HANS JOACHIM IRMLER + JAKI LIEBEZEIT (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Wed 17th June

Happening to walk past the venue earlier in the day, I found they've recently placed one of those old-fashioned long white name strips outside. So the names Irmler and Liebezeit were spelt out to one of Brighton's busiest streets. And of course most simply trudged straight past. While to those of us steeped in Krautrock lore those lengthy, foreign-sounding and entirely unprepossessing names couldn't seem more enticing. However much it might sound like hyperbole the bands they stemmed from, Can and Faust, were credible contenders for the most important band in the history of everything, ever.

How could you sum up the appeal? The nearest I could manage, at least for comics fans, would be when Marvel and DC staged the Superman and Spider-man team-up. It's not just two greats, its two reality systems coming together. Liebezeit drummed with Can, Zen masters of metronony who could take a groove to trance states. Meanwhile Irmler played home-made keyboards plus any number of other invented or extemporised instruments in a multitudinous collective who brimmed with deranged invention. Like the Velvets, they could coin and discard musical styles and ideas which later bands would build careers around. While Can's method was to boil music down, Faust's was to rip it apart. While Can's credo was less is more, Faust's was that more could be more too. Put them together, I wondered, and what do you get?

The result is perhaps closer to Neu!, the third great Krautrock band, than either outfit they were in. There's the same sense of music as a serene, gliding force, as if untroubled by gravity. As is always the distinction between great and merely good musicians, what they did didn't seem impressively hard so much as infectiously easy. You felt they could have continued playing for hours without breaking a sweat or furrowing a brow. You felt like anyone else cold have got up and joined in, just through getting swept up in the sheer joy of it.

While drums often merely provide the base line for other instruments to jump up and down on, here neither instrument led. When I saw Irmler earlier this year, accompanied only by a woman drawing, I didn't feel it that engaging. Yet give him another musician to spark off and the magic is soon unleashed.

Liebezeit played ostensibly simple patterns, but subtly shifting throughout. Jah Wobble has compared his playing to a man running, and for all its marshalling of the power of repetition there's something very organic about it. Rolls often kick off with a lift, throwing the emphasis on their beginning. Rather than dominating Irmler would often pass through sections of tone and washes, like colour fields. Only for the last number did he – literally and metaphorically – pull out the stops for some powerful surges.

Sometimes you get the feeling people come out to see great musicians from past eras just to say they've seen them. It's like a form of commemoration. Not this time. In the small but crowded Hope, the mesmerising set went down a storm. What are Irmler and Liebezeit doing these days? More of what they've always done. If that's not inspirational, I can't imagine what is.

My starter's guide to Krautrock is here..

The same tour but from Glasgow...

Coming soon! Speaking of less is more, expect more of less soon...