Kraut-Rock

Genesis of Kraut-Rock

When we talk about kraut-rock, we're referring to that variegated musical scene born in the Germany of the 1960s, a country still grappling with the disastrous consequences of the Second World War and split in two by an icy wall. Between 1967 and 1977, a new generation of musicians set itself the goal of transcending the recent past of a homeland in which they could barely recognize themselves, in order to create a highly iconoclastic musical proposition that could stand as a symbol of a new era. Unaware of the role they were playing, the protagonists of kraut-rock wrote an unrepeatable page in the history of rock music. If there has ever been a true opposition, a real alternative to the "dictatorship" of Anglophone music, it was undoubtedly born in Germany.

In 1960s Germany we had a very peculiar generational conflict. The generation before us had experienced Nazism and the war. After the war there was a completely different political climate, but in many institutions, the smell of the old world was still there. Children asked their parents for information about the war and about Nazism and, above all, about the role they themselves had played; students asked the same of their teachers, and it was hard to get adequate answers. Among young people, artists and university students there was this strong desire for freedom. Out of this situation came a great friction between old and new, which ended up in a cultural revolution. Amon Düül were part of that.
(John Weinzierl, Amon Düül II)

The political and social situation of post-war Germany is extremely complex and contradictory. By the mid-1960s, German music was dominated by the so-called "Schlager" genre, an inoffensive brand of pop steeped in easy arrangements and catchy melodies, an experiment already perfected by the Third Reich's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who had poured energy and money into the music industry for his own political propaganda ends. In fact, the economic boom of the 1950s and '60s we read about today was something far removed from what was actually happening in the streets, and the only people who benefited from it were, very often, the very same people who had held power under Nazism. It is in this highly peculiar, probably unique, context that the substrate from which German experimental rock (kraut-rock and kosmische musik) sprang was formed: a nation that, within the span of a few decades, emerged defeated from not one but two world wars, both of its own making; a profound sense of guilt and a need for atonement born of having been the people who created the cruellest and bloodiest dictatorship European history can recall, as well as having caused the most terrifying genocide in human history: the Holocaust. All of these were burdens weighing on the shoulders of their own fathers, grandfathers, teachers and fellow countrymen. The protagonists of kraut-rock spent their childhoods in a Germany reduced to rubble; their earliest years can't have been all that different from the childhood of the young protagonist of Roberto Rossellini's neorealist masterpiece "Germany Year Zero" ("Germany Year Zero"). It's clear just how unprecedented this combination of factors was, and how, in all likelihood, it will never be repeated; this is what makes the historical, social, cultural and political context absolutely unique.

When talking about German music of the 1970s, two terms are used more or less interchangeably: one is the catch-all "kraut-rock" itself — a term coined by the magazine Melody Maker, drawing on the slang then current in English for referring to German people ("Kraut"). A term that conceals a barely disguised, snobbish sense of condescension, later sarcastically echoed in the identically titled tracks by Faust and Conrad Schnitzler. The other is "kosmische musik": "cosmic music", a name owed to a historic double-album anthology released at Christmas 1972 — an epithet that seems rather misleading, though, when applied to bands like Can, Faust and Neu!, whose sound has nothing remotely cosmic about it.
Perhaps the generic label "German experimental rock" is the one that best sums up the sound of every band active on German soil, bearing in mind that, while all of these acts consistently shared a pronounced taste for craftsmanship and relentless improvisation, always steering clear of commercial ambitions, not all of them reached the same artistic and musical results. Quite the opposite: the watchword of kraut-rock is diversity itself.

What could possibly throw such disparate bands into a single melting pot? What do the post-atomic nightmares of Faust, the secular/religious mysticism of Popol Vuh, the cosmic adventures of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, the motorik beat of Neu!, the anarchic ravings of Amon Düül and the lysergic-spatial journeys of Ash Ra Tempel have in common? Perhaps only three elements: first, as already mentioned, the geographical, political and cultural conditions inherent to post-war Germany, a period so distinctive that it was able to spawn a movement that cannot be traced back, in musical genealogy, to any Anglophone experience (a unique fact, if you consider the rest of Western culture). The second element is the essential desire for absolute freedom, the wish to be pioneers of a new way of understanding art and music — art born free, uncolonised. Rebellious, anarchic art, not one bent on restoring the old national glories, looking exclusively to the future, never to the past.
A third element is the influence of the giant of the avant-garde, Karlheinz Stockhausen: the decisive break from rock conventions also passed through the experience of this extraordinary musician. It's hard for us today to grasp the importance that the personality and music of this modern, revolutionary composer held in those years. For the young Germans of the time, Stockhausen was a model to imitate, a catalyst, the very emblem of the new Germany: innovative, cultured, extremely modern and experimental, with a gaze so far into the future that it remains, even today, difficult to fully decipher. His music classes, held at the historic school in Darmstadt, were hugely sought-after and closely followed by a string of devoted disciples. Many krautrockers attended them — Can in particular were among his most fervent students, as were Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk. In those classrooms in Darmstadt something unique, and perhaps unrepeatable, took place: rock musicians moving in the very same circles that had helped shape composers of the calibre of Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Iannis Xenakis and others. German musicians weren't the only ones attending Stockhausen's lectures; Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead also followed them for six months, in 1966, at the University of California, and came away deeply impressed.

All of these factors hold together experiences that were subversive in such "different" ways, and it's interesting to note how the same visions can be traced in the contemporary films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, to name the three most representative directors of New German Cinema, all of whom repeatedly collaborated with kraut-rock musicians. Wim Wenders indeed filmed some Amon Düül II concerts in Munich, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder even paid them tribute with a cameo in the film "Die Niklashauser Fart", as well as featuring Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" in two films, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Chinese Roulette", while Werner Herzog worked with the mystic Popol Vuh on his soundtracks — a group led, among others, by the shamanic Florian Fricke, an old school friend of his. These directors went even further, signing their own declaration (the so-called Oberhausen Manifesto) calling for the rebirth of a New German Cinema, free from the laws of the market and from the aesthetics of the past.
In short, it's undoubtedly possible to draw an ideal connecting line between the kraut-rock we're dealing with in this article and the violent neorealism and impetuous irony of New Objectivity (Otto Dix, Christian Schad, George Grosz), as well as with the inescapable fates of the claustrophobic kammerspiel films of the 1920s (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Lupu Pick), an expression of the terrible conditions imposed on the Weimar Republic after the Great War and of the disastrous crisis of '29. Anxiety, resignation and nihilism magnificently painted by Erich Maria Remarque in "Drei Kameraden" ("Three Comrades"). A cultural legacy that, upon coming into contact with English-language culture — brought over by the occupying British and American troops — meant that, even as the songs of Doors, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa and 13th Floor Elevators also made their way through Germany in the '60s and '70s, this musical input from across the Channel and the ocean was not passively accepted, simply erasing the past and creating a colony capable only of imitating outside models — it instead spurred a search for different, unique, distinctive sounds, pointed towards the new, towards the future.

Germany really was in a bad place: it had been foolish and irresponsible enough to start two wars and then lose them both. But let me add one thing, one positive: it had nothing left to lose. It had already lost everything.
(Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream)

Multifaceted and nihilistic by definition, kraut-rock is a (non-)scene next to which Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" seems like child's play (to paraphrase kraut-guru Julian Cope, author of the book "Krautrocksampler"). The only glue holding it together is a handful of names: engineers and producers Dieter Dierks and Conny Plank, plus patron and journalist Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser — the latter being, by definition, the record man and rock critic of the German experimental scene, the one who, at the famous Essen Festival of 25-29 September 1968, presented alongside the most celebrated names — Frank Zappa, Alexis Korner and Brian Auger — a whole series of homegrown bands that had found no room in official channels. It was during those five days that the British press first used the derogatory term "kraut-rock" — inspired by the Amon Düül track "Mama Düül Und Ihre Sauerkrautband Spielt Auf" — only to later recognise its intrinsic artistic value, so much so that Britain itself would go on to become the sounding board for the new German rock, helped in no small part by John Peel's persistent championing of it on BBC radio.

This piece covers all the musicians whose work can be traced back to the Germany of the years between 1966 and 1977; left out are those German musicians who were too close to Anglophone musical culture, and therefore too far removed from the kraut cultural substrate. Given how difficult the classification at hand is, we chose to single out one group to be regarded as the embryo of the whole movement, if only for chronological reasons (Psy Free), and to try to find points of convergence across all the bands that followed. These common threads can be traced in an approach more closely tied to the avant-garde (Faust, Can), to electronic music (Kraftwerk, Cluster), to obsessive rhythms (Neu!), to cosmic music (Tangerine Dream) or to more mystical-religious aspects (Popol Vuh). We will also look at the kraut musicians who went on to successful solo careers. Finally, we'll cover all those bands that, while operating within a kraut context, are nonetheless heavily indebted to an Anglophone tradition (prog and jazz-rock in particular); hence the four chapters on kraut-folk, kraut-prog, kraut-jazz and psychedelic kraut-rock. The final chapter, meanwhile, is devoted to the genre's forgotten albums, very often impossible to find, some of which are genuine historical artefacts.

• The beginnings
  • Psy Free

Bringing kraut-rock to life required all of the premises mentioned above. But it also took an idea, a desire to be unique, a wish to play rock but in a way that was totally different from what was happening in the rest of the world. This pursuit of the most extreme experimentation even called into question the very notion that a musician ought to sell records: the idea of needing to please people, of having an audience to answer to, seemed almost vulgar. It's interesting to note just how suddenly this revolution seems to have come about. Two years before the movement was born, in 1965, some of its most famous future protagonists were playing in contexts where it would have been utterly unimaginable to predict what was about to happen. Edgar Froese — future mastermind of Tangerine Dream — was part of a youth group that played classic rock'n'roll numbers; Holger Czukay, soon to become the leader of Can, despite attending Stockhausen's classes, was playing simple dance music, while the legendary Klaus Schulze was playing Rolling Stones covers with Les Barons.
The birth date of kosmische musik is 1967, the year in which the trio Psy Free came into being, formed by Klaus Schulze (drums), Joachim Schuhmann (keyboards) and Alex Conti (guitar). Psy Free were the embryo of what would go on to become the future cosmic couriers: essentially, the first true kraut-rock band. Considering the very idea of being paid almost offensive, they played for hours on end for free in all sorts of venues around Berlin, including, notably, the historic Zodiak. No live recordings or albums of their music survive, but theirs was a blend of Stockhausen's experimentalism — tied to the freest kind of improvisation — and American and British psychedelia.
Psy Free disbanded in 1969, the year Schulze joined Tangerine Dream. The seed had already been planted. But for this music to grow up, it needed independent record labels that weren't solely focused on profit, suitable venues to play in, and patrons willing to bet on this extraordinary adventure. Luckily for us, fate would have it that, before long, all of these conditions fell into place.

• The Zodiak Free Arts Lab

As already mentioned, the multifaceted nature of kraut-rock is inevitably linked to the vast network of cities active in avant-garde production, largely concentrated between Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, though special mention should also go to Munich, birthplace of Amon Düül II and Popol Vuh, as well as to the Cologne of Can. In particular, Berlin, split in two by the Wall, served as the operational base for a sort of circle of artists composing experimental music, some of whom moved from one line-up to another, writing several chapters of German rock along the way. Among these musicians, two stand out in particular: Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Kluster, Cluster, Harmonia) and Conrad Schnitzler (Tangerine Dream, Kluster), who in 1968 founded in Berlin the aforementioned Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a club that became the crucial hub of electronic music in Europe, a strategic bridge between psychedelic and avant-garde music, drawing inspiration from John Cage's approach to concert performance. This important club was set up in the large back room of a theatre: like a perfect yin and yang, one half of the room was painted white, while the other was painted black, with instruments, speakers and amplifiers arranged all around. The venue firmly championed the idea that all art should be free, and that songs themselves were to be considered bourgeois; and although its existence lasted only a few months, it gave rise to numerous influential electronic artists such as Kluster and Tangerine Dream. The latter, especially, played there for hours and hours, improvising, sometimes through entire nights.

• Rolf Ulrich Kaiser, Timothy Leary and the kraut-rock labels

A crucial milestone in the birth of kraut-rock was, however, the founding of its defining label, Ohr ("Ear"), launched by the flamboyant Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser in 1970 and famous for the balloon included with the original pressings. Its slogan – "Macht Das Ohr auf" ("open your ears") – was coined, with a certain amount of humour, by graphic designer Reinhard Hippen: it is in fact a sly play on the slogan "Macht Das Tor auf" ("open the gate"), which at the time appeared in the logo of the West Berlin edition of the tabloid "Bild", framed by barbed wire alluding precisely to the Brandenburg Gate. Kaiser believed deeply in his label and hired two brilliant sound engineers, Dieter Dierks and Conny Plank, who by German standards of the time were decidedly ahead of the curve. In no time at all, "Ruk" recruited around thirty artists for Ohr: among them were first-rate bands such as Tangerine Dream, Guru Guru, Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel, as well as some lesser-known names such as Emtidi, Hölderlin, Wallenstein and Witthüser & Westrupp. Without Kaiser's vision, we probably wouldn't be here talking about kraut-rock today: while in 1969 Amon Düül II were forced to release their debut, "Phallus Dei", through an English label, Liberty, most of the great albums that followed could count on a label that guaranteed total creative freedom – a crucial factor in the future release of exceptional works.
Two other crucial labels emerged out of Ohr: Brain ("Cervello"), founded by the defectors Bruno Wendel and Gunther Korber, who teamed up with Metronome and became the parent label's main rivals. The other, less fortunate label was Pilz ("Fungo") – also founded in Berlin by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, as a home for the folk acts excluded from Ohr – which turned out to be more inclined to release psychedelic material.

Another figure who unwittingly lit the fuse of this movement, pushing Kaiser's ideas to the extreme, was the acid guru Timothy Leary – according to Richard Nixon, "the most dangerous man in the world".
Having escaped from prison with the help of hippie militants, he took refuge in Switzerland – home of the pharmaceutical company Sandoz – where Dr. Albert Hofmann had first synthesised LSD. There, Leary was welcomed by a colourful community made up of the painter Walter Wegmuller, the poet Sergius Golowin, and the graphic artist H.R. Giger (the one behind "Alien"). In 1972 the German Hartmut Henke, bassist of Ash Ra Tempel, also arrived there, acting as an observer on behalf of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser – so electrified by the idea of setting Leary's acid vibrations to music that he created a brand-new label just for the purpose (Die Kosmischen Kuriere), its name reaffirming the cosmic concepts of the music it intended to promote. Whereas at first the psychedelic messages had been coded or tempered with heavy doses of humour, with the "cosmic couriers" something changed: Kaiser now saw hallucinogens as a kind of salvation for humankind, and the playful, allusive atmosphere of the early kraut-rock acts was set aside in favour of full-blown acid propaganda.
With three labels bearing his stamp, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser can rightly be considered the true "Garibaldi of kraut-rock": the man who managed to unite Germany's sprawling experimental scene. It's no coincidence that, as soon as "Ruk" disappeared from the scene, kraut-rock itself began to fade away. In 1975, after being the target of a smear campaign led by many of the musicians he had helped launch internationally – accused of paying bands not in cash but in drugs – Kaiser withdrew from public life and cut all ties with society, going into exile in Cologne with his partner, the fortune-teller Gille Lettmann: the "star girl" who appears on the last two albums of the Cosmic Jokers supergroup. That same year, kraut-rock was breathing its last: after a few years of moderate fame – culminating in David Bowie's "Berlin period" – German experimental rock began sliding inexorably into oblivion, with the exception of Kraftwerk, who by then were veering towards more pop-oriented sounds. Meanwhile, Kaiser and Lettmann moved into total isolation in a small town in the Sauerland: our world was no longer theirs. Or perhaps it was the other way round.

Kraut-Rock was erased from music historiography until the mid-1990s, when the genre resurfaced, though superficially lumped into that catch-all bin conveniently labelled "progressive rock". The silence lasted until 1995, when Julian Cope published a booklet titled "Krautrocksampler", a short but essential compendium of kraut-rock history, in which the former Teardrop Explodes frontman presents, with a sincere, almost adolescent passion, all the most important bands of 1970s German experimental rock – stressing how kraut-rock was, first and foremost, a "subjective British phenomenon, based on how it was perceived in Britain rather than on the actual German music scene from which it sprang".

