Watussi

The opening track of the debut: interlocking loops of organ, synth and guitar, each moving to its own rhythm.
Harmonia, from Musik von Harmonia

Written by
Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Michael Rother
Length
5:55
Album
Musik von Harmonia

Play on hypersongs

Watussi opens side one of Musik von Harmonia, recorded in Forst in 1973 and credited, like every track on the album, to all three members. Post-Punk Monk heard it built from several looping parts of keyboards, synths and guitars, each with its own rhythm, and compared it to Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting. Bruce Jenkins of Vinyl Connection described an organ-synth loop over a fractured beat, with Rother's guitar weaving away in the middle distance, and found more machine menace in it than African abandon, with no link to the early sixties dance of the same name. Stephen Iliffe called it a jangling pastoral piece.

Record Collector singled it out with Dino as the point where Cluster's textures and Neu!'s rhythmic insistence meet, and PopMatters named it among the album's highlights. setlist.fm logs no performance of it, and it is absent from the band's live albums. The fiftieth-anniversary edition of the album added three reworks of it, by Dextro, James Holden and Stuart Braithwaite. The upload in the hypersongs web is the studio version, posted by the label, Grönland.

More songs by Harmonia

Dino

Sources

  1. Record review: Harmonia, Musik von Harmonia, Post-Punk Monk (2017-05-12)
  2. Musik von Harmonia, Vinyl Connection (2024-12-03)
  3. Complete Works, Record Collector (2015)
  4. Musik von Harmonia + Reworks, Discogs
  5. Harmonia: Musik von Harmonia, Watussi, Grönland Records (2017-07-13)