Neu! - 1
Kraftwerk - 0
I'm going to go with Neu!'s debut... As enjoyable as Autobahn is... its overall sound was heavily influenced by what Neu! was doing at the time, and it really doesn't hold my attention as much as the other album does. There's also an element of cheesiness in the title track... basically what they did was take somewhat of a Stockhausen approach to electronic music composition by drawing from the sounds around them (in this case... driving their car). Except... they did it in a more blatantly obvious (and boring) manner.
Then there is Neu!'s album... you can just hear the influence Neu had on future musicians... genres ranging from motorik to post-rock and ambient to industrial music to post-punk to noise and noise rock... Take away it's influence, though, and it's still amazing, incredibly atmospheric, and magical... it's like Iggy Pop said... they managed to make a rock album devoid of any blues influence and ended up with a kind of "pastoral psychedelicism."
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