• Post-atomic experiments – The kraut-rock avant-garde
  • Faust
  • Can
  • Guru Guru

There is no band more legendary than Faust.
(Julian Cope, "Krautrocksampler")

Within experimental kraut-rock there are three very different bands who, for different reasons, decisively broke away from the past, making them only marginally traceable to earlier musical experiences. This triad includes Faust, arguably the emblematic band of the entire movement; Can, who brought Stockhausen's avant-garde into kraut-rock; and Guru Guru who, despite being the closest to a rock context – a Hendrix-like one, in this case – distanced themselves from it so thoroughly as to become a genuine avant-garde act in their own right.

Faust are the band we want to start with, the one repeatedly praised by Julian Cope, who in his essay enthusiastically asserts that, more than any other act, they embodied the very essence of the kraut-rock movement – probably the one most free of (or entirely unbound from) the influences of the Anglophone music world. Extremely experimental and innovative, virtually unknown until quite recently even among industry insiders, Faust forged a new musical language capable of reconciling Wagnerian power, Stockhausen's extreme research, descriptive electronics, psychedelia, the avant-garde and songcraft that veers now towards Barrett, now towards Velvet Underground, musique concrète and theatrical expressionism, the art of collage and the acid trip without LSD.
Faust were unique: there's no chronicle of drug use as with the Velvet Underground, no golden California beaches, no hippies or flower children. But even within Germany they remain a case apart. They lack any interest in the cosmic-courier universe so typical of other German acts, or in the fusion of music and religion found in Popol Vuh. Faust are far more focused on the psyche, on the neuroses and fears of twentieth-century man. With their journeys through modern post-industrial society and the nightmares of atomic war, they produced one of the noblest chapters that rock history can recall.
It all began in 1971, when a man named Uwe Nettelbeck – also linked to the violent Baader-Meinhof gang – put himself forward as the band's producer and manager, managing to get Faust a contract with Polydor without them even playing a single note, convincing the unwitting label that it had the new Beatles on its hands. Polydor, galvanised by the idea, would even include in its offer the supply of equipment, a sound engineer, and paid accommodation for a full year. Initially a six-piece – Werner "Zappi" Diermaier (drums), Hans Joachim Irmler (keyboards), Arnold Meifert (percussion), Jean Hervè Peron (bass), Rudolf Sosna (guitar) and Gunter Wuesthoff (saxophone) – they thus recorded their debut album, still shrouded in legend to this day. The album's clear vinyl sleeve – depicting the X-ray of a clenched fist – plays both on the band's name and on the nightmare of nuclear war, a very real and justified obsession for the generation that lived through the Cold War years. Even a figure like John Peel, the most famous DJ of the English underground, fell instantly in love with the sleeve, and with the clear vinyl.

The moment I saw the sleeve and the clear vinyl of 'Faust', I decided I had to have it.
(John Peel)

Their first album, "Faust" (1971), opens with "Why Don't You Eat Carrots?", which contains one of the most destructive – and at the same time descriptive – intros imaginable, sliding brutally over a few notes echoing the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" and the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". A furious electronic sound like nothing heard before paints, as if on canvas, gusts of nuclear radiation: both the world and music as we know them are destroyed by this intro. "The idea was not to copy anything happening in the Anglo-Saxon rock scene", Uwe Nettelbeck would later reveal. And you can hear it.
The old world tries to resist and re-emerge from the destructive waves, but is immediately swept away by the overwhelming, devastating fury. And here are Faust in a post-atomic bunker, while a Zappa-esque piano ushers us into a cabaret atmosphere. It all continues with trumpets, guitars, horns straight out of "Lumpy Gravy", noises, snippets of radioactive gusts, dialogues in German, rowdy choruses. Faust's opening is not just music, it's also vision, narrative, a magnificent sublimation of reality or of the possible realisation of an alternate reality. It continues with "Meadow Meal", where an unexpected rock-blues jam finds room, only to dissolve into a terrifying radioactive downpour that buries every last remnant of our civilisation. The finale is the great masterpiece "Miss Fortune": part tribal music, part cosmic music, alternating cold electronics with a poetic, moving two-voice ending that finds, in "Are we supposed to be or not to be?" and its answer "Nobody knows if it really happened", one of the absolute peaks of popular music.

Faced with such greatness, it wasn't easy for Faust to repeat themselves. The following "So Far" (1972) recalls, at least on its sleeve, the one band Faust seem to have actually drawn influence from, the Velvet Underground of "White Light/White Heat". This time there are nine tracks, and the average length is naturally shorter. It ranges from the compulsive rhythms of "It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" – which Stereolab would later revisit with "Anémie" – to the folk arpeggios of "On The Way To Abamae", to the goofy "No Harm", right through to the album's masterpiece, the dark, hopeless electronics of "Mama Is Blue".
That same year Faust released, together with minimalist composer Tony Conrad, "Outside The Dream Syndicate", though it actually came out after their third album, "The Faust Tapes". The genesis of their third record was troubled: spotted by the legendary John Peel, Faust were signed by none other than Virgin. The problem was that they had plenty of unreleased material but no real album as such. The decision was as insane as it was brilliant: release all the tracks and sketches together in one big melting pot, apparently divided into 26 pieces. The album's marketing was no less bold: it was sold for the rock-bottom price of 49 pence. As a result, Faust sold nearly a hundred thousand copies – a staggering figure that, in today's anaemic market, would probably send them straight to the top of the charts. But in 1973 it wasn't enough to get them into the charts, partly because the album's price was too low.
The stunt nonetheless proved a lucky one: many more people now knew of the band. And "The Faust Tapes" remains a work of genius, extreme in its experimentation, containing a bit of everything: from quotes from jazzman Lennie Tristano to the seeds of new wave, from pure free-form to musique concrète, from minimalism to nonsense dialogues.

Still in 1973, "Faust IV" was released, an album that returned to more conventional song formats; at the time, many saw it as an attempt to normalise. A view that overlooks just how much nobility Faust managed to bring to the "song" format. It ranges from the Barrett-esque "The Sad Skinhead" to the splendid ballad "Jennifer", to the long psychedelic trip in the style of "Ummagumma" that is "Just A Second" – whose definitive 11-minute version would only surface years later – to the psych-folk of "It's A Bit Of A Pain", the deranged "Picnic On A Frozen River", and above all the incredible suite "Krautrock", which gives rise to a sort of electronic version of the Velvet Underground. A track that is itself emblematic of the genre, "Krautrock" is a blend of electronic suite, acid trip, cosmic noise, deconstruction, and sonic nightmare. Twelve mad minutes, with which Faust crown themselves the fathers of German rock.
"Faust IV", however, was an unacceptable commercial flop for Virgin, who consequently refused to release Faust's fifth album. Their adventure, for the time being, came to an end. They would return many years later with consistently excellent LPs, such as: "Rien" (1995), "You Know Faust" (1996), "Faust Wakes Nosferatu" (1997), "Ravvivando" (1999).

Similar to Faust in their irreverence and experimental daring, Can began their adventure in 1968, when two former Stockhausen students – the Polish Holger Czukay (bass) and Irmin Schmidt (piano) – met Jaki Liebezeit (drums) and the very young Michael Karoli (guitar) in Cologne, founding a collective with no preconceived ideas and, moreover, no real leader. Yet, just as Faust had Nettelbeck, the quartet was soon lucky enough to meet its own patron: Vohwinkel, the wealthy owner of a castle outside the city (Schloss Norvenich), who granted them free use of several rooms, which then became their operational base, the "Inner Space".
Having found a place in which to shape their multifaceted music, the band settled on the name "Can", which in its best-known English sense means a tin container or the verb "to be able to", but which also alludes to "soul" in Turkish and "feeling" in Japanese, and could even stand for the acronym of "Communism Anarchism Nihilism". With the pieces in place, Can finally hired as singer the African-American sculptor Malcolm Mooney, with whom in 1969 they released a private edition of the psychedelic "Monster Movie", pressed in just 600 copies on the Music Factory label. In 1970 they also released some soundtrack work, later gathered under the fitting title "Soundtracks". It's on this very record that, across four tracks, one can hear for the first time the devilish voice of the new vocalist, the Japanese Damo Suzuki: a street musician they happened to meet one day outside a club in Munich and hired that very same evening, after Mooney had left the band on the insistent advice of his psychologist (who claimed, in his view, that the group was actually dangerous for his mental health). The African-American singer was the Syd Barrett of early Can, and his former bandmates were devastated by his departure. For several months, from December 1969 to May 1970, they remained inactive, until their encounter with the Japanese busker.

I went up to the guy and said: 'Tonight we're playing a concert in front of a few thousand people. Do you want to sing?' And he said: 'Okay, I've got nothing else to do'. And so he came along with us. We didn't rehearse at all. (...) At first he sang in a focused, dramatic way, with an intensity like Japanese meditation and a calm manner. And then, suddenly, he snapped like a samurai, grabbed the microphone and started making martial-arts moves and screaming at the audience. The crowd got nervous, there was the start of a brawl, and then most of them left the venue. About sixty enthusiasts stayed, half American (one of whom was David Niven) and half German, and we played for them for the rest of the evening. It was beautiful.
(Holger Czukay)

With the wild figure of the Japanese Suzuki out front, Can lived through their most thrilling era: with him they carved out their first milestone, the massive double LP "Tago Mago" (1970), whose title borrows from a writing by the famous satanist Aleister Crowley, coming frighteningly close to the ideas of global music theorised by Stockhausen. It includes twisted metaphysical experiments ("Halleluhwah"), terrifying electronics ("Aumgn"), Eastern-style yelps ("Oh Yeah"), John Cage's avant-garde and much more besides, in an album marked by an openly nihilistic attitude towards all musical structures, with a violent demolition of the human sense of harmony sustained from the first track to the last. Julian Cope is right when he writes that "Tago Mago" "sounds only like itself, and like nothing before or since".

Two years later, Can tried again with greater commercial success with "Ege Bamyasi" (1972), placing on the cover a Warhol-esque tin can that held far less acid and far more concrete ideas, even if the earlier magic is still strongly felt in episodes such as the decadent alienation of "Sing Swan Song" and the psychedelic funk of "Vitamin C". This multi-vitamin recipe would then be further refined on "Future Days" (1973), where it is now obvious that Can's music had lost many of the flashes of inspiration of its early days, in favour of a greater underlying cohesion, in a tight sequence of experimental melodies ("Moonshake") and embryonic murmurs ("Spray"), poised halfway between sleep and wakefulness, arriving at a cross-cutting sound that stems from Stockhausen's teachings but lands here in a new, variable-expansion dimension. The darkly esoteric landscape of the previous two albums gives way to an exuberance of phenomenal Afrobeat rhythms blended with an ethereal ambient sound, partly due to a series of events that shook Can's core: from Michael Karoli's perforated ulcer to the band's disastrous financial troubles but, above all, Damo Suzuki's conversion to Jehovah's Witnesses, as he married his devoted wife and left the band after the release of "Future Days".

The following "Soon Over Babaluma" (1974) acts as a symbolic watershed between the more experimental part of Can's career and the phase marked by a decidedly more conventional sound: highly emblematic of this divide is the exotic "Come sta la Luna", a danceable litany addressed to Galileo's questions.
With their success in England, the band lost some of its edge but landed a deal with Virgin for "Landed" (1975) and for the collection of unreleased material "Unlimited Edition" (1976).
In 1976 Can even managed to chart with the kraut-funk of "Flow Motion" (1976), while for "Saw Delight" (1977) they retreated into world-music territory thanks to the addition of the Traffic rhythm section (Rosko Gee and Reebop Kwaku Baah).
Their story came to an end at the close of the 1970s with "Out Of Reach" (1978) and the self-titled "Can" (1979), released once the band had already broken up. Since then, amid their various solo careers, there has been only one fully official reunion, for "Rite Time" (1989), which marked the return to the scene of a resurrected Malcolm Mooney.

Longer but less fortunate is the story of Guru Guru: it begins way back in 1967, when the future leader of the band, Marcus "Mani" Neumeier (drums), and Uli Trepte (bass) broke away from the trio backing Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer to form Guru Guru Groove, whose free-jazz workouts brought them to the stage of the Essen Festival in September of that same year. During that period, the band lived together in an old farmhouse in the Odenwald with a crowd of friends, acquaintances and musicians, with drummer Mani Neumeier as the undisputed "guru" of the household. Not only did all the music revolve around him (he's also remembered, incidentally, as the inventor of the so-called inflatable "Mani-Tom" drum), but so did the lysergic dynamics of that anarchic brotherhood. In early 1970, their singer left the band and was replaced by Ax Gernich, the first guitarist of Agitation Free: a few months later, with this line-up and the name shortened to Guru Guru, the band recorded its debut album "UFO" (1970): a "flying saucer" of a record released by the legendary Ohr label, packed with heavy doses of psychedelic madness and vocal howls ("Stone In"), visceral aggression ("UFO"), echoes of Jimi Hendrix ("Girl Call") and a typically Berlin brand of underground ("Der LSD/Marsch"), with the stated intent, spelled out in the liner notes, of preparing the human race for the imminent arrival of an extraterrestrial form of intelligence.

This ominous proclamation was followed, a year later, by the second album "Hinten" (1971), likewise made up of four long improvised pieces, though this time shot through with an unprecedented irony, evident in the backside cheekily displayed on the cover (as the title suggests) and in the seemingly nonsensical lyrics, across four tracks of over ten minutes each of spaced-out lysergic improvisation and psychedelic anarchy. Guru Guru's avant-garde, born out of Ax Gernich's Hendrix-like improvisations and the sinusoidal percussive waves of leader Mani Neumeier, here reaches a new dimension of primordial grunge, capable of petrifying the listener like the gaze of Medusa.

With "Känguru" (1972), however, things change for good. In March 1972, the trio spent a week in the studio with sound engineer Conny Plank to produce their third album, on which the musicians play triangulated, meticulous and refined music, adding a brand-new melodic component and wisely blending influences from Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, always balanced between R&B and the more lysergic strains of acid-rock. The flamboyant producer turns the trio's raw material into a glittering diamond on "Kängaru": his uncredited keyboard contributions considerably enriched the sound of Guru Guru, who, ever since the epiphany of "Hinten", had already realised that a radical political mindset needed a sharp sense of humour to go with it — an idea openly displayed on a track like "Immer Lustig" ("always fun"), a free-form freak-rock number with a wandering, itinerant cadence, somewhere between circus fanfare, blues developments and spacey interludes.

With Trepte's departure, "Guru Guru" (1973) loses considerable depth in favour of more conventional songs, a path continued that same year with a new international deal with Atlantic on "Don't Call Us We Call You", which stripped the group of its distinctly German character in favour of a generic jazz-rock, also ushering in a long period of uncertainty and line-up instability. Gernich's departure (replaced by Conny Veit, from Gila) left Guru Guru at the mercy of an ever more unstable line-up with no clear artistic direction. The band decided to put things on hold for a while, with Neumeier collaborating with Harmonia on "De Luxe", while also taking part in various jam sessions at Conny Plank's studio, later released on record as "Mani und Seine Freunde" (1975).
From "Tango Fango" (1976) onward, the story of Guru Guru becomes inextricably tied to the sonic whims of its leader Mani Neumeier, with sporadic activity continuing to this day, between a handful of group albums, numerous anthologies and a fair number of solo ventures.

• The cosmic couriers
  • Tangerine Dream
  • Ash Ra Tempel
  • Cosmic Jokers
  • Wallenstein

Tangerine Dream are the transcendental creation of painter, sculptor and musician Edgar Froese, one of the most inspired "cosmic couriers" in all of kraut-rock. This many-sided artist first formed the cover band the Ones in 1965 but, after a string of private shows — the most famous being for Salvador Dalì, in Spain — in September 1967 he renamed his band Tangerine Dream, paying tribute to the Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and its "tangerine trees and marmalade skies". Despite a rather unstable early line-up, the group made a name for themselves at Berlin's Zodiak club, becoming especially famous for a single improvised concert lasting a full six hours.
In the autumn of 1969, however, the line-up was completely overhauled by Froese, who, for the Essen Festival, recruited Conrad Schnitzler — owner of a Berlin nightclub and a former member of Kluster — and a young Klaus Schulze (future member of Ash Ra Tempel), both working part-time; together with them, under the guidance of contemporary-music scholar Professor Kessler, Froese headed down the road of electronic rock, becoming one of its most influential pioneers.

