a continuous 4/4 drum pattern without breaks, Motorik resurfaced in popular music. For instance, Klaus Dinger adopted this drumming style in bands such as Kraftwerk, Neu! and La Düsseldorf and Jaki Liebezeit in nearby Cologne-based Can. For some fans, Motorik has become ‘the sound of Düsseldorf’ (for an overview of this, see Esch 2014 and Stubbs 2014a). It is a rhythm that a listener can sonically associate to motorways, railways, and waterways, which dominate the landscape of this dense and polycentric region at the core of the so-called blue banana. Dinger himself referred to this rhythm as lange gerade, long and straight, or as Apache beat, in reference to the repetitive percussion sounds of ‘Indians’ in Western movies (Dee 1998). British musician and producer Brian Eno calls it Dingerbeat and Neu!beat and considers it one of the three defining drum beats of the 1970s (Stubbs 2014b).
The shift of the term from the realm of classical to the one of popular music, however, lost this semiotic association. Popular music artists ranging from Stereolab to David Bowie, from Arcade Fire to Teksti-TV 666, have used Motorik as a referent to a specific 1970s European continental ‘Kraut’ feel and atmosphere only, denying once more the role that black music played in popular music history.
Often composers of the early twentieth century took inspiration and celebrated industrial and mechanical soundscapes, as already mentioned, through repetition, and this began to influence the understanding of cultural production in general. For instance, Walter Benjamin examined mechanical reproduction as an ambivalent force, which was able to democratise the fruition of art but at the same time deprived it of the ‘aura’ of uniqueness and authenticity (Benjamin 1963). Krakauer (1996) criticised dancing revue performances as ornament of the masses, where sexless bodies in mass perform the same mechanical moves to please masses of spectators, themselves put in order in tiers. The German thinker understood ornament as having no meaning outside itself and compared it to industrial production, where the aim of production is in production itself and in the generation of profit. However, he also stated that
the masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories: the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments. (Krakauer 1996, 79)
The German author was, therefore, aware of the idiosyncratic function of repetition in contemporary cultural expressions. Even if not referring specifically to sounds, he was able to assign a specific function to it and recognise its ability to make the hidden machinery, which enables our understanding of reality, visible. However, experimenting with the industrial soundscape disappeared quickly from the horizon of art music in the Soviet Union, thanks to the arrival into power of Stalin who preferred more conventional musical expressions bound to socialist realism (Makanowitsky 1965), and elsewhere because art music and its world belong to capital cities and cultural centres (not to industrial towns) and its aesthetics moved quickly towards pre-industrial and ecological themes, a more globalised and technological urbanity, and the influence of music of non-European origin, jazz in particular.
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