Krautrock

KRAUTROCK REISSUES column

Melody Maker, 1995?

by Simon Reynolds

Marginal in its own time, Krautrock can now be seen to have

invented the future we currently inhabit.  Can's pan-global

avant-funk anticipated many of the moves made by sampladelic

dance genres like trip hop, ethnotechno and ambient jungle;

Kraftwerk and Neu!'s motorik rhythms paved the way for trance

techno and trance rock; Faust and Cluster's drone-ological

experiments contained the germs of lo-fi, post-rock and

isolationism. The boom in Krautrock reissues offers a great

opportunity to go back and hear this future's birth-pangs.

Easily the most exciting of the current spate of

reissues are the three albums Kraftwerk recorded between

1970-73, prior to their global pop smash "Autobahn".

"Kraftwerk 1", "Kraftwerk 2" and "Ralf and Florian" (all

Germanofon)  are fascinating because you can hear both where

the band are headed (techno) and the experimental tradition

from which they gradually extricated themselves (late '60s

New York avant-gardism).  Despite the fact that its robotic

riff is played on a flute rather than a synth, "Ruckzuck"

prophesises the hypnotic rush of "Trance Europe Express" and

"Tour De France"; the Elysian electro-pastoralism of

"Klingklang" looks ahead to the heavenly shimmerscapes of

"Neon Lights", or even Spacemen 3's "Playing With Fire".

Elsewhere, Kraftwerk's avant-classical and psychedelic roots

are showing: there's John Cage-like gamelan chimes, clusters

of woozy guitar-harmonics and droopy, almost Hawaian-souding

bottleneck-glissandos, echo-chamber freak-outs, Beach

Boys/barbershop harmonies and even Byrdsy backwards-guitar.

Krautrock's ancestral links (via the Velvet Underground)

to New York's school of drone-minimalism were spelled out

when Faust hooked up with Tony Conrad, who'd played

(alongside John Cale) in La Monte Young's legendary if little

heard "dream music" ensemble. The result was the 1972 LP

"Outside The Dream Syndicate", now reissued by Table of The

Elements: three twenty-minute-plus tracks of magnificent

mantric monotony, with Conrad's severe violin rasping across

Faust's strict and symettrical rhythm section.  Don't expect

Faust's kooky wit or surreal caprices: "Outside The Dream

Syndicate" is an essay in the Zen-power of repetition and

restriction.  If it's Faust's daft side you're after, check

out "The Faust Concerts Vol. 1" and "Vol.  2" (both Table of

the Elements), which document the band's '90s reformation,

alternating between a pointless 'Greatest Hits' revue and

'old-Dadaist-farts-at-play' cacophony. Still, Faust have a

brand new studio LP out later this year, produced by Steve

Albini and Jim O'Rourke, which should be at very least

intriguing.

Anyone interested in tripped-out weirdshit should hunt

down the awesome "Cluster II" (Tempel). Cluster--the two-man

sound-laboratory of Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius--

deployed treated, processed and looped guitars to weave

drone-tapestries that seem to waver, buckle and crinkle

before your ears, like the sonic equivalent of Op Art.

Later, Cluster went synth, collaborated with Brian Eno, and

dwindled into sporadically interesting but increasingly New

Agey solo careers. That said, their brand-new, percussion-

oriented LP "One Hour" (Gyroscope) is actually well worth a

listen.  

Back in the mid-70's, Roedelius and Moebius hooked

up with Michael Rother of Neu!  to form Harmonia, whose

second LP "Deluxe" (Bebe) has just been reissued. Harmonia's

aura of serene exultation is actually closer to Neu!'s

gliding propulsion than Cluster's locked-groove

claustrophobia. With its twinkling Rother guitars and naively

pretty, early Orchestral Manoeuvres melodiosness, "Deluxe" is

like some weird fusion of kosmic rock and Test Card muzak.