In 1969, I met Klaus in Berlin. He was a terrible drummer, but he had that kind of madness I was looking for. This is what has happened with Tangerine Dream over the last 10 years. The people who have been part of the band joined because they had this kind of madness. This is what I think: it's the kind of music you can't create if you're completely normal.
(Edgar Froese)

"Electronic Meditation" (1970) is the first chapter in the Tangerine Dream saga and in a discography whose sheer size has few equals in music history. Although it stands somewhat apart from the rest of the group's output, this is an album that already anticipates some key ingredients of the Tangerine Dream sound. Billed as the German answer to "A Saucerful Of Secrets" (as the liner notes themselves point out), this electronic meditation is intoned through the acid mantras of Froese's guitar and the novice-like originality of Schnitzler's violins, forming a kind of dark concept album about the human life cycle, before and after death, beginning with the Genesis of the opener and ending with the Resurrection of the closing track.
From the cover alone, showing a decapitated doll trapped in the workings of a synthesizer, it's clear we're dealing with a thoroughly peculiar album: recorded in a rented factory in West Berlin in October 1969, using nothing but a twin Revox tape recorder. The record fuses free-jazz atmospheres, electronic music and psychedelic rock into a single work, moving from conventional instruments like guitar, organ, drums and cello to the various devices played by Froese (Farfisa organ, electric piano), all the way to more random sounds such as broken glass, burning parchment and dried peas shaken in a sieve. A demo emerged from these sessions and was handed to Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, who had just founded Ohr Records: the label boss was hugely enthusiastic about their music and offered Tangerine Dream the chance to make an album, on condition that they accept his suggestion for the title and cover artwork. Tangerine Dream took the offer, even though the album's title, "electronic meditation", proved rather misleading, since not a single genuine electronic instrument was actually used on it.

Personal conflicts and artistic disagreements brought the original trio to an end, while the second line-up — the ever-present Froese joined by drummer Christopher Franke (ex-Agitation Free) and keyboardist Steve Schroeder — made a name for itself with a famous concert for six amplified pinball machines, whose sounds the band twisted into their most eclectic experimentation yet. This trio was responsible for the shift from the rock of the debut album to the kosmische musik of "Alpha Centauri" (1971), an album that vies with Popol Vuh's "Affenstunde" for the title of first-ever cosmic music record. On this work, named after the star system nearest our own solar system — evoked in the cover art by Froese's wife — much heavier doses of electronics are injected. Strange as it may seem, the group's shift toward more electronic sounds came about precisely because of Schulze's departure, as he would soon become one of the gurus of electronic music, setting aside percussion in favour of keyboards and synthesizers. If the electronic meditations of the year before had mostly been psychedelic journeys inside the mind — as suggested by the title of one track, "Journey Through A Burning Brain" — trips that only brushed against the cosmos, with "Alpha Centauri" space itself becomes the one true protagonist. It's as if Froese stopped watching the cosmos from Earth and instead climbed into a spacecraft, pushed past the atmosphere and into space, describing it from within. "Alpha Centauri", without entirely leaving behind the pronounced psychedelic sounds of the early days, moves beyond them and creates the first true soundtrack of the Universe, giving birth to cosmic music in the process.
In the years that followed, their gaze would push ever further outward, managing — alongside Schulze's solo work — to depict the terrifying abysses of deep space. The very long closing track (22 minutes) of "Alpha Centauri" is, in a sense, the founding manifesto of the new kosmische musik. It's Tangerine Dream's first long piece with a total absence of rhythm, a defining trait that foreshadows the revolutionary albums to come. This is the new sound that describes the darkness of space: a hostile, cold, inhospitable place. The final choral passages, backed by synthesizers that are at once majestic and unsettling, lend the track a religious air, as if the singers were priests of some new religion celebrating the infinite spaces of the Universe.

But the real nightmare was still to come: Conrad Schnitzler left to form Cluster, and Peter Baumann took his place. In doing so, Froese put together the "classic" Tangerine Dream line-up, marking a genuine turning point.
"Zeit" (1972) pushes even further down the road toward cold, uncompromising music. Here we find four dark, claustrophobic suites that radically go beyond any notion of rhythm, reconciling minimalist dictates with the electronic experimentation of Stockhausen.

The story of Tangerine Dream keeps moving forward without repeating itself: while "Atem" (1973) closes out a kind of trilogy begun with "Alpha Centauri", notable for its martial title track, in the years that follow the band arrives at very different sounds. Their Virgin albums — "Phaedra" (1974) and "Rubycon" (1975) — introduce a rhythmic element and mark a shift towards a less rigid, more seductive brand of electronic music: together they became a kind of manual for the new electronic music that has influenced, and still influences, generation after generation of musicians.

Also in 1974, Tangerine Dream became the absolute protagonists of a one-of-a-kind event, when they were invited to perform in Reims Cathedral in France alongside Nico; a cosmic coronation attended by nearly six thousand people, who, however, behaved with little respect for the religious setting, prompting Pope Paul VI to ban any further performances of popular music in Catholic churches from then on. The following day, New Musical Express journalist Chris Salewicz reported having spoken to Father Bernard Goureau, who was so shaken that he claimed the cathedral needed immediate purification, while American music critic Lester Bangs — also, among others, a New Musical Express contributor — instead declared he had seen God at the Tangerine Dream concert. Whatever one's point of view, what remains certain is that only the Anglican Church would later invite Tangerine Dream to perform, symbolically, in Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt after the Nazi bombings — though the following day an English newspaper would give the band an enormous front-page headline: "Forty years ago they came with bombs, today they've come back with synthesizers".

From the live album "Ricochet" (1975), recorded that same year during their European tour of cathedrals and theatres, Tangerine Dream began to favour the cinematic use of their music, starting with William Friedkin's "Sorcerer" (1977): from that point on, the music of Froese & co. absorbed increasingly conventional elements, spread across a string of releases with few equals in sheer quantity, today numbering over a hundred titles.

Like Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel were among the earliest bands of the German experimental scene. Their origins go back to 1967, when in Berlin the very young guitarist Manuel Göttsching tried his hand at rock with classmate and bassist Hartmut Enke, in a duo first called Bomb Proofs, then Steeple Chase Blues Band. A trip to London in August 1970 convinced the band to commit to rock full time, and for a while they shared a rehearsal space with Agitation Free and Tangerine Dream: it was with the latter's drummer, Klaus Schulze, that the pair went on to form Ash Ra Tempel.
In 1971 the band recorded their self-titled debut album for Ohr, with the help of sound engineer Conny Plank, a hugely skilled catalyst of ideas and a key figure of the kraut-rock scene of the time. The record was released with an almost ontological cover depicting a double doorway into the Egyptian temple of the Sun (Ra), containing inside it Allen Ginsberg's celebrated beat poem "Howl". With this, the trio announced themselves with a breviary of German electronic music, an acid-rock masterpiece made up of just two tracks across 45 non-stop minutes of cosmic jamming under strobe lights ("Amboss") and ecstatic interstellar frescoes ("Traummaschine"), inspired by the visual stimuli of William Grey Walter's book "The Living Brain". There's no real sense of editing, yet everything still feels remarkably fluid and organic: ancestral images enter the listener's head like storm clouds, leaving them defenceless inside a claustrophobic musical cage that traps the mind in a place from which it will be hard to return.

After the first album, Klaus Schulze preferred to go his own way and pursue a solo career, and was replaced by Wolfgang Muller, also a former member of Steeple Chase: officially still billed as a trio, but with a few supporting guests (including the controversial singer John L.), Ash Ra Tempel recorded "Schwingungen" (1972), another cornerstone of German cosmic music, a logical continuum with the debut, even if everything here seems, on the surface, calmer and less structured. Wolfgang Muller's contribution to the group's sound — with the addition of voice, vibraphone and saxophone — acts as the medium for a more earthbound mystical experience, beneath the veil of Maya of a false sense of security that is already unmasked on side one of the record (made up of the two-part suite "Light And Darkness"), while side two unfolds into the simmering "Suche & Liebe", which offers a soothing release after the previous psychotic atmosphere, in a way quite close to the grand finale of Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets": it's a more serene vision, but no less powerful, with the music slowly drifting through an interstellar cyclone of vibraphones and pulsing electronics that then veer straight into a paradisiacal climax of heavenly choirs and orgiastic melodies.

In 1973, with the following album "Seven Up", the lysergic vocalist and performer Timothy Leary also entered the temple of Ra's ashes, road-testing on the first release of Kaiser's new label (Kosmische Kuriere) a sound decidedly more oriented toward acid rock, largely thanks to the vocal performances of the LSD guru himself. There are exactly seven tracks, just as there are seven levels of consciousness theorized by Leary; the title, moreover, is said to refer to the fact that the fugitive used to spike the unsuspecting musicians' glasses of Seven Up with LSD.

That same year brought another unpredictable turn: with “Join Inn” (Ohr, 1973), Schulze rejoins the core lineup, while the arrival in the band of poet and singer Rosi Müller, the young muse who would become Göttsching's inseparable companion for years, contributes to an album with more mystical, dreamlike tones, once again split into two sprawling, contrasting suites. However, a string of problems was undermining the band's internal balance, and by the time Göttsching, Müller and Harald Grosskopf recorded the underrated “Starring Rosi” (1973), the transition toward a completely different sound was already evident — one that retained its cosmic character but incorporated increasingly substantial guitar melodies. That's the case with “Inventions for Electric Guitar” (1975), with which Göttsching, still under the old Ash Ra Tempel banner, began a phase of his career that was in some ways solo work, influenced by the erudite American minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
The band's modest notoriety caught the attention of Virgin, always alert to new proposals from across the Channel, which signed Göttsching but insisted the name be shortened to Ashra. He is the undisputed keeper of the Temple of Ra: his presence dominates the Virgin-era albums, first and foremost in “New Age of Earth” (1977), a hybrid of electronic pop and new age meditations, but also in “Blackouts” (1977) and “Correlations” (1979). “Walking The Desert” (1990) is the last album under the new name for some time; after that, subsequent output is essentially marked by soundtracks and live recordings.

Timothy Leary's influence is also evident in two albums that anticipate the birth of the cosmic couriers par excellence, courtesy of the Cosmic Jokers. The first act centers on the figure of poet Sergius Golowin and his “Lord Krishna Von Goloka” (1973), straight from Timothy Leary's lysergic court. Jurgen Dollase and Jerry Berkers from Wallenstein, Klaus Schulze, the duo Witthüser & Westrupp and Jork Mierke rush in to back the Swiss poet, on a three-part suite of cosmic folk, sordid electronics and enigmatic rock, on the Kosmische Kuriere label, its second release after Ash Ra Tempel's “Seven Up”. It's an album steeped in mysticism and ecstasy, eclectically set to music to create an otherworldly frame fit for the beautiful cosmic journey of master of ceremonies Sergius Golowin, whose narration carries the listener far from the materialist cravings of our small world.
It's again the Lsd guru Timothy Leary who indirectly spawns another atypical album, “Tarot” (1973), a work based on the tarot-themed paintings of gypsy painter Walter Wegmuller; from Sergius Golowin's project remain Jurgen Dollase, Jerry Berkers and Westrupp, joined by Harald Grosskopft, Hartmund Henke and Manuel Göttsching from Ash Ra Tempel, engineer Dieter Dienks and Rosi Müller, on a record far more powerful than the Swiss poet's. It consists of two LPs with a total of 21 tracks based on the respective major arcana: a very emphatic German spoken-word delivery wraps around some of the tracks, rising over massive shifting space-rock backdrops amid psychedelic grafts and blues trips straight from the lavish cover painted by Wegmuller himself, making this work one of the most surprising and visionary records in the kraut-rock landscape, the perfect prologue to the galactic epic of the Cosmic Jokers, in which Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser himself enters the scene.

The Cosmic Jokers are a "themed" supergroup bringing together Manuel Göttsching (Ash Ra Tempel), Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel), Jürgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf (Wallenstein), plus the ever-present sound engineer Dieter Dierks. The official sessions took place in the early months of 1973, at Dierks' quadrophonic studios in Stommeln (near Cologne), following a modus operandi very similar to the acid trips of the Grateful Dead: they were meant to be sketches for future projects, but the far-sighted Kaiser carried out a "cut-and-paste" job à-la William Burroughs, without even informing the musicians involved, assembling several long suites.
In 1974, within the space of a single year, the label boss released no fewer than five albums for the same series, which had meanwhile changed its name from “Kosmische Kuriere” to “Kosmische Musik”: the first act is “The Cosmic Jokers”, probably the best realized work under this name, able to balance the impulses of the various musicians across the two long sides of “Galactic Joke” and “Cosmic Joy”, in a kind of extremely long prototype of "dub music". The second, “Galactic Supermarket” (1974), also heavily criticized on release, is still marked by the same star wars, while the hallucinogenic symphonies of “Planeten Sit-In”, unlike the earlier albums, are channeled into shorter tracks, strung together in one continuous cosmic flow. The last two records see the arrival of Kaiser's girlfriend, Gille Lettmann, hailed as Sternenmädchen ("star girl") on “Sci-Fi Party” and “Gilles Zeitschiff”; the latter tells the story of how Timothy Leary managed to escape the Cia and of his encounter with Ash Ra Tempel. Things didn't turn out as well for Kaiser as for Leary: when the musicians discovered their material had been released, they filed a hefty lawsuit against the label boss, which led to his swift disappearance from the scene and the closure of his Ohr label.

Jürgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf of the Cosmic Jokers wrote another important chapter of kraut-rock with Wallenstein, one of the storied bands of German space/prog-rock, born from their meeting with Dutch bassist Jerry Berkers and American guitarist Billi Barone. In 1971, after finishing the recordings for their first LP under the name “Blitzkrieg”, they learned of an English band with the same name and settled on Wallenstein, the famed general of the Thirty Years' War, though they still titled their debut LP with the original name (“Blitzkrieg”, 1972). Produced by the far-sighted Dieter Dierks, the record consists of four long, almost entirely instrumental tracks: a symphonic spell with furious heavy-rock sections that only loses its edge once the vocals kick in. The second album, “Mother Universe” (1972), featuring Dollase's elderly grandmother on the cover, is heavily marked by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's attempts to push the band toward a more conventional sound, bordering on folk.
A year later, largely because of this pressure, Berkers decided to leave Wallenstein and was replaced by Dieter Maier: at this point, influenced by their recent experience with the Cosmic Jokers, Dollase and Grosskopf put their own personal vision of cosmic rock on record with “Cosmic Century” (1973), an album that nonetheless contains a series of tracks much closer to symphonic prog-rock than to kosmische musik, especially in the ten minutes of “Silver Arms”. The following “Stories Song & Symphonies” (1975) nearly derails into jazz-rock territory, but it's Wallenstein themselves who go off the rails, splitting up that same year, with Barone suddenly heading back to the Usa.

• The solitary couriers: the kraut-rock soloists
  • Klaus Schulze
  • Günter Schickert
  • Deuter
  • Edgar Froese
  • Holger Czukay
  • Achim Reichel

Klaus Schulze was the author of the most important and prolific solo career among musicians associated with kraut-rock. After his time with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, Schulze moved beyond the psychedelic, lysergic elements that had always been present in early cosmic music, turning his gaze decisively toward deep space. If the early Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel had looked at the stars imagining space journeys, Schulze was the first to conjure an almost tangible sensation of deep space itself. Schulze is the first to truly shatter the porthole of the spaceship in which the early cosmic couriers had remained firmly trapped, throwing himself naked and without a spacesuit into absolute darkness and cold. Schulze turns his gaze toward dark, silent places where nothing recalls human experience, surpassing even the celestial vault of rock music itself.

There has never been a single or specific reference point in my music. In the early Seventies I listened to the rock of that era, because it was very easy to understand, but my work had nothing to do with those sounds. I was experimenting with sonorities that aimed to reveal new frontiers of art. Apart from the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Grieg and Rossini, it's genuinely difficult for me to listen to any music that isn't my own. It's an unconscious reflex that sets me apart from ordinary listeners, who keep drawing that banal distinction between the short-lived hits of pop and the long-form works identified with classical music.
(Klaus Schulze)

The goal is to create music for the mind, not for the body, music that aspires to be immortal rather than the fleeting fad of a brief season. His debut “Irrlicht” (1972) is a monumental work for thirty performers, a quadrophonic symphony for orchestra and electronic machines, which stands in history as the very manifesto of cosmic music, as well as his most fully realized work. The Wagnerian power of his compositions, for instance in the opening aria “Satz Ebene”, is almost overwhelming and reveals a descriptive capacity never before heard in cosmic music. That power dissipates into helpless despair in the closing “Exil Sils Maria”.
“Cyborg” (1973) stays at an excellent level and holds its own against such an imposing predecessor. This time twelve cellos, thirty violins and four flutes appear alongside the electronic instrumentation. Here we find four twenty-minute suites that draw close to the glacial electronics of Tangerine Dream's “Zeit”.

