Manuel Göttsching: E2-E4

Undoubtedly, E2-E4 is one of the most important chess manoeuvres in music history. The title describes a brief movement of the king’s pawn, a standard opening really, which surprisingly offered new musical possibilities to Manuel Göttsching from Berlin. The piece for guitar, synthesizer and drum computer dates to 1981, one single track which was pressed onto the two sides of a vinyl LP at the time and has been varied, quoted, copied and remixed innumerable times since.

Self-similar repetition, a universal structural principle in animate and inanimate nature, here finds its aesthetic equivalent. Soft, engaging grooves combine classical minimalism à la Steve Reich and Philip Glass with Techno and Ambient. Göttsching, one of the early 1970s’ co-founders of the German Krautrock scene around Guru Guru, Tangerine Dream and his own trio Ash Ra Tempel, was already a known entity in his time. Yet it was only after E2-E4 that the British Guardian named him “göttfather” of electronic music.