Krautrock
Created | Updated Dec 12, 2002
It took me a long time to get krautrock. I'd enjoyed Kraftwerk, a passion that had been passed down from my Bowie Worshipping cousin, for a couple of years and decided to leap in by taking 'the faust tapes' out the library and buying 'Flow Motion' by Can. Neither were to my taste. The former simply too confusing and abstract, the latter simply a dissapointment, too smooth. Both of them sounded contrived. So that was it. Until a friend copied 'Mother Sky' (from the album Soundtracks by Can) for me, and I got it.
What does Krautrock sound like? Mother Sky's as good a place as anywhere to start, the 17 minute long illegimate offspring of the Floyds 'Set the controls to the heart of the sun' and 'Funhouse' era Stooges.
And that's the thing. I was wrong. Krautrock's loose, it's improvisational. Even the concept of form itself is to be toyed with. Tape trickery, analogue synthesisers, and outlandish proto dub echos abound. The tone of the instrumentation could be anything from a pastoral ballad to the sound of the world ending.
This anything goes mentality fits in perfectly with the prevailing mood in Germany at the end of the 60's. As with the rest of europe, confomity had lost its grip on youth (see the story of the Baader meinhoff gang for more background on this). Bands such as Can, the embryonic Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, Faust, Neu! (their punctuation) Ash Ra Tempel and Amon Duul II were all pushing forward, either proclaiming 'no rules!' or simply inventing their own systems. It is notable that Holger Cuzacky and Irmin Schmidt of Can studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had done much to introduce 'non musical' instrumentation into 'classical' music (notably the short wave radio and the helicopter). Sounds very dry and theoretical doesn't it? Not at all, get digging, explore. Krautrock is body and head music at the same time, Kraut Rocks. There may not be a whole world of music out there but there's certainly a countrys worth that will turn the heads of your self proclaimed music expert mates. In time i'll put some links to the main bands with a bit of a guide to their main albums.