In the following years Schulze continued to produce excellent albums such as “Blackdance” (1974) and “Moondawn” (1976), alternating them with more disappointing efforts like “Body Love” (1977), even founding his own label, Innovative Communication, and his own school of electronic music. In 1978 he returned to top form with the colossal “X” (two hours and thirty-eight minutes), reaffirming the cosmic elements but with a more symphonic, grandiose structure. 1979 brought “Dune”, featuring vocals from the legendary Arthur Brown.
However, as his career went on, the sheer volume of releases from the German electronic maestro became downright excessive, further fueled by an endless string of self-celebratory compilations and box sets.

Günter Schickert, initially active as a sound engineer and roadie for Klaus Schulze, devoted himself to a solo career from the mid-Seventies onward, after collaborating with the former Ash Ra Tempel member on “Home Session” (1975). His first two albums – “Samtvogel” (1975) and “Uberfallig” (1979) – explore the acid-drenched experiences of kraut-rock, with particular focus on guitar echo effects, an instrument whose every possible sonority he experiments with, setting aside synthesizers and following an avant-garde path already attempted by Manuel Göttsching (“Inventions For Electric Guitar”) and, more recently, by both Glenn Branca and the pioneers of industrial music.

Also often forgotten when discussing kraut-rock is the name of Georg Deuter, who, in years when the Universe seemed the favored destination for most electronic musicians, instead sought out that narrow space linking Eastern and Western music, becoming a pioneer of what would later be called new age. His debut, “D” (1971), contains clear raga influences (“Krishna Eating Fish and Chips”), cacophonous jokes (“Der Turm/Fluchtpunkt”), ambient music with tribal percussion (“Atlantis”), and even the complex electronic suite “Babylon”, a typical piece of electronic experimentation somewhere between Stockhausen, Can and Tangerine Dream.
The following “Aum” (1972) is even more steeped in Eastern spirituality and stands as his most fully realized work. Ambient sounds help Deuter immerse us in a landscape, now maritime, now rocky. The tribal percussion, floating free over a delicate sonic carpet, marks one of the album's high points (“Offener Himmel I”), while the various raga experiments (“Morning Glory”, “Phoenix”) represent some of the most original pages of the German scene and establish Deuter as one of the founding fathers of new age music. Deuter later moved to India, where he would delve even further into Eastern and new age elements, but by then moving definitively away from the kraut-rock scene.

Edgar Froese, too, father of cosmic music, built a solo career, lived mostly as a break between the various Tangerine Dream releases. Among his works, “Aqua” (1974) stands out, continuing the path already taken with “Phaedra” (1974) and later pursued on “Rubycon” (1975), particularly on the track “Panorphelia”. The following “Epsilon In Malaysian Pale” (1975) contains two long tracks of around 16 minutes that emphasize the meditative, intimate side, especially on the title track, rather than cosmic electronics, offering us a new facet of Froese's music.

Can's bassist, Holger Czukay, is the author of a little-known solo career dating back to 1968, the year “Canaxis 5” was recorded, released in 1969 under the name Technical Space Composer's Crew. Recorded with Rolf Dammers on production duties, “Canaxis 5” – besides marking Czukay's true debut – is a unique case within the German scene of that era. Here we find a manipulation of pre-recorded chants from Vietnamese tradition, altered and layered over electronic recordings that give it such evocative power that it becomes a harrowing cry recalling the sufferings of the Vietnamese people during the long war in that Asian country.

In that same middle ground between cosmic visions and Eastern meditation, we find another wanderer caught up in a strange "green journey" (“Die Grune Reise”, 1971). We're talking about the factotum Achim Reichel, historic founder of the Rattles, Germany's answer to the Beatles. In the late Seventies, Reichel returned from military service a changed man, releasing his solo debut. Judging by the track titles, the album almost seems conceived as a soundtrack for a religious film: closer to Manuel Göttsching's solo works than to the cosmic cacophonies of Amon Düül II, this psychedelic songbook nonetheless bears the clear marks of its time, even if much of today's music is plainly indebted to Reichel's madness.

• The anarchists: subversive kraut-rock
  • Amon Düül I
  • Amon Düül II
  • Agitation Free
  • Floh de Cologne
  • Checkpoint Charlie

We were looking for a new way of living together, freely and creatively. We knew the kind of life industrial society had in store for us: eat, grow up, grow old, die, like amoebas. We wanted something else.
(John Weinzierl)

On the anarchic-tribal front, Amon Düül have no equal for sheer force and evocative power. The leader and driving force behind this fundamental band is the iconic Christoph Karrer, guitarist, saxophonist, violinist and singer with a blind faith in the jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, active since the mid-Sixties with small lineups alongside Edgar Hoffman and Christian Burchard of Embryo. However, after seeing a Jimi Hendrix concert, Chris literally smashed his records to pieces and decided to convert to rock, while still drawing on its many interactions with jazz expressiveness and the psychedelic madness of the hippie era.
In a political-artistic commune in Munich, Karrer joined forces with his first bandmates and chose the programmatic name Amon Düül, fusing Egyptian solar concepts and Turkish lunar ones into the name, and experimenting with improvised, tribal music in the style of England's Hapshash & The Coloured Coat. In the summer of 1968, Karrer and Rogner finally traveled to London, where they met the Luciferian sibyl Renate Knaup-Krotenshwanz, who ended up joining the commune.

At the historic Essen Festival in September 1968, the first internal disputes emerged, effectively splitting the group into two factions: the first, revolutionary and political, was led by Rainer Brauer and Ulrich Leopold, a camp that also produced some curious characters like the “Red Army Faction” terrorists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin; the second, more interested in artistic and musical matters, was headed instead by Chris Karrer and Peter Leopold, who chose a full-time rock career.
The improvised, on-record history of the Amon Düül I faction barely lasted until 1971. Their only musical output was an endless 48-hour studio session, the raging, delirious tapes of which were spread across no fewer than four albums of psychedelic folk-rock hybridized with traditional Teutonic and Slavic music: “Psichedelic Underground” (1969), “Collapsing” (1970), “Paradieswarts Düül” (1970), and the double “Disaster” (1972), the latter clearly cashing in on the rising fame of Amon Düül II.

In the Amon Düül II camp, led by multi-instrumentalist Chris Karrer, we find singer Renate Knaup-Krötenschwanz, Falk Rogner (keyboards), Johannes Weinzierl (guitar), Christian “Shrat” Thierfield (bongos, violin), Englishman Dave Anderson (bass), Dieter Serfas (percussion) and Peter Leopold (drums). Their technical shortcomings were offset by tremendous improvisational nerve, which immediately caught the interest of Liberty/United Artists.
“Phallus Dei” (1969) was born this way, revolutionary from its outrageous title onward, brutal in its sonic impact, an acid, terrifying trip pressed onto vinyl, somewhere between collective improvisation and naive exorcisms. Olaf Kubler's groundbreaking production behind the scenes also guaranteed the band maximum creative freedom, with two outstanding guests: Christian Burchard (Embryo) and Holger Trutzsch (Popol Vuh).
The nightmare begins with the primitive “Kanaan”, where the Lord's Prayer is recited in Greek, with Knaup's maniacal laughter reverberating into an entropy saturated with spatial effects, ecstatic grooves and Stockhausen-like dissonances. The cerberus-like mellotron that opens the door to “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren” then carries us further along this nightmarish journey through possessed falsettos and malevolent violins; the reassuring triad of the title (“goodness, beauty, truth”) conceals within it the gruesome tale of a pedophile and his execution. Next, the psychedelic satanism of “Luzifers Ghilom” unfolds through several macabre passages over Chris Karrer's scat singing, while the kraut-rock maenad Renate Knaup then conjures the night of the Inquisition on “Henriette Krötenschwanz”, burning at the stake what sounds like a haunted version of “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane. The twenty minutes of the title track finally cover the entire second side of the record, a sardonic, structured improvisation that moves from the screaming space-rock of the prelude to the tribal torments of the interlude, right through to the closing section, where Chris's voice battles the tentacular electric violin as if he were Hercules against the Lernaean Hydra.
Musically, Amon Düül II offer a kind of psychedelic rock, a demonic saraband largely hampered by stumbling percussion and a diseased sense of humor, awash with raw guitar parts, sabbatic violins and vocals possessed by the lovely Renate Knaup — all ingredients also present on the second album, “Yeti” (1970), a disturbing double LP whose cover features former percussionist Wolfgang Krischke – who died of hypothermia after passing out in a forest under the effects of LSD and was later mauled by animals – in a photographic allegory of the Grim Reaper.
While the first side is dominated by the 14 minutes of the representative suite “Soap Shock Rock”, diabolically balanced between Kosmos and Chaos, on the second, live disc the tortuous “Sandoz In The Rain” sounds the trumpets of the Apocalypse, reuniting the two Amon Düül line-ups for the last time: a few luciferian flutes emerge from the acoustic fog that animates the track, dedicated entirely to the Swiss pharmaceutical company that first created LSD.

In 1970 Anderson left to join Hawkwind, and Amon Düül II lost a crucial piece of the puzzle: while his spirit still lingers on the double “Tanze Der Lemminge” (1971), on “Carnival In Babylon” (1972), the title notwithstanding, the infernal dance almost seems to sit down, on a record full of rock and short on chaos. This fourth album brings to completion what “Tanz Der Lemminge” had only hinted at, further streamlining the song structures, which grow ever more concise, and steering toward more conventional sounds: not surprisingly, it's the record that broke them in Britain, helped along by the heavy radio rotation John Peel gave to “All The Years Round”.
But the band members had many disagreements about the future direction of their music, and tensions rose during recording: as a result, the album bears the mark of these hesitations, losing some of the freshness and spontaneity of earlier work, but gaining something in terms of cohesion, along with a certain underlying melancholy. Still, the days of double LPs stuffed with improvisation were undoubtedly over, and the connections to the first two albums could by now be counted on one hand.
For their first American tour in 1972 the band lost several more key members along the way, but with “Wolf City” (1973) Meid and Rogner returned, on another album that, while not extraordinary, was still solid, held together by the splendid “Surrounded By The Stars”, even though the loss of inspiration is glaring on the rest of the tracks.
In 1974, “Vive la Trance”, their last for United Artists, finally completed a process of simplification and commercialization of their sound, at the mercy of an ever more unstable line-up and frequent concessions to the English trends of the moment.

In the Seventies, after the disappointing “Hijack” (1974) and the decent “Made In Germany” (1975), Knaup went on to join Popol Vuh, leaving Karrer and Weinzierl on their own and in the midst of a full-blown artistic crisis: with “Pyragony X” (1976) and “Almost Alive” (1977) Amon Düül II passed the double-digit mark in their discography, but broke up shortly after. The rest is superfluous history, punctuated by a few lukewarm reunions and forgettable solo careers.

Less long-lived than Amon Düül II, but possessed of the same tribal, anarchic energy, Agitation Free took shape in 1967 from the merging of two small Berlin beat combos, led respectively by Lutz Ulbrich (guitar) and Michael Gunther (bass). Initially, under the name Agitation, they made a name for themselves mainly in psychedelic circles, recreating Pink Floyd's famous light shows, alongside drummer Christopher Franke but above all vocalist John L., known less for his questionable vocal talents than for his bizarre habit of appearing on stage naked with a painted penis.
Once they'd shed their awkward singer, by the late Sixties Agitation Free came under the wing of artistic mentor and composer Thomas Kessler, who pushed them toward an electronic- and ethnically-inspired free-rock, poised between jazz and world music. In 1971, the line-up finally stabilized: Burghard Rausch replaced Franke (who joined Tangerine Dream), while electronic music expert Michael Hoenig also joined the project.

Thanks to funding from the Goethe Institute, the band was able to travel to the Middle East, returning with a series of tapes recorded alongside local musicians: the result of this native interaction is “Malesch” (1972) – an Egyptian term urging one to take life's misfortunes philosophically – an album quite unlike the rest of contemporary German rock, released by Vertigo, full of swirling psychedelic echoes and electronic sequences held together by ethnic instrumentation, as if the Grateful Dead had relocated from Haight-Ashbury to Cairo and stood ready to whisk you away into a crowded souk, amid synthesizer muezzins (“You Play For Us Today”, “Pulse”), funk sandstorms (“Ala Tunk”) and psychedelic belly dances (“Sahara City”). With a second guitarist added (Stefan Diez), the band went on to complete the chameleonic “2nd” (1973), shifting their ethno-cosmic center of gravity toward Hellenic sounds (notably through the use of bouzouki), while also including Edgar Allan Poe-style nightmares (“Haunted Island”), psycho-trance for worshippers (“Silence Of The Morning Sunrise”) and ghosts of Jerry Garcia (“Laila”). In 1974, Hoenig's premature departure irrevocably sealed Agitation Free's fate.

The story of kraut-rock's most anarchic soul doesn't end here. One cannot overlook the little-known Floh De Cologne, who grew out of a student theater group in Cologne and were quickly likened to the rock satire of Frank Zappa, that scornful censor of society's ills. Led by drummer and vocalist Hans-Jorg Frank, the only constant throughout their entire history, Floh de Cologne were among the first to debut, with “Vietnam” (1968), an album provocative from its title alone, even if largely inaccessible to non-German speakers. In an equally provocative gesture, the record's proceeds were donated to an organization supporting the Vietnamese people, while their appearance at the five days of Essen helped spread the group's fame, winning over above all the fervent student population. Their “Fliessbandbabys Beat Show” (1970) was the very first release on the Ohr label, a repertoire of rock and cabaret that includes, among other things, an ironic 19-point guide on how to get into politics, while with the follow-up “Rockoper Profitgeier” (1971), pressed on red vinyl, Floh De Cologne perfected their style: somewhere between theater and rock, the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention, pointing an accusing finger at “the vultures of profit” on a record of sarcastic proclamations voiced in titles like “Der Kapitalismus Stinkt” (capitalism stinks) or “Wir Brauchen Keine Millionäre” (we don't need millionaires).
Their finest year, however, was 1973, when they recorded the double live album “Lucky Streik” with the brilliant engineer Dieter Derks, followed by the outrageous “Geyer-Symphonie”, a three-movement concept album about the shady dealings of industrial magnate and war criminal Friederich Flick (who died in 1972), an ambitious jumble of satire, blues, jazz, rock and cabaret. From here on their music lost some of its abrasiveness and subversive charge, gaining an almost progressive cohesion: “Mumien” (1974) is another concept album, this time about the Chilean coup, but the departure of organist and lyricist Gerd Wollshon after “Tilt” (1975) plunged the band into crisis, and their last notable act before splitting up was the wild retelling of Little Red Riding Hood on “Rotkäppchen” (1977).

Regarded as the “rivals” of Floh De Cologne, Checkpoint Charlie (named after the famous checkpoint in the Berlin Wall) were one of the kraut scene's most radical and unconventional acts. Formed as early as 1967 by Bremner Malte and Walten Werner (guitar), Heß Werner (drums), Krebs Joachim (organ), Linder Harald (bass) and Trotha Uwe (vocals), they debuted with the pioneering “Grüß Gott Mit Hellem Klang” in 1970. The album consists for the most part of political rants screamed at the top of one's lungs, punctuated by moments of sonic explosions of rare intensity. Checkpoint Charlie's artistic mission sits somewhere between the anarchist kraut-rock collectives already mentioned and, at least in part, what the proponents of the most extreme, tribal psych-rock would do in the US just a year later: the Cromagnon, with their sole album “Orgasm”, albeit with entirely different goals and ambitions.

• Glimpses from the cosmos: mystical kraut-rock 
  • Popol Vuh
  • Kalacakra
  • Yatha Sidhra
  • Between
  • Baba Yaga

When it comes to mystical-religious dimensions, the first name that springs to mind is certainly Popol Vuh, the foremost champions of kraut-rock at its most sublimated by the sacred and by Eastern philosophy. Florian Fricke, formerly a film critic and director, managed within just a few years (from 1971 to 1973) to elevate Western music to such heights as to justify Cope's declaration about “Hosianna Mantra”: “I've never heard anything like it”. Their music is worlds away from the experimental electronics of Faust, the demonic Amon Duul, or Schulze's cosmic monoliths. Fricke sought a point of connection between various cultures, philosophies and religions, Eastern and Western, trying to create a music that could contain them all without belonging to any single genre or “side”, one capable of speaking to the whole of humankind, regardless of faith, creed or country of origin. This idea, however, emerged only after their first album, the historic “Affenstunde” (1971) — historic in that it can be considered among the very first works of cosmic music ever made, not counting Tangerine Dream's debut “Electronic Meditation” (1970), which is still authentically cosmic in its own right.
“Affenstunde” is entirely electronic, an experiment that almost completely sheds the psychedelic traits still present in early Tangerine Dream and turns its gaze toward the cosmos instead. Fricke described the album as depicting the moment when “the human being becomes a human being and is no longer an ape”: released in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was surely a direct influence on the work, especially considering that, at the time of the film's release, Fricke was still working as a film critic for major publications like “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and “Der Spiegel”. This is more than evident on the second side of the record, where the title track journeys through primordial entropy, its moog almost gesturing toward the soundtrack work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti, culminating in a transcendent, uplifting finale.

