Düsseldorf Electronic

Not a genre — a city with a studio culture. Düsseldorf was wealthy, industrial and full of art students, and the music that came out of it treats rhythm as architecture: one beat, held, with the drama stripped off.

Two generations, the 70s machine-pastoral and the 80s punk-with-synths, sharing the same bars and often the same engineer.

Kraftwerk's Kling Klang studio on Mintropstraße made the city self-sufficient: own room, own gear, no label clock. , working with Conny Plank; Dinger carried on into La Düsseldorf in 1976.

The second wave came from a bar. The Ratinger Hof in the Altstadt was rebuilt at the end of 1976 and became the central meeting point of German underground culture, widely called the birthplace of German punk, roughly 300 metres from the Kunstakademie.

DAF, KFC, Mania D and Östro 430 formed in that orbit. Kurt Dahlke founded Warning Records in 1979 — renamed Ata Tak in 1980 — starting with a self-pressed Der Plan 7" of 1,500 copies, with DAF's debut as the label's first album.

Neue Deutsche Welle followed, then the majors.

Who: Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider at Kling Klang; Dinger and Rother; Gabi Delgado and Robert Görl; the Ata Tak three — Dahlke, Frank Fenstermacher, Moritz Reichelt; Conny Plank's studio outside Cologne as the shared ear.

What: a pulse that never resolves, sequencers and tape over drama, German lyrics said flat rather than sung. How a record gets in: it was made in the city or by someone from the Hof, it keeps one rhythm longer than feels reasonable, and it treats the studio as the instrument.

DAF started in the Hof's basement — Delgado on stylophone, Görl on drums.