware that those records are electrifying, audacious blasts of psychic energy and sonic adventure unlike anything before them. And Conny Plank was crucial to their construction.

Kraftwerk’s debut has been officially out of print for decades and was never available legitimately in the U.S. The classic lineup hadn’t come together yet (future Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger’s here). The band had no synthesizers or electronic drums (flute was still a feature), but you’d barely know it. Imagine a stereotypical ‘50s b-movie mad scientist’s lab, with Plank presiding over the oscilloscopes and Tesla coils, enabling the fledgling band’s electro-acoustic alchemy.

The band that began as Kluster, featuring Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler, trafficked in fascinating but potentially room-clearing electronic experimentalism. When Schnitzler split after two albums, and the “K” changed to a “C,” they were still a bracingly avant-garde outfit, but they were beginning to move towards melodicism.

On their first record sans Schnitzler, Conny Plank contributed so much that he earned band member status in the liner notes. Like early Kraftwerk, they operated without synths, making electronic music the way avant-gardists had been doing for years, effectively using the studio as an instrument. In other words, Conny’s superpower was in full effect.

When Klaus Dinger drummed on Kraftwerk’s debut album, he vibed strongly with Conny Plank’s unorthodox methods. So, when Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother established their new duo, they turned straight to Plank as producer. Conny, in turn, believed so strongly in Neu! that he put up his own money to make their self-titled debut (He hadn’t yet built his studio).

Plank’s electronic treatments of the pair’s revolutionary sound gave Neu!’s minimalist attack both bite and atmosphere. The unrelenting, machine-like motorik beat introduced on the opening track “Hallogallo” would affect everything from punk to techno.

As the man with the Midas touch in krautrock’s golden era, Conny Plank could work his magic with a guitar/bass/drums trio just as easily as an exploratory electronic ensemble. As freaky as Guru Guru’s first two albums are, they were still rooted in a Jimi Hendrix-inspired post-psychedelic space. Kanguru, though, takes the trio someplace new without adding additional instruments to the arsenal. 

Wider grooves, roomier arrangements, and a spacier approach from guitarist Ax Genrich allow the jazz-schooled rhythm section of Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier to shine. At times Plank comes on like a Teutonic King Tubby, bringing dub-like vibes to the big, fat beats, helping to forge a krautrock classic in the process. Decades later, the record remained influential enough for Guru Guru fans Pavement to model the cover of 1995’s Wowee Zowee after it, and hip-hop fans will immediately identify the album’s opener as the motif in Danny Brown’s “Downward Spiral.”

Ultravox’s 1978 album Systems of Romance referenced the motorik beat of Neu! and the man-machine synth-scapes of Kraftwerk, which makes sense since it was a Conny Plank production. But for their next album, which passed the frontman baton from John Foxx to Midge Ure and marked a new era for the band, Ultravox doubled down on the Krautrock influences. 

After cutting what would become Vienna’s cinematic title track as a single at Conny’s Studio, the band decided to undertake the album’s entire creation process there. Ultravox moved in for three months, building songs from scratch and establishing a bold new electronic sound with Plank’s expertise. In due course, Vienna kicked off England’s hugely impactful New Romantic phenomenon.

In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s  a new generation of German mavericks applied the lessons of krautrock to the post-punk era in the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave). Conny Plank was there to shepherd the new schoolers. 

Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft began as instrumental post-punk provocateurs with a savage guitar-and-drums assault. By 1981 they had evolved into an equally provocative electronic duo. Singer Gabi Delgado-Lopez sounded like he was auditioning for the serial killer role in a German language true-crime audiobook, and Robert Görl delivered frighteningly intense, maniacally minimal patterns on synths and drums.

D.A.F.’s krautrock-loving label boss, Mute’s Daniel Miller, sprang when Plank requested to produce the album. Being a fledgling label at the time, Mute had shallow pockets but Plank was so enthusiastic and confident he assured Miller he could cut the entire album in three days. Whether it worked out that way is another story.

When Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox arrived in Cologne to cut an album with Conny, they were refugees from recently disbanded U.K. act The Tourists, not worldwide pop stars. Plank drafted German helpmates old (Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit) and new (D.A.F.’s Robert Gorl) to help the duo move from the New Wave power pop of their old band to musical pastures more atmospheric, electronic, and expansive. After Eurythmics conquered the globe with their second album, Stewart would attribute their accomplishments to the no-rules production approach they learned while working with Conny on In the Garden.

Jaz Coleman’s brain was blasted open by “Der Mussolini” from D.A.F.’s Alles Ist Gut, convincing the Killing Joke frontman that Conny Plank would be the perfect producer for his band’s next album. Coleman was right, but Plank flipped the script somewhat. Counter to expectation, Revelations ended up being the least arty, most unrelentingly aggressive of the band’s early albums. Even more counterintuitively, it was also the biggest commercial success. Ordinarily, Plank would be the first to add some electronic flavoring. Instead, the synth touches that occasionally adorned previous albums were stripped away in favor of pure post-punk mayhem. 

Whodini were Brooklyn teenagers who’d barely been out of New York City when they went to Germany to work on their first album. The experience blew their minds on multiple levels. Eyeballing the array of top-tier sampling gear at Conny’s fingertips was a trip — they’d never seen a Fairlight CMI or an Emulator before.

The state-of-the-art gear helped put Whodini ahead of the hip-hop production curve. And on a more basic level, they were wowed simply by stepping into Plank’s bathroom, where his multiple Gold records adorned the walls. Plank isn’t the album’s only producer — Thomas Dolby’s work on the hit “Magic’s Wand” is widely celebrated — but when you hear the clockwork synth patterns and robotic vocoder vocals on “Rap Machine” kick in, there’s no question who’s at the helm.