But this wasn't the true path Fricke was after. “In Den Garten Pharaos” (1971), recorded partly inside a church, is the turning-point record. Popol Vuh's electronics reveal for the first time the leader's true aspirations, which look toward the East and mysticism rather than the vast emptiness of the universe. The far heavier presence of frenetic percussion creates intense tribal atmospheres, conjuring up ancient landscapes. It's no coincidence that Julian Cope describes this album as an Adam and Eve trip, likely also owing to the influence Florian's wife Bettina had on him. The sound of water, the sense of standing in one of the magnificent gardens of the Egyptian pharaohs, the mournful chanting of ambiguous priestesses, the primitive sound of tablas — these are among the elements that set Popol Vuh's electronic phase far apart from the sonic coordinates of Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze. “In Den Garten Pharaos” is a solemn hymn to nature and to a pagan, perhaps pantheistic, spirituality, while Western or Eastern religions as such still have little to do with it here.

The mystical-religious dimension is tackled once again that same year with “Hosianna Mantra” (1972), which Fricke himself described as “a mass for the heart”. The German shaman bids farewell to the cosmos and to antiquity, abandons all electronic ambitions, ill-suited to the mystical-religious mood he wants to recreate, changes instrumentation and offers a music centered on piano and acoustic instruments: electric guitar, oboe, harpsichord and violin. Having sold his moog to Klaus Schulze, he also brings in Japanese soprano Djong Yun and the very young guitarist Conny Veit. The idea he had in mind was revolutionary: to fuse culturally different religious sounds, to create a mystical atmosphere, to blend classical instruments with Veit's electric guitar. Similar experiments had already been attempted, but with far less mature results (for instance, the Electric Prunes' “Mass In F Minor”). Inside we find East and West bound inseparably together, classicism and innovation, Christianity and Hinduism, modernity and antiquity, classical instruments and rock instruments. Everything that seems opposite here coincides, because for Fricke even apparent diversity conceals common threads that deserve to be celebrated, since every religion shares one thing: love. “Hosianna Mantra” is a truly unique album, so grand and complex that it made it hard for other musicians to follow the same path.

Popol Vuh's story continues over the years, though without ever again reaching such heights, with thoroughly respectable albums, among which their collaborations with director Werner Herzog stand out, providing the soundtracks for “Aguirre” (1974), “Coeur De Verre” (1976), “Nosferatu” (1978) – split across two albums, “Bruder Des Schattens” and “Nosferatu” – and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). Alongside these, Fricke continued his exploration of sacred texts with the trilogy “Seligpreisung” (1972), “Einsjager Und Siebenjager” (1973) and “Das Hohelied Salomos” (1974). With “Letze Tage – Letzge Nächte” (1976), a record that also features Renate Knaup of Amon Düül II, Fricke's mystical inspiration nevertheless seemed to have run its course.

Popol Vuh's influence looms large even over kraut-rock's smaller outfits. Kalacakra, for instance, were a self-taught, multi-instrumentalist duo made up of Claus Rauschenbach and Heinz Martin, who in 1972 created “Crawling To Lhasa”, a self-produced album released in just 1,000 copies, conceived in their rented apartment in Duisburg and then brought to life at Willy Neubauer's studios in Düsseldorf. The duo's moniker, Kalacakra, refers to one of Buddhism's principal tantric deities, whose name translates as “wheel of time” (and appears in the mandala on the cover), while their unsettling psychedelic raga-rock sinks its roots into folk and blues, amid Eastern ramblings, guitar mirages and relatively lo-fi recording techniques, tipping its hat to the Third Ear Band as well as Popol Vuh, while also borrowing plenty of the madness of the Clark-Hutchinson duo, as on the necromantic ballad “Naerby Shiras”, which conjures up the catastrophic Black Death.

Another mystical “one-shot band” from Germany, Yatha Sidhra, instead put out “A Meditation Mass” in 1974, a genuine collector's rarity today. The ensemble, originally named Brontosaurus, formed at the tail end of the Sixties around brothers Rolf (guitars, synthesizer, piano, vocals) and Klaus Fichter (percussion), Peter Elbracht (flute) and Frenchman Jean-Michel Boivert (bass), later replaced by Matthias Nicolai. In 1973, however, the group decided to completely overhaul its musical direction, also changing its name to the more solemn Yatha Sidhra and setting to work on the hieratic suite “A Meditation Mass”, a live performance of which caught the attention of producer and musician Achim Reichel (AR & Machines), who offered them a contract with the renowned Brain Records. The result is a four-part crescendo, holistically interconnected: an illuminating suite that flows as a single, unbroken continuum from start to finish, offering a shape-shifting blend of cryptic kraut-rock, ambient music and Eastern flavors.

The same mystical aftertaste can be found in Between, whose programmatic name simply refers to the fact that the music of Peter Michael Hamel (keyboards, vocals), Robert Eliscu (oboe), Roberto Detree (guitar, harp), Cotch Black (congas), Duru Omson (flute, percussion) and Fabian Arkas (electronics) sits “in between” a celestial union of “folk music” and “art music”. The sextet debuted with “Einstieg” (1971), which already announced the musical direction to come, a blend of various acoustic elements (“Song For Two”), chamber music (“Memories”) and experimentation (“Flight Of Ideas”).
With their first two albums, “Einstieg” (1971) and “And The Waters Opened” (1973), Between carried forward their acoustic improvisations, but Peter Hamel's travels opened the doors of consciousness and flooded the group's sound with a certain cosmogonic spirituality, channeled into a record that stood as pure resistance against the superficiality of the world. With “Dharana” (1974) we find a work that marks a new step forward for the launch of world music: a sacred symbiosis later refined on “Hesse Between Music” (1975), a concept album, still improvised, poised between recitation and meditation. “Contemplation” (1977) and “Silence Beyond Time” (1980) then represent Between's swan song, before Peter Michael Hamel's prolific solo career in the wake of Terry Riley's minimalism.

Baba Yaga are the contemplative creature of a duo made up of Ingo Werner (keyboards) and Iranian musician Nemat Darman (percussion, sitar, santur), taking their name from a character out of Russian folklore. Their debut album "Collage" (1974), recorded at Dieter Dierks's studios in Cologne, is essentially a medley of ethnic improvisation and electronic treatments, resulting in something highly esoteric, comparable to certain literary works by Aldous Huxley ("Moksha"). The second, self-titled album, released the same year as the debut, moves toward progressive territory somewhere between Cressida and Greenslade, aided by guest contributions from Bernd Weidmann (bass, vocals), Jürgen Dyrani (guitar), Winfried Schreiber (guitar) and Joska Fledermutz (drums); it's a record where the shift happens in full force, in a streamlined mix of prog-rock and avant-folk, further complicated by electric piano and synthesizer, plus a heavy use of percussion.

• Robotic dances: kraut-rock electronic music
  • Kraftwerk
  • Kluster
  • Cluster
  • Liliental

When it comes to electronic kraut-rock, Kraftwerk need no introduction, being one of the most influential bands to ever emerge from the German scene. The first chapter of the synthetic creature dreamed up by the two "music workers" Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider was a project with Organisation, which materialized into a handful of sketches recorded by Conny Plank and ended up on a rare, forgotten LP ("Tone Float", 1970). After a few ill-fated live shows, the duo decided to change tack and set up their own private recording studio, Kling Klang in Düsseldorf: the underlying idea was to revisit and commercialize the teachings of Karlheinz Stockhausen, applying them to rock and electronic music. So, after a programmatic change of name (Kraftwerk = power plant), with the help of percussionist Klaus Dinger, by the end of 1970 the first, self-titled LP was ready: an album of acoustic instruments filtered through electronics, not exactly extraordinary, but one that still managed to break into the German top 10. With Hütter temporarily out of the band, Schneider then tried every which way to keep Kraftwerk going with the help of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, and began work on the second album. When Ralf returned, however, the pair were pushed out of the project and went on to form Neu!, while Ralf and Florian carried on as their now-classic duo, with only the occasional guest as outside input.
At the end of 1971, "Kraftwerk 2" surprisingly charted again in Germany, despite not really sounding like a record made for a mass audience, but it's with "Ralf Und Florian" (1973) that Kraftwerk's klingklangmusik found its natural direction in a lucrative brand of techno-pop, helped along too by the famous cover in which the duo appear almost like an old married couple in a family portrait. The original edition instead shows the cybernetic duo on the back cover inside Kling-Klang, even though the album had actually been recorded with Conny Plank at studios in Munich, Cologne and Düsseldorf — but the two "music workers", with the help of graphic designer Emil Schult, wanted to reinforce the concept of "self-made men" this way. The turn toward techno-pop is also announced by the song titles, split between robotic visions ("Elektrisches Roulette") and early hints of techno music built on algebraic progression ("Tanzmusik"), where you can already glimpse the robotic, ecstatic feel of the Kraftwerk to come, even if it still lacks the elegant melancholy that would later give weight to their future compositions.

Another huge success for the band came with their fourth album, "Autobahn" (1974), which charted across half of Europe. The theme is the monotony of a motorway journey, where in the back seat we can make out the contributions of minimalist Wolfgang Flür, a percussionist with an academic background, and Klaus Roeder, who plays guitar and violin as a vehicle for textures that complement the basic electronic layers laid down by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider on synths and various keyboards, moving between pastoral visions ("Morgenspaziergang"), luminous radiation ("Kometenmelodie") and stretched-out electronics ("Autobahn"), always foregrounding the duality between man and machine, between the splendor of old Europe and modern industrial society, riding the rails of Philip Glass's and La Monte Young's minimalism as it veers off onto new pop tracks.

From here on, the Kraftwerk story is defined by suit-and-tie looks, backed by a shrewd promotional campaign built on robotic poses, haughty elegance and the vocabulary of a beginner's electronics course. With the famous album "Radio-Activity" (1975), Kraftwerk officially became a foursome, folding electronic percussionist Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür into their core lineup. "Trans-Europe Express" (1977) then swapped the motorway for the railway, but by this point it was clear just how far Kraftwerk had strayed from the rest of contemporary German rock — a path that would nonetheless lay the groundwork for all subsequent hybrids of electronics and popular music. After the robotic visions of "The Man Machine" (1978) and the cybernetic ones of "Computerworld" (1981), activity became increasingly sporadic through the Eighties. In 2009, Florian finally left Kraftwerk in Ralf's hands, officially due to fatigue, and was replaced by video operator Stefan Pfaffe.

The three multi-instrumentalists Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius — before becoming the better-known Cluster — formed Kluster in 1969. Their two albums — "Klopfzeichen" (1970) and "Zwei-Osterei" (1971) — are primordial proto-industrial experiments with a genesis that's at least amusing: short on cash to release the album, Kluster turned to funding from a Catholic church, which agreed to pay them on the curious condition that it could write the lyrics. Kluster accepted, both out of sheer financial need and out of sheer indifference toward the lyrical side of things.
And so the group's first LP, "Klopfzeichen", unfolds between fragments of chords and ecclesiastical declamations, building a record so strange that the German press described it as "progressive, made by a progressive church." The tracks on "Zwei-Osterei" (1971) were drawn from other tapes of the same session, and amount essentially to a bizarre monologue by a Catholic preacher set against extreme, largely inaccessible avant-garde backing.
Meanwhile, Schnitzler kept busy on several fronts, including Tangerine Dream and Kluster's earliest live appearances alongside Jimi Hendrix. During this period he privately released "Kluster & Eruption", the group's third LP, which was in fact essentially a Schnitzler solo project, to the point that Roedelius and Moebius announced their split from him.

Having changed their name to Cluster and enlisted celebrated sound sculptor Conny Plank, the duo debuted with the self-titled "Cluster" (1971), which marks the beginning of a shift away from the hostile, industrial sounds of their early days toward what would, in later years, prove foundational for the genesis of ambient music and the growth of electronic music more broadly. "Cluster", with its three untitled tracks, nonetheless remains one of the harshest, most inaccessible albums in all of kraut-rock, in a style still very much under construction, even though it was well received by the German press of the time, which included it among the year's ten best albums.
With Plank now confined to a purely production role, the band released the follow-up "Cluster II" (1972), which shows a huge leap forward toward what would become ambient/ambient drone. The opening six minutes of "Plas" recall early Suicide and the bleak post-rock of Labradford, while the twelve minutes of "Im Suden", with its dry, parched guitar tones, evoke the worst neuroses of Faust.

After 1972, Cluster teamed up with Michael Rother of Neu! and formed Harmonia. Around this time, the duo relocated to a small country village, Forst, where they set up a private recording studio; the tapes recorded there would later be polished off at Plank's studios. After the brief experience with Harmonia — where, more than anything, they encountered rhythm and melody for the first time — Cluster returned with "Zuckerzeit" (1974), smoothing off their rough edges partly thanks to Rother's involvement as co-producer. The sounds here are much softer — "Zuckerzeit" means "Sugar Time" — but even in its simpler impact, this album too deserves mention, since once again Cluster proved to be ahead of their time. Brian Eno considers "Zuckerzeit" one of the albums that influenced him most.
Having enriched their arsenal with electronic drums and Hawaiian guitar, having abandoned the gloomy sounds of their early years and adopted a tone now somewhere between ironic and pastoral, Cluster were ready for new paths. Emblematic of this new direction are the two tracks "Hollywood" and "Caramel", which make the comparison with Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" (1974) an easy one.
Back down to a duo once more, Cluster took a new turn with "Sowiesoso" (1976), opening onto far more ambient, relaxed atmospheres, something that's clear even from the cover art. Rother's influence is by now obvious, and everything seems to bring Cluster closer to Brian Eno. Hence their historic collaboration, immortalized on the album "Cluster & Eno" (1976), a splendid example of ambient music now free and fully mature. Also appearing on this album are Can bassist Holger Czukay and avant-garde composer Asmus Tietchens on keyboards.

Liliental is, finally, the name of the side project by Cluster's Dieter Moebius, in search of something more innovative in electronic music. For the occasion, Moebius invited two distinguished members of jazz group Kraan: bassist Helmut Hattler and saxophonist Johannes Pappert. Conny Plank also joined this unprecedented lineup. The aim of this one-off, self-titled record, dated 1978, is to refine the atmosphere toward an electronic ambient sound that veers into darkness, drawing on distorted guitars, exotic percussion, unsettling horns and gorgeous synthesizer passages, moving between meditative minimalism ("Stresemannstrasse") and electronic experimentation ("Adel", "Wattwurm"). After this episode, Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank would go on to work together on several more albums under the name Moebius & Plank, always emphasizing the electronic side of things on two records, "Rastakraut Pasta" (1980) and "Material" (1981), as well as collaborating with Guru Guru's Mani Neumeier on "Zero Set" (1983).

• The industrial pulses of krautrock – the motorik beat
  • Neu!
    • From the split of Neu!
      • Harmonia
      • La Düsseldorf
      • La! Neu?

It was a protest against consumer society, but also against our colleagues on the kraut-rock scene, who had a completely different taste.
(Klaus Dinger)

Having split off due to internal differences, drummer Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother, both formerly of Kraftwerk, created a new kind of sound — the motorik beat — one so innovative at the time of its creation, and so influential on the music of the following decades, that it can rightly be called revolutionary, thanks to its accelerated tempos and industrial obsessiveness. Those hammering pulsations really do feel more like the product of a machine than of a human being, which is exactly why they're called the motorik beat. From this point of view, Neu! are the perfect soundtrack to an industrial society on the verge of turning post-industrial. While their ties to the classic kraut-rock bands are certainly present, Neu! remain very much a case apart. Dinger and Rother weren't looking to the cosmos at all, so their music can't strictly be called cosmic — starting with their choice of stripped-down artwork. They looked to the new (Neu), and the new — as La Monte Young taught us — doesn't have to be beautiful or pleasant; it can even be horrible, but precisely because it's new, it has to interest us. In this case, the new is the obsessive rhythm, always identical to itself, the metallic clatter of a jackhammer or a circular saw. Two souls coexist within the band: Rother's, which charts a middle path between cosmic music and psychedelia, anticipating ambient music. The other, voiced by Dinger, is more dynamic and aggressive, going so far as to anticipate punk, especially on their third album.

