More than 40 years after its genesis in the German countryside, the music of Harmonia sounds removed from time. Featuring the late Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of electronic duo Cluster alongside guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia is often described as a "krautrock supergroup," but that term implies musicians coming together to combine their powers and respective fame. Harmonia’s formation was more casual and informal—Rother calls it an "easy action"—a gentle experiment which yielded lasting results.

Grönland Records’ Complete Works box set compiles the group’s entire discography, including two studio albums, 1974’s Musik von Harmonia and 1975’s De Luxe, two collections of exploratory live material, and Tracks and Traces, which collects sessions recorded with Brian Eno in 1976. The box set offers a way of observing Harmonia’s output as a whole, how its sound informed Moebius, Roedelius, and Rother’s future solo and collaborative works, and its impact on the greater musical landscape, as elements of Harmonia’s sound influenced electronic music makers.

-=-=-=-By the time the trio banded together, they’d already helped define the sound that would eventually be called "krautrock." Roedelius, 10 years older than most of his peers, had lived a trying life: as a child he appeared in films, was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and jailed by the Stasi. Eventually freed, he found his way to West Germany and began exploring the experimental scene there with Moebius, a political activist with a taste for jazz and psychedelic rock. The two formed Kluster, creating clanging, proto-industrial soundscapes before eventually rechristening the group Cluster. Rother had traveled in his youth, studying in Düsseldorf and Pakistan, before joining up with Kraftwerk for a stint and forming Neu! with drummer Klaus Dinger. Neu!’s pop art sensibility popularized the "motorik" or "Apache beat," an insistent drive coursing beneath cosmic swaths of sound.

Coming together in rural Forst, far removed from city life and near the idyllic River Weser, the trio set up their recording equipment in a spacious farmhouse, crafting a swooning sound reflecting their pastoral surroundings. The group’s lifespan was short, only three years, but its influence was wide reaching. Brian Eno described the band as the "world’s most important rock group" before recording with them, and elements of the trio’s sound can be heard in his Berlin Trilogy albums with David Bowie.

None of it was planned, Rother says. When he visited "the Cluster guys" in 1973, it was simply to see if they’d be interested in backing up Neu! during live shows. "Klaus and I were both very unhappy with the musicians we had tested," Rother says. "The two of us back then, with the technology that was available, couldn’t play live. We tried that once. I used a tape recorder…Back then, people thought, ‘Oh, this is a lie, this is not real live music.’ You couldn’t even use a tape recorder to introduce sounds of water or backing sounds. But also, it was boring, just Klaus playing drums and me playing one guitar. It was not the sound we both had in mind."

Rother was familiar with Cluster’s work, and mutually aquatinted through producer Connie Plank. He was drawn especially to "Im Süden", from 1972’s Cluster II, which featured a minimal, four-note drone. "I called them and they said, ‘Yeah, just come over,’" Rother says. "No details. I jammed with Roedelius, and it was sort of a musical love at first sight, really. When Dieter joined in, it was just something I hadn’t experienced before. In good moments, the three of us could produce a real, live music, which was not like a comic version of the music you did in the studio."