Their debut — "Neu!" (1972) — was described by Julian Cope as possessing "a beauty you never get used to." Across its tracks you can clearly recognize the influence of Faust, from whom the band's members drew their interest in the industry that alienates, distorts and humiliates humankind ("Negativeland"); of Popol Vuh, traceable in the more meditative pieces ("Weinensee" and "In Gluck"); of the Pink Floyd of "A Saucerful Of Secrets" ("Weinensee"), with its long psychedelic excursions; and finally of cosmic music (Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze), here reworked into something rhythmic and pulsing. On "Hallogallo" and "Negativeland" — Neu!'s two defining, manifesto-like tracks — bass and drums weave a continuous carpet of sound: a rhythm that periodically speeds up and slows down is torn apart (especially on "Negativeland") by a hard, distorted guitar that would pave the way for thirty years of rock to come (Cope describes them as a pop-rock mantra).

After such a powerful debut, Neu! — while recording "Neu!2" — ran into a major problem: their label's budget had run dry. As Dinger put it, they were forced to find "a pop solution to a pop problem." The first side of the LP was ready and contains tracks far more devoted to the motorik beat than to the cosmic psyche of "Weinensee." "Für Immer", with its unstoppable motorik pulse, is essentially a reworking of "Hallogallo"; "Spitzenqualität" and "Gedenkminute (Für A + K)" — the former still driven by a relentless drumbeat, the latter with its harrowing death-knell bells (almost isolationist ambient) — venture into darker territory. "Lila Engel" is a magnificent, delirious proto-punk litany, and one of Neu!'s essential tracks, one that blazed trails still unknown to their contemporaries. To fill out the LP's second side, the idea was to speed up or slow down tapes of pre-existing recordings. Cope calls it being "taken for a ride," and indeed it's hard to say whether this was the genuine version of the record or a sign of a genuine creative crisis. From there, we move from the dreamlike "Neuschnee" to the searing "Super" in their altered versions. "Neuschnee" only has a sped-up version (78 rpm), while "Super" also has a slowed-down one (78 and 16 rpm).

Neu!'s dual soul temporarily failed to find any synthesis, and the two split, one forming Harmonia, the other La Düsseldorf. It would take until 1975 for Rother and Dinger to rediscover the compromise that had made Neu! legendary. Hence the release of another great album, "Neu! 75". In essence, they once again offered up a record split in two. This time, though, the division was total: side A went to guitarist Michael Rother, side B to drummer Klaus Dinger. The two sides are completely different. Rother continues with slow, introspective sounds, following the path of Harmonia and Cluster, while Dinger delivers the kraut-punk of La Düsseldorf. Rother's side A is truly gorgeous: it consists of three tracks, one of which, "Seeland", may be the single best thing Neu! ever recorded, alongside "Negativeland" from the first album. It's meditative music, a genuine dreamlike journey that moves you and leaves you suspended in a timeless trip. "Seeland" is a summation of Neu!'s two souls, combining their trademark obsessive rhythm with piano, creating a blend of old and new. "Leb' Wohl" abandons rhythm altogether for ambient music set against the sound of the sea and Rother's whispered voice.
Side B is a whole other world: the sound turns harsh and hard to digest, starting with the vocals. We're deep in proto-punk territory here, before even the faintest hint of Sex Pistols could be detected anywhere. The influence of "Neu! 75" on the future of rock is practically incalculable.
After 1975, Rother and Dinger went their separate ways. Their ambitions and personalities were simply too different. They reunited in 1986 for the fourth chapter of their discography, "Neu! 86", which amounts to little more than a footnote to their remarkable career.

As already mentioned, the split between Neu!'s two souls gave rise to Harmonia and La Düsseldorf. Having parted ways with Dinger, Rother sought refuge with Cluster's Moebius and Roedelius, whom he considered a good fit for his musical direction. This is how the trio Harmonia came together, described by Brian Eno as "the world's most important rock band." Their debut, "Musik Von Harmonia" (1974), is a successful fusion of the Neu! and Cluster styles. It ranges from the cosmic grandeur of "Sehr Kosmisch", to the Neu!-like gallop of "Dino" and "Veterano", from the placid atmospheres of "Ahoi" to the delirious electronic march of "Sonnenschein".
The following record, "Deluxe" (1975), doesn't quite live up to the debut, though the track "Monza", which oddly recalls Dinger's Neu!, deserves a mention.
Not to be missed is Harmonia's collaboration with Brian Eno, found on the album "Tracks And Traces", released in 1976 but compiling live recordings from 1974.

When Michael Rother left for Harmonia, Klaus switched permanently to guitar and joined La Düsseldorf alongside his brother Thomas (percussion), Harald Königer... wait, actually Harald Hönietzko (bass) and Conny Plank's studio assistant, as well as Hans Lampe (electronics). The first, self-titled LP (1976) represents a natural evolution of the Neu! sound. A four-track electro-rock record meant to capture different facets of the city of Düsseldorf, it hand-crafts the klingklang sound of Kraftwerk ("Silver Cloud") with a dash of Velvet Underground thrown in ("Düsseldorf").
La Düsseldorf then made a few lukewarm concessions to kraut-pop on "Viva" (1978), a record that found decent commercial success thanks to two singles, "Rheinita" and "Cha Cha 2000".
From here on, Klaus Dinger's band went into decline: their fame peaked with the third and final album, "Individuellos" (1980), a work that nonetheless stumbles into much more melodic territory, helped along by pianist Andreas Schell's contribution. It was right after his suicide that the group disbanded. In 1985, Dinger gathered material for a fourth album, released posthumously as "Neondian", putting it out under his own name, while his brother also let fly his own "solo" arrow with Für Mich (1982).
Finally, in 1996 came the short-lived rebirth of La! Neu?, a name that combined the musical concepts of Neu! and La Düsseldorf without adding anything new to the story of either band — both of which were nonetheless fundamental in defining the so-called Neue Deutsche Welle of the early Eighties.

• Acoustic hallucinations:cosmic folk
  • Emtidi
  • Dom
  • Witthüser & Westrupp
  • Hölderlin
  • Bröselmaschine

Within kraut-rock, folk stands as an emblematic example of just how marginal Anglo-Saxon influences could be, giving rise to an entirely new genre capable of blending acoustic harmonies with electronic digressions carried out on instruments unconventional for rock. Emtidi, in particular, embodied this new folk frontier to perfection. The duo, made up of Maik Hirschfeldt (guitar, flute, vocals) and Canadian Dolly Holmes (keyboards, vocals), a former collaborator of the Incredible String Band, was initially inspired by the classic folk of Donovan and Bob Dylan, but soon developed a personal, atypical style far removed from English sonorities. In 1970 they recorded their first LP ("Emtidi", 1970), a fairly conventional folk record notable chiefly for the heretical "Space Age", with its strange synthesizer coda. Their curious style, however, caught the attention of kraut-rock patron Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, who sent them to record at Dieter Dierks' sanctuary. The result was their second and final album, "Saat" (1972), an unprecedented folk record with cosmic and electronic leanings, full of striking keyboard and vocal moments, whose clearest sign of the new direction is the idyllic "Touch The Sun", a multi-dimensional paradise of electronic folk.

Among the genre's forgotten masterpieces, one name stands out without question: the multi-national quartet Dom, whose members hailed from every corner of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. Their sole album, "Edge Of Time" (1970), is a disarming blend of cosmic acid-folk and space-rock, with occasional forays into electronics and drone music. The album's leitmotif is built around a bad trip, a malevolent journey capable of warping the mind's perception of both reality and time. It's a largely instrumental voyage, this time rattled by spectral whispers and moans. The Dom record has much in common with the most experimental kraut-rock acts, unfolding across four lengthy segments that in fact form a single uninterrupted odyssey through space.

Another duo, this time working in cosmic/circus folk, was formed by guitarist Bernd "Barnelli" Witthüser (owner of a small club in Essen and one of the backers of the famous 1968 Essen Festival) and multi-instrumentalist Walter Westrupp. Their first LP, bearing the bizarre title "Lider von Vampiren, Nonnen und Toten" ("Songs of Vampires, Nuns and the Dead"), is a semi-serious piece of work credited to Witthüser on vampire literature: a record of enormous collector's value, having been issued in Ohr's original pressing complete with attached balloon. It was, however, with their second LP, "Trips und Träume" (1971), that the duo caught the public's attention, helped along by the media comparison to the Incredible String Band: this is an almost spoken-word folk record in German, made up of tracks with typically hippie titles and psychedelic trips, highlighted by the ode to weed "Nimm Einen Joint, Mein Freund" ("take a joint, my friend"), lifted directly from Fraternity of Man's "Don't Bogart That Joint", later featured in the cast of "Easy Rider". The irreverent "Der Jesuspliz" (1971), subtitled "Music from the Gospel", then takes its cue from a text that half-seriously claims links between the Bible and drugs, again marked by the choice of spoken German, moving between the orthodox acoustic folk of "Nehmet Hin und Esset" and the blasphemous psychedelic revelries of "Beasuch Aus Dem Kosmos". "Bauer Plath" (1972) instead features Wallenstein as guests, with this collaboration steering the duo toward a more conventional progressive rock, while the double LP "Live '68-'73" (1973) seals the duo's story, released after the pair had already split. In the late Seventies, Bernt Witthüser would even find fame in Italy as Barnelli (the other half of "Otto") on Renzo Arbore's television show "L'altra domenica".

Far more numerous, on the other hand, were Hölderlin, a six-piece originally made up of Dutch singer Nanny DeRuig, multi-instrumentalist brothers Joaquim and Christian Grumbkow, Michael Bruchmann (drums), Peter Gaseberg (bass) and Christoph Noppeney (violin, flute). Hölderlin were among the first prog-folk bands alongside Witthüser & Westrupp, having delivered one of the genre's most astonishing debuts before vanishing due to the collapse of their label. The band's debut is a self-titled album (1972): a balanced mix of rock, jazz and folk, spanning medieval madrigals and ethnic influences, all sprinkled with a touch of hippie idealism ("Wetterbericht") and grand progressive arrangements ("Traum"), with the keyboard flourishes standing out above all.
Trouble began when their producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser tried to push the band toward a more "cosmic" approach. It took almost three years and numerous legal battles to get out of the contract, but eventually, under the new name Hoelderlin (in German the pronunciation of "oe" is the same as "ö"), the band released their second self-titled LP in 1975, a far more romantic record with strong echoes of King Crimson and Genesis. In 1976 Hoelderlin released "Clowns And Clouds", packed with theatrical and surreal elements. A year later, however, Christian suffered a severe mental breakdown, no longer able to reconcile the band's demands with his family life. Spanish guitarist Pablo Weeber then joined Hoelderlin, who released the album "Rare Birds" in 1977, but the magic had already faded. "New Faces" (1979) and "Fata Morgana" (1981) would finally leave an indelible stain on the band's sound with a far more mannered, melodic rock.

Another thoroughly distinctive folk band was Bröselmaschine, founded by guitarist and writer Peter Bursch, who drew heavy inspiration from the American popular music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. The first Bröselmaschine line-up dates back to 1968, featuring Jenni Schücker (flute and vocals), Willi Kissmer (vocals and guitar), Lutz Ringer (bass) and multi-instrumentalist Mike Hellbach. Their first self-titled album, from 1971, is made up of a series of songs sung in English, expressing a folk sound heavily steeped in blues guitar, Eastern influences, eccentric lyrics and folkloric symphonies. The quintet split up that same year following the release of the debut, and the second album, "Bursch", retained only Bursch and Kissmer from the original line-up, rebuilding under the name "Peter Bursch Und Die Broselmaschine" with a new and much larger line-up, featuring notably percussionist Mani Neumeier (Guru Guru) and drummer Jan Fride (Kraan).

• War on Great Britain – kraut-prog

• Xhol Caravan
• Embryo
• Grobschnitt
• Novalis
• Eloy
• Mythos

Far from the English court of the Crimson King, progressive rock within kraut-rock managed to deliver plenty of fascinating moments, thanks above all to the numerous ethnic and jazz contaminations granted to a genre that has never had rivals in terms of eclecticism, yet which found new synapses and an even more multifaceted dimension within German experimental rock. That said, it must be admitted that while kraut-folk had highly peculiar and original traits, these appear far less evident in kraut-prog, where the influence of music from across the Channel is, in several cases, so strong as to erode one of the fundamental qualities set out in the introduction — namely, absolute freedom from the Anglophone "dictatorship".
At the dawn of kraut-rock, in the mid-Sixties, Xhol Caravan formed in the spa town of Wiesbaden (in Hesse) under the name Soul Caravan, a name that reveals much about their American-style soul-rock, complete with two saxophonists (Hansi Fischer and Tim Belbe) and two singers (James Rhodes and Ronnie Swinson). In 1967 they made their recording debut with "Get In High" (1967), a repertoire heavily indebted to the American Motown scene.
At that point, with psychedelic rock spreading like a virus across English soil, the band decided to embrace the new creed and change its name to Xhol Caravan, letting go of the two singers and giving rise to a psychedelia all of its own, enlivened by the use of sax and the eclectic disturbances typical of progressive rock. "Electrip" (1969) came to life amid freak ramblings ("Raise Up High"), ethnic hallucinations ("Walla Mashalla") and experimental music à la Frank Zappa ("Electric Fun Fair"): a historic document marking the transition toward what would become the wholly original kraut-rock sound.
To avoid being confused with the Canterbury band Caravan, the band later decided to shorten their name to Xhol, losing along with part of their name saxophonist Hansi Fischer, who joined Embryo. In 1970, now down to four members, Xhol moved to Ohr for "Hau Ruk", shifting their focus toward free improvisation. Their final album, "Motherfuckers Gmbh & Co.Kg" (1972), was released with the band already in pieces, dusting off some old tapes. The cover depicts a box of reels: along with those tapes, the story of Xhol Caravan was destined to gather dust in the attic, along with many other forgotten kraut-rock bands.

Luckier by far was the epic kraut-prog outfit Embryo, compared by the German press of the time to a plane ticket with no destination. A remarkably fitting image for one of the first world-music bands without borders, praised even by Miles Davis. The cornerstone of the group's entire history is multi-instrumentalist Christian Burchard, who as a child in Hof first met drummer Dieter Serfas, with whom he later founded Amon Düül II and played on "Phallus Dei". The original Embryo line-up on their debut record ("Opal", 1970) is quite large, including, alongside vocalist Christian Burchard, Ralph Fischer (bass), Edgar Hofmann (winds, percussion), future Ten Years After member John Kelly (guitar), plus a sizeable cast of guests among whom Robert Detrée (motocello — a kind of home-made screeching violin) and Lothar Meid (bass) stand out. It's a record that resists easy labelling, thanks in part to the combination of many talents from different backgrounds, all rooted in a rock sound with a distinct taste for free jazz.
The rest of their career is marked by the same creative restlessness, born of a variety of influences: "Embryos Rache" (1971), recorded with a reshuffled line-up and no guitar, was steeped in ethno-jazz ("Revenge") and freak hysterics ("Tabarinman's Return"), even including an anti-Franco proclamation ("Espana Si, Franco No") that led to the cancellation of some Spanish dates. On "Father Son And Holy Ghosts" (1972) the keyboards disappear, replaced by American flautist Dave King and sitar player Sigfried Schwab: once again the tracks are built on long instrumental jams, under the banner of musical contamination between East and West, the fruit of Burchard's frequent travels and his growing interest in Arab and Indian traditions.

The following "Steig Aus (This Is Embryo)" (1973) and "Rocksession" (1973) were released on Brain, losing some of the originality of the earlier albums, while "We Keep On" (1973) collects recordings made with American musician Charlie Mariano's negasuram (an Indian oboe). By this point, the story of Embryo had narrowed down to that of Christian Burchard and Roman Bunka, joined from time to time by various musicians, but often working as a duo.
After "Surfin'" (1975) Embryo decided to found their own label, April/Schneeball, aiming to secure greater creative freedom, though in practice this choice resulted in a lighter discography, rooted in jazz-rock with occasional ethno-funk contaminations, especially with the addition of Anglo-Ghanaian singer Maria Archer and percussionist Trilok Gurtu, who pushed the sonic boundaries of "Apocalypso" (1977) firmly toward India.
Over the course of his long career, Christian Burchard played alongside some sixty musicians from every corner of the globe (even performing with an Afghan orchestra).
In 1979 the band even embarked on a nine-month bus tour to India: an adventure documented in the film "Vagabunden Karawane" and on the double LP "Embryo's Raise", the last notable achievement of this long-lived band, which went on for decades exploring every corner of the world and reworking its traditions within their own music.

Less prolific on record than the vast Embryo catalogue, Grobschnitt were instead one of kraut-rock's most popular live acts. Formed by Stefan "Wildschwein" Daneliak (vocals and rhythm guitar), Gerd "Lupo" Kühn (guitar), Bernhard "Bär" Uhlemann (bass, flute), Hermann "Quecksilber" Quetting (keyboards), Axel "Felix" Harlos (percussion) and Joachim "Eroc" Ehrig (drums, effects). In 1972 they debuted on Brain with their self-titled album, produced under the supervision of Conny Plank, made up of two long tracks and two shorter ones, blending spoken-word German melodies, progressive-leaning arrangements ("Sun Trip") and a biting lyrical irony that winked at Frank Zappa.
Another record poised between music and theatrical performance was their second, "Ballermann" (1974), a concept album about Ballermann's journey from the Sahara to outer space, remembered above all for the two improvised sides of "Solar Music", which would provide the band with countless future live variations on the theme. The following "Rockpommel's Land" (1977) was hailed by the press of the time as a masterpiece, and is again a concept album: this time about a bored boy who sets off on a journey to the imaginary land of the title, complete with a Roger Dean-style cover painted by the little-known German artist Heinz Dofflein.
Despite the glowing reviews, Grobschnitt's style gradually lost its edge, and by "Merry-Go-Round" (1979) their sound had already grown considerably lighter, though the band remained active on stage throughout the Eighties.

Pioneers of German romantic rock, though all too influenced by British music, Novalis (a name taken — unsurprisingly — from the pen name of early Romantic poet Karl Friedrich Von Hardenberg) formed in Hamburg in 1971, when, looking for a band, Jürgen Wentzel (vocals, acoustic guitar) and Heino Schünzel (bass) placed an ad in the newspaper, an appeal answered by Lutz Rahn (organ) and Hartwig Biereichel (drums). After the release of their debut album ("Banished Bridge", 1973), full of romantic Crimson-esque reverberations, Wentzel left the group, handing over vocal duties to Heino and passing his guitar to Carlo Kerges.
Their next two albums, "Novalis" (1975) and "Sommerabend" (1976), reveal the band's evolving style, strongly calibrated toward a symphonic blend of progressive rock, classical music and hints of folk, as they began writing lyrics in German and found a charismatic frontman in their new vocalist: Austrian singer Fred Mühlböck. Riding the wave of his powerful, unmistakable voice, Novalis entered their finest period with the concept albums "Brandburg" (1977), "Vielleicht Bist Du Ein Clown?" (1978) and "Flossengel" (1979), the latter essentially a concept album about the ocean and whale hunting.

In Hannover, in 1969, the story of Eloy began instead: a name taken from H.G. Wells' novel "The Time Machine", where the Eloi — without the y — are gentle, peaceful creatures devoted to a life of leisure. Founding member is guitarist Frank Bornemann, who alongside Eric Schriever (vocals), Helmuth Draht (drums, flute), Wolfgang Stöcker (bass) and Manfred Wieczorke (organ) gave life to a hard-rock creature heavily indebted to the English sound. Their self-titled debut (1971) was not their happiest moment, leading to an early split from their label and inevitable friction within the band: Frank Bornemann, in fact, was none too pleased with the political direction the band seemed to be taking, arguing that matters of state and music should not mix.
After a two-year hiatus, Bornemann promoted himself to lead vocalist, and Fritz Randow replaced his friend Helmuth Draht on drums, after the latter was seriously injured in a car accident. With this reshuffled line-up and a contract with Harvest, a new style also took shape: "Inside" (1973) sounds like the work of an entirely different band, born of a cosmic, progressive space-rock at the crossroads between early Hawkwind and Pink Floyd's "Meddle". A winning combination of symphonic prog songs ("Land Of Nobody") and a few feisty jam sessions ("Future City"). The press of the time was quick to compare Frank Bornemann to "Ian Anderson without the flute" (the frontman himself would later admit he'd been trying to emulate the famous flautist during that period), though it is the ever-present organist Wieczorke who dominates the record with his moods.
The following "Floating" (1974) was recorded at the same studios where Scorpions were tracking "Fly To The Rainbow", and shows the influence of that proximity stylistically too, made up of a far more multifaceted hard-rock, with its kraut-rock instincts tamed and kept in check in favour of more developed, symphonically styled chords. A higher-quality sound inevitably results in a record that, while striving for overall balance, still leans toward cleaner spatial jams than its predecessor.
Despite a loss of originality, the fourth-and-fifth albums "Power And The Passion" (1975), a concept album saturated with spoken monologues, and "Dawn" (1976), with which Bornemann rebuilt the band for the third time, pushed Eloy to the forefront of German rock. Their last truly interesting album remains "Ocean" (1977), another concept album, this time on the myth of Atlantis. Afterwards, Bornemann repeatedly renewed the line-up but not the style, while Eloy's fortunes gradually faded.

Worth mentioning are Mythos, a band that would later give rise to the kraut-jazz outfit Morpheus. Hard to pin down, their debut "Mythos" (1972) marked a strange meeting point between the prog-rock of Jethro Tull, raga music influences, and moments of highly energetic heavy-psych.

• Cosmic improvisations – kraut-jazz
  • Annexus Quam
  • Dzyan
  • Limbus
  • Anima Sound
  • Exmagma
  • Morpheus

Although jazz found greater fortune within the German Democratic Republic, in West Germany we can nonetheless count a number of bands worthy of attention influenced by jazz-rock, at times vaguely Canterbury-inspired, at others drawing on the most extreme free jazz.

Let's start with Annexus Quam, a highly original kraut band of experimental jazz-rock formed near Düsseldorf in 1967 under the name Ambition Of Music, who later expanded their line-up to as many as seven musicians, becoming known for their lively live shows. By 1970 the line-up had settled with the versatile Uwe Bick (drums, percussion), Jürgen Jonuschies (bass), Werner Hostermann (clarinet, organ), Peter Werner (guitar, vocals), Hans Kämper (guitar, trombone), Ove Volquartz (saxophone) and Harald Klemm (flute), who made their recording debut on Ohr with "Osmose", an album of psychedelic electronics with jazz shadings in the style of Keith Tippett, garnished with eccentric sonic touches, not forgetting the prominence of wind instruments (mostly flute and trumpet). The record also owes much to the earliest Pink Floyd ("Osmose III"). The album's true epitome, however, remains the suite that fills the entire second side, the shadowy "Osmose IV", eighteen minutes of claustrophobic cosmic fusion.
After this first album, born under the sign of free improvisation, the second takes on a more balanced air, thanks above all to a line-up trimmed to five members and their growing presence on the jazz festival circuit. "Beziehungen" (1972) thus emerges from a rather free-jazz stylistic approach, tied to the inspiration of individual members rather than to collective harmony. After this album, the musicians disappear from view.

That same year, the story of the ill-fated Dzyan began in Frankfurt am Main, taking their name from an ancient Tibetan text on creation. Initially a five-piece, in March of that same year the band recorded their self-titled debut, released by the small Aronda label. A concept album on genesis, showcasing an English-style jazz-prog somewhere between Gentle Giant and King Crimson, featuring the highly "soul" voice of singer Jochen Leuschner. Without achieving any success, the band fell apart almost immediately, and a new group under the same name was formed by bassist Reinhardt Karwatky, who, together with Eddie Marron (guitar and vocals) and Peter Ginger (drums), recorded the far more innovative "Time Machine" (1973). Without Leuschner's voice, the wall of sound had room to thicken and gain depth, between guitar wizardry ("Magika") and granite-hard saxophones ("Kabisrain"), across four tracks of psychedelic rock and jazz-fusion topped by the powerful title track. Their last LP, "Electric Silence" (1975), moves away from rock and finally follows the path already opened by the improvisations of the Third Ear Band, rich in sitar, mellotron and ethno-psychedelic invocations, ranging from the opiate lament of "Khali" to the wild trails of "The Road Not Taken".

Another small legendary band of the German scene is Limbus, whose story begins confusingly in Heidelberg in 1968, with a lineup about which very little is known - save for a certain penchant for free improvisation. Superficially defined by critics as "an ethnic version of Cluster", they released their first album "Cosmic Music Experience" (1969), which came out under the title "Limbus 3" to reflect the triangular formation of the multi-instrumentalists: Odysseus Artner, Bernd Henninger, Gerd Kraus. For the second act, "Mandalas" (1970), Matthias Knieper finally joined this multifaceted lineup, giving life to an album of psycho-ethnic improvisations and exotic flights of fancy. It's a difficult and highly radical work: the twenty minutes of "Plasma" and the ten of "Dhyana" perfectly exemplify the quartet's spirit, lost amid amelodic digressions and ramblings of kazoo, percussion, wind instruments, organ and electronic effects - all in the name of free-jazz improvisation.

The duo formed by the couple Paul and Limpe Fuchs, known as Anima Sound, released "Stürmicher Himmel" in 1974 for Ohr: a kind of acoustic, atonal and organic avant-garde that tries to merge the most extreme free-jazz with Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète. After the initial mooing of cows, the percussion makes its entrance. There are only five tracks, each of which can be broken down into further fragments that don't detract from a flow as meditative as it is hallucinogenic, not without its twists, in a total freedom of expression already hinted at by the nudity on the cover.

With a name similar to the French Magma (the "Kobaïans" par excellence), Exmagma stand out from any other kraut-rock band for having created a jazz-rock that is utterly free in form and structure. Drummer Fred Braceful was born in Detroit but flew to Germany with the US Army in the late Fifties, where he built the band with Thomas Balluff Wolgang (keyboards) and Andy Goldner (bass, guitar, sax). Their albums - "Exmagma" (1973), "Goldball" (1974) and "Exmagma 3" (1975) - point to sounds closer to Canterbury jazz-rock or Italy's Area than to the kraut scene.

Morpheus, from the German region of Westphalia, recorded only one album, "Rabenteuer" (1976). They combine the free-jazz soul of part of the band with a side closer to jazz-rock (from musicians who came from the prog-rock, raga-influenced group Mythos). The album is a fine example of elegant, superbly played jazz-rock, rich in improvisation and fusion digressions, far removed from the more experimental strand of German rock but not lacking in interest and originality.

• Hallucinogenic visions: psychedelic kraut-rock
  • Walpurgis
  • Curly Curve
  • Gila
  • Brainticket

A great deal of kraut-rock was influenced by American and British psychedelic music: suffice it to mention early Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra Tempel, who went far beyond that initial influence to reach the status of true pioneers. The next four groups, influenced by psych-rock, stayed more firmly within its boundaries, creating an interesting chapter of German psychedelia, even without reaching the heights of the major acts.

Let's start then with Walpurgis, whose story is one of the shortest and most original in kraut-rock: the two guitarists Jerzy Sokolowski and Ryszard Kalemba fled communist Poland in the late Sixties, taking refuge in West Berlin, where together with drummer Manfred Stadelmann they put together a band specializing in American psychedelia, with a repertoire made up of covers of Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In 1972, despite the doubts of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, and thanks to Frank Oeser's record-industry interest, the trio managed to land at Ohr, releasing their only album with the label: "Queen Of Saba", alongside flautist George Fruechtenicht and keyboardist Jürgen Dollase (Wallenstein). Six tracks of noisy, American-inspired psychedelia, falling into the jaws of the most cosmic blues ("Daily") and frequent hard-rock digressions ("My Last Illusion").

Another cult psychedelic band on the Berlin underground scene is Curly Curve, founded in West Berlin in 1968 by former Tangerine Dream bassist Kurt Herkenberg, following his meeting with Hans "Hansi" Wallbaum (drums), Alex Conti (guitar), Chris Axel Klöber (keyboards) and Heiner Pudelko (vocals). The original line-up, however, was soon replaced by new guitarists and singers (Hanno Bruhn and Martin Knaden) for the first self-titled album in 1973: a record of gritty, keyboard-driven blues-rock interspersed with brief electronic moments, eight tracks in English with rather blurred edges.
The album received widespread acclaim, and this media encouragement led the band to prepare a second record. Eight new tracks were then recorded in 1974 but, despite good reviews, Curly Curve were unable to secure another deal to guarantee its release, and the material was shelved for seven years. In 1981, thanks to a limited edition promoted by collector Kurt Wehrs, the band's old demo finally saw the light of day, fittingly titled "Forgotten Tapes" and distributed in just a thousand copies. Little by little the lineup fell apart, with the various members moving on to other projects until Kurt Herkenberg was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1983, the year in which Curly Curve closed its doors for good.

Among the most original names in kraut-rock, one cannot forget Gila; formed by guitarist Conny Veit (the one from "Hosianna Mantra"), Daniel Alluno (drums and percussion), Fritz Scheyhing (keyboards, mellotron and electronic effects) and Walter Wiederkehr (bass), they were a band capable of blending surprising rock alchemy with new psychedelic experimentation. Their music sits within the great melting pot of cosmic psychedelia that looked to both early Pink Floyd and Ash Ra Tempel, without ever neglecting sounds more typically acid-rock-blues, recalling Jimi Hendrix.
Their debut - "Free Electric Sound" (1971), split into six tracks - can be understood as one long, uninterrupted acid trip.
In 1972 they recorded their second album, "Night Works", which however was only released in 1999. 1973 saw their final work, "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee", featuring Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh, which abandoned the acid sounds of their early days for a psych-folk turn. The title is taken from the book - published in 1970 - by American writer and historian Dee (Dorris Alexander) Brown; its pages laid out, without rhetoric or bias, the story of the conquest of Native American lands by white settlers. The book's aim is to make clear once and for all just how grave and dramatic the extermination inflicted on Native Americans was, along with the destruction of their culture and the wisdom of their ancestral lands. Indeed, Wounded Knee is precisely the place where, on December 29, 1890, a genuine massacre of Native Americans took place.

Listen only once a day. Your brain may be damaged. Hallelujah Records assumes no responsibility.
(Liner notes from the album "Cottonwoodhill")

Brainticket are usually filed under kraut-rock despite being of Belgian origin, even though the lineup - made up of Joel Vandroogenbroeck (organ, keyboards, flute, vocals), Ron Bryer (guitar), Werni Fröhlich (bass), Cosimo Lampis (drums), Wolfgang Paap (percussion, tabla), Dawn Muir (vocals) and Hellmuth Kolbe (keyboards and sound effects) - was a genuine commune open to musicians of various nationalities. The liner note on their debut album "Cottonwoodhill" (1971) remains legendary, a true stroke of genius from their record label: "Listen only once a day. Your brain may be damaged. Hallelujah Records assumes no responsibility". Because of this line, the album was even banned in several countries under right-wing regimes (Spain, Portugal and Greece). We're talking about a highly original, deeply acidic psychedelic LP, with explicit sexual references, whose delirious peak is the repetitive suite split into three parts, "Brainticket part I-II-III". Their career continued with the subsequent "Psychonaut" (1972) and "Celestial Ocean" (1973).

• Forgotten krautrock
  • Sand
  • Epitaph
  • Frumpy
  • Ardo Dombec
  • Thrice Mice
  • Zweinstein
  • Seesselberg
  • Brave New World
  • Association
  • Wolfgang Dauner
  • Os Mundi
  • Out of Focus
  • Sameti
  • Siloah
  • Gäa
  • Satin Whale
  • Necronomicon
  • Electric Sandwich
  • German Oak

Believing that all Teutonic bands of the early Seventies played kraut-rock is a mistake.
(Julian Cope)

Sifting through the German scene of the Seventies, alongside bands more symptomatically kraut-rock, we also find a series of groups more mannerist in their devotion to traditional Anglo-Saxon rock, such as Jane, Birth Control or Scorpions, to name only the best-known examples. To be fair, within that thicket of names traceable back to the anti-conformist, avant-garde essence of "kraut-rock", we've chosen to draw up a small, marginal list aiming to bring back into the light the most forgotten albums of the contemporary German scene - those that, for one reason or another, never enjoyed the same fortune as their compatriots, despite showing the same compositional ferment and achieving the same impact in terms of sound and disregard for media tastes, many years before the "indie" label became fashionable.

Let's start with Sand, from the small town of Bodenwerder (Lower Saxony) and formed by Johannes Vester (vocals, synth, guitar) and the Papenberg brothers, Ludwig (drums, organ) and Ulrich (bass, percussion), the latter initially inspired by Pink Floyd and English psychedelic rock. After a brief spell of gigging in Cologne, in 1971 Vester moved to Berlin to study psychology, followed by the Papenberg brothers. It was right around that time that Klaus Schulze was developing, together with engineer Manfred Schunke, a special recording process called Artificial Head Stereo Sound, meant to create the illusion of sound coming from every direction, much like today's dolby surround. Schulze had already met the group at a concert in Cologne and chose to take them under his wing, having them record at his studios with his new techniques, stamping his own cosmic mark onto a record poised between Ash Ra Tempel and Cosmic Jokers. This is how Sand's one-off record came about: "Golem" (1974), an album that nonetheless left the band members themselves unsatisfied, feeling violated by it. The band broke up just days after the record's release, and Vester launched a brief solo career under the never-ending banner of Johannes Vester and His Vester Bester Tester Electric Folk Orchestra.

Two other groups that produced a curious episode of Teutonic progressive rock are Epitaph and Frumpy. Epitaph formed in Dortmund in 1969, put together by Cliff Jackson (vocals, guitar), Bernd Kolbe (bass, mellotron, vocals) and Jim McGillivray (drums). The first sessions for their self-titled debut album (released in 1971 on Polydor) were recorded at an English studio but, for unknown reasons, were completed at Windrose Studios in Hamburg, with the addition of a fourth member: Klaus Walz (vocals). In 1972, Epitaph brought forth their second offspring, "Stop Look And Listen", in chilly Berlin, with five tracks stylistically similar to their debut. It's a decidedly gritty melodic hard-rock/progressive record, with strong blues echoes on the title track.

The story of Frumpy also began in Hamburg, a trio made up of Inga Rumpf (vocals), Karl-Heinz Schott (bass) and Carsten Bohn Bandstand (drums), formed in 1965 as City Preachers, before changing name and musical creed in 1970, when they recorded "All Will Be Change" with the essential instrumental support of French keyboardist Jean-Jacques Kravetz, who introduced classical elements into the band's rock-blues sound.
Their second LP, "Frumpy 2" (1972), defined the group's style: a strange prog-rock poised between jazz, rock and folk, spread across four medium-length suites, with some excellent classical-tinged passages always performed on keyboards. Some disagreements among the members later led to a temporary split after "By The Way" (1972).
Frumpy's entire story played out over just a few years, and as early as the first months of 1973, Kravetz, Schott and Rumpf formed a new band with other musicians, called Atlantis.

Also based in ever-fervent Hamburg were two other highly distinctive groups. One was the quartet made up of Harald Gleu (guitar and vocals), Helmut Hachmann (sax and flute), Michael Ufer (bass) and Wolfgang Spillner (drums), operating under the curious name Ardo Dombec. Their style was essentially progressive rock à-la Colosseum, tinged with the broad chromatic possibilities offered by jazz, with Hachmann's sax taking pride of place in almost every track, often counterbalanced by Gleu's guitar. The self-titled album was recorded shortly before the band's split in 1971, only to be released with an ice-cream-cone cover in the curious flavour of "vanilla, blood and cactus", featuring eight "scoops" that look equally appetising but are in fact seasoned with bitter, metaphorical lyrics, like the chilling "Supper Time", which manages to translate animals' endemic fear of vultures into music.

Another Hamburg group worth flagging up is Thrice Mice, a sextet led by multi-instrumentalist Wolfgang Buhre, whose sax playing was heavily influenced by Ian Underwood of the Mothers of Invention. Their self-titled album came out in 1971 with four tracks, each built around its own theme, all under the banner of a progressive rock shaped by an endless carousel of instruments: the classicism of "Vivaldi", the idiosyncratic philosophy of "Jo Joe", the western-jazz of "Pancy Desiree" (inspired by a novel by Joachim Ringelnatz) and the sinister sensuality of "Torekov", about some band members' experiences with a Finnish girl.

Diehard kraut-rock fans will already know that one of the most sought-after albums is, without doubt, "Trip – Flip Out – Meditation" by Zweinstein (a name paying tribute to Einstein), a duo formed by sisters Suzanne and Diane Doucet under assumed identities, who in 1970 conjured up a legendary triple LP whose title, according to popular lore, alludes to the three stages of an acid trip. This is an album that defies any classification, unwinding across more than a hundred minutes of unsettling sounds and sonic collages, musique concrète and psychotic experimentation, in an atonal, surreal atmosphere far removed from the winking promotional single ("I'm a Melody Maker", performed with friends), an aura further fuelled by the various stories circulating around its making. The sisters composed the entire LP over four months between Munich and Prague on a portable tape recorder, finishing off the effects with crucial help from engineer Peter Kramper in the Bavarian city. In the years before the album's release, Susanne Doucet had already begun a moderately successful career as a pop star; in 1964 her German-language version of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" topped the German charts. The extremism of "Trip – Flip Out – Meditation" eventually worried her, and not wanting to jeopardise her career with such a project, when Philips approached her to produce the album she decided to hide her name behind the pseudonym Jacques Dorian.
Over the years, various urban legends have sprung up around "Trip – Flip Out – Meditation", most notably the supposed love affair between Suzanne and producer Wolfgang Kretschmar who, smitten with the artist, is said to have got her signed to Philips before being fired by the label himself. What has instead been confirmed as true is that George Harrison was among the first to receive a copy of the album, handed to him personally by the sisters at his country estate.

Another curious case of kraut-rock "kept in the family" is that of the largely forgotten Seesselberg brothers (Eckart and Wolf); in 1973 they released "Synthetik 1", a bleak work of electronic sublimation, sensory obstruction and intimidating avant-garde, pressed in just 1,000 copies and capable of shaping a hallucinatory, relentless music, extravagant enough to easily reach the claustrophobic atmospheres of Conrad Schnitzler and Kluster. The album consists of nine pieces in which there is no rhythm at all, only a long astral, electrical turbulence: everything is inscrutable, a dark place where nature is literally etherised by means of the synthesizer.

An equally dystopian world is the one created by Brave New World, a short-lived group based in Hamburg, made up of German and Irish musicians. Their 1972 album "Impressions On Reading Aldous Huxley" is a kind of concept album based on readings of the famous sci-fi writer's "Brave New World". Being almost entirely instrumental, the sextet managed to craft an eloquent sound capable of combining different styles: a shining example is "Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon… Ford", a song that anticipates by several years the developments of future rock in opposition.

On the more strictly jazz side of things, we want to single out three names in particular. First of all, Association, an unusual multi-national group with an ever-shifting line-up of German and Dutch musicians. In 1970 they produced an entirely instrumental record, "Earwax". Their music prowls like a thief through the territories of jazz and rock, stealing a little from both, as in the tortuous opening of "Spider" or the bizarre free-jazz of "Hit The P. Tit". Guitarist Toto Blanke is highly charismatic, laying down a display unique to his style on vinyl, but it's the name of Flemish drummer Pierre Courbois that appears on the cover: he is in fact the compositional catalyst of this corrosive jazz-rock ensemble, whose rhythmic gusts give the band a particularly thunderous sound.

Another name worth highlighting is Wolfgang Dauner (piano, clavinet, effects) who, assisted for the occasion by Eberhard Weber (double bass, cello, guitar) and Fred Braceful (percussion, vocals), created the intriguing "Output" (1970), which fuses jazz and electronics. The future founder of the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble and Et Cetera recorded an album brimming with provocation and humour, already evident in its electric, hairy cover art, in a crackling blend of rock, free-jazz, ethnic music and avant-garde.

Os Mundi have nothing to envy Dauner in terms of originality either: a project by Udo Arndt (organ, guitar, vocals), Chris Busse (drums), Dietrich Markgraf (sax) and Andreas Villain (bass) that culminated in the Latin mass of their first album "Latin Mass" (1970), a humorous eucharist saturated with theatrical moments and the ghosts of Vanilla Fudge. Their second album – "43 minuten!" (1972) – is more sharply defined, bringing together a line-up that exemplifies the best of the German jazz-rock scene on a record very similar in mood to the musical acts of the lively Annexus Quam.

From eclectic Bavaria, we should also mention Out of Focus, made up of Moran Neumuller (vocals and winds), Hennes Herring (Hammond organ), Remi Dreschler (guitars) and brothers Klaus and Stefan Spöri Wisheu (drums and bass), who in 1971, after a decent debut with "Wake Up" (1970), released a self-titled album somewhat comparable to the earliest stirrings of British progressive rock, but which gradually evolved towards certain Soft Machine-style jazz-rock tendencies, with strong socio-political overtones and a touch of folk. It's an undoubtedly very passionate album, though it does have some great moments, such as the numbing litany of "Blue Sunday Morning", a narcotic kraut-folk ballad.

Staying in the Bavaria of the same period, we should also recall the story of Sameti, a band born from not one but two offshoots of Amon Düül II (namely Dieter Serfas and Christian "Shrat" Thiele) together with Walter Bratengeier (guitar) and Klaus Götzner (drums). Their first, self-titled "Sameti" (1971) came out on Brain as an endless psychedelic trip driven by the very long track "Anotherwaytosee Improvisation" with guests Robert Eliscu (Popol Vuh, Between) and Jürgen Benz, in a sound clearly influenced by the Sabbath-like rituals of Amon Düül II. In 1974 the second album, "Hungry For Love", veered towards a decidedly more traditional rock sound and brought the short-lived Sameti project to an end.

Close in spirit to the aforementioned Amon Düül, the brief story of the hippie tribe Siloah lasted only as long as it took to release two albums – "Siloah" (1972) and "Sukram Gurk" (1972). Works that, starting out from folk and moving through a strong ethnic component, represented one of the more joyful, lighthearted moments, far removed from either the more intellectual avant-garde or the more meditative, mystical strand of kraut.

Günter Schickert also ranks among the cult names of forgotten kraut-rock. His first album "Samtvogel" (1974) reveals the full talent of a skilled sound manipulator. Schickert managed to shape a rudimentary, mysterious electronic music, made of echo guitar and alienating melodies, built cyclically on dense layers that still sound utterly unique, timeless and beyond any classification.

A friend of Schickert's and a great kraut-rock soloist in his own right, Klaus Schulze also left his mark as a drummer in Code III, improvising as part of a quartet alongside Manfred Schunke (electronics), Apama Chakravarti (harmonium, tambura, vocals) and Ed Key (vocals, various instruments). Their sole record, "Planet Of Man" (1974), is a dark concept album about the life of the Earth, made up of three long tracks featuring a riot of cacophonous interference and virulent vibrations lurking in the background. It's an unbroken electro-acoustic howl, at times punctuated by robotic voices, and produced using the new "kunstkopf" (artificial head) technique, a recording method designed to optimise the headphone listening experience.

More sacred – at least in name, evoking the Greek goddess of the earth – were the prolific Gäa. They formed in 1973, when Helmut Heisel (guitar), Peter Bell (bass) and Stefan Dörr (drums), friends since their school days, met Günther Lackes (keyboards), Werner Frey (guitar, vocals) and Werner Jungmann (congas). After playing far and wide across a string of concerts, Gäa landed a record deal with the Kerston label and in 1973 set to work on their first album at Alfred Kersten's studio, under dreadful recording conditions. Yet out of those stressful sessions emerged their extraordinary debut, released in 1974 under the title "Auf Der Bahn Zum Uranus": a true collector's rarity before its 1992 CD reissue. The record is a splendid chapter of German rock, incorporating important psychedelic ("Tanz Mit Dem Mond") and progressive ("Mutterherd") elements, with a few cosmic touches and hard-rock lashings.

The same ingredients can also be tasted in the "cetacean" rock (an adjective befitting the band's chosen name) of Bonn's Satin Whale, made up of Thomas Bruck (bass), Gerald Dellmann (keyboards), Dieter Roesberg (guitar) and Horst Schoffgen (drums), a spacey hard-rock band with jazz streaks, marked by frequent time changes and to-the-death duels between Hammond organ and electric guitar. Their first LP was recorded in 1974 for Brain, titled "Desert Places", five long tracks steeped in distinctly Pink Floyd-like waters. The record was essentially recorded live in the studio, and Satin Whale's popularity reached its peak with a support tour for Barclay James Harvest in 1974. They went on to record five further, mediocre albums, playing on into the early Eighties, when kraut-rock collided head-on with the Neue Deutsche Welle.

Still on the front of the most psychedelic hard-rock, 1972 saw the release of the first and only LP by Necronomicon, “Tips Zum Selbstmord” (“tips for suicide”), a desperately bleak record that is nonetheless deeply compelling. Hailing from Aachen, near the Dutch border, the band was influenced from their very name by the visionary work of writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Led by guitarists and vocalists Walter Sturm and Norbert Breuer, they favored languid dark atmospheres, acidic electric guitars, devilish choral vocals and a granite-solid rhythm section, in a blend of progressive rock, American psychedelia and proto-punk leanings, made even more unique by their total refusal to compromise with the record business. The album, in fact, was self-produced and pressed in a run of just 500 copies.

In those same years, another singular outfit was active in Bonn: the eclectic Electric Sandwich. Formed at the end of 1969 by a group of four students: Klaus Lormann (bass), Jorg Ohlert (guitar, mellotron), Wolf Fabian (bass) and Jochen Carthaus (vocals). Their first and only self-titled album was recorded at Dieter Dierks' studios and then released by Brain in 1973, an endless whirlwind of freak improvisations, with a few eccentric nods to folk and blues, alongside some perilous mellotron excursions ("Material Darkness") and latent echoes of Pavlov's Dog's bipolar progressive rock ("I Want You").

Utterly forgotten too, in the end, are German Oak, who had nothing to envy in the more celebrated acts. This was a band founded by a small community of five hippies: Wolfgang Franz Czaika (guitar), the Ullrich brothers (percussion), Harry Kallweit (bass, vocals), Manfred Uhr Warlock (organ) and Norbert Luckas (guitar, effects). Somewhere between the delirium of Magma and that of Guru Guru, their self-produced vinyl debut was released in 1972 in Düsseldorf: the record was recorded inside a bunker and then issued in a handful of copies with a stylized portrait of a Reich soldier on the cover, thereby exorcising their rage over World War II directed at their own relatives and parents. The music reflects this wartime kunstlerschuld in a deeply obscure way, detonating into heavy distorted guitars and electronic noise that reverberate straight out of the fallout shelter.
With their second album, “Niebenlungenieg” (1972), we are once again faced with a riot of sonic improvisations based on the "Song of the Nibelungs," the very saga that had already inspired Richard Wagner. Who knows—had he lived a hundred years later, maybe Wagner too would have played kraut-rock.

Bibliography

Krautrocksampler. Guida personale alla Grande Musica Cosmica dal 1968 in poi – Julian Cope – 2006 – Fazi
The Prog Side of the Moon.  Suoni e leggende del rock europeo. Anni ’70 – Cesare Rizzi – 2010 – Giunti
Solchi Sperimentali, una guida alle musiche altre – Antonello Cresti – Crac Edizioni
Guida alla musica pop – Rolf Ulrich Kaiser – 1975 – Mondadori
La musica rock-progressiva europea – Al Aprile, Luca Mayer – 2009 – Calypso
Il krautrock e la musica cosmica – Enrico Bassi – 1991 – Ed. Musica DiagonaleProg.
Una suite lunga mezzo secolo – Donato Zoppo – 2011 – Arcana
The crack in the cosmic egg. Encyclopedia of Krautrock, Kosmische musik & other progressive, experimental & electronic musics from Germany – 1996 – Steve Freeman, Alan Freeman – Audion
Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany – David Stubbs – 2015 – Melville Pub House
Una Storia della Musica Rock – Piero Scaruffi – 2005
Cosmic Dreams at Play. Guide to German Progressive and Electronic Rock – Dag Erik Asbjornsen –1996 – Borderline Productions
Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and It’s Legacy – Nikolaos Kotsopoulos – 2009 – Black Dog Pub Ltd 
Krautrock – The rebirth of Germany – Benjamin Whalley – 2009 – BBC (documentary)

Web resources 

http://www.maltoni.co.uk/cosmica.html
https://venerato-maestro-oppure.com
http://www.progarchives.com/
https://www.headheritage.co.uk/
http://radiognomeinvisible1.altervista.org
https://lultimathule.wordpress.com/
http://www.scaruffi.com/itmusic.html
http://www.audiocentralmagazine.com/
http://detritidipassaggio.blogspot.com/
http://www.psycanprog.com
http://krautrockgroup.blogspot.it
http://distorsioni-it.blogspot.com/
http://janreetze.blogspot.com
http://doyourealize.it/
https://www.ondarock.it
https://ornitorinconano.com/

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25/02/2026