Of the latest bunch of Can-related reissues, the most

interesting solo item is "Canaxis" (Spoon/Mute), a 1968/69

collaboration between Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers that

consists of two side-long "acoustic sound-paintings".  The

title track and "Boat-Woman Song" (which is based around

tape-loops of haunting Vietnamese folk music) are pioneering

examples of ethnological sampling. Much later came Jon

Hassell with his "Fourth World" music, Brian Eno and David

Byrne's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", and contemporary

ethnodelic magpies such as Loop Guru, Trans-Global and Jah

Wobble.  Once again, those krafty Krauts got there ahead of

the rest. 

KRAUTROCK a survey

Melody Maker, 1995 (also appeared in the book Modulations)

by Simon Reynolds

Immerse yourself in Krautrock--and this is the immersive,

engulfing music par excellence--and you'll find a paradox at the

music's heart: a combination of absolute freedom and absolute

discipline. Krautrock is where the over-reaching ambition and

untethered freakitude of late '60s acid rock is checked and galvanised

by a proto-punk minimalism. Krautrock bands like Can, Neu! and Faust

unleashed music of immense scale that miraculously avoided prog-rock's

bombastics, its cult of virtuosity-for-virtuosity's-sake. Where

progressive rock boasted "look at me, look how fast my fingers can go",

Krautrock beseeched "look! look how VAST we can go'. Or as Can's

Michael Karoli put it: "We weren't into impressing people, just

caressing them."

Alongside Tim Buckley's Starsailor, Miles Davis circa On The Corner,

Yoko Ono circa Fly, Krautrock was true fusion, merging psychedelic rock with funk groove, jazz improvisation, Stockhausen-style avant-electronics and ethnic flava in a way that

avoided the self-congratulatory, dilettante eclecticism that marred

even the best of the 70s jazz-rock bands. Krautrock's primary inputs,

and urgency, came from late 60s rock: Velvet Underground's mesmerising

mantras, Hendrix's pyrotechnique, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd's

chromatic chaos, plus dashes of West Coast folkadelic rock and the

studio-centric experiments of Brian Wilson and the later

Beatles. Equally significant is what they didn't draw on, namely the

blues-bore purism sired by Cream and the Stones.

  

Tweaking this Anglo-American legacy, the German bands added a vital

distance (coming to rock'n'roll as an alien import, they were able to

make it even more alien), and they infused it with a German character

that's instantly audible but hard to tag. A combination of Dada, LSD

and Zen resulted in a dry absurdist humour that could range from zany

tomfoolery to a sort of sublime nonchalance, a lightheaded but never

lighthearted ease of spirit. Although they occasionally dipped their

toes into psychedelia's darkside (the madness that claimed psychonauts 

such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson or Moby Grape's Skip Spence), what's

striking about most Krautrock is how affirmative it is, even at its

most demented. This peculiar serene joy and aura of pantheistic

celebration is nowhere more evident than in the peak work of Can, Faust

and Neu!

If the triumvirate of Can/Faust/Neu! has gotten so clichéd as a hip

reference point, it's for a good reason. Despite being quite dissimilar

and lacking any kind of fraternal, comradely feelings towards each

other, Can, Faust and Neu! are the unassailable centre of Krautrock's

pantheon-- its Dante/Shakespeare/Milton, or Beatles/Stones/Dylan, if

you will.

Can's core was a quartet of lapsed avant-garde and free jazz musicians

(bassist Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist Irmin

Schmidt and drummer Jaki Leibezeit) who--blown away by the Velvet

Underground and the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus"-- decided rock was where

it was at. Can were the most funky and improvisational of the Krautrock

bands. Recording in their own studio in a Cologne castle, they jammed all day, then edited

the juiciest chunks of improv into coherent compositions. This was

similar to the methodology used by Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero

on classic jazz-rock albums  such as Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson and On

the Corner. As Can's resident Macero, Czukay deployed two-track recording and a handful of mikes to achieve wonders of proto-ambient spatiality, shaming today's lo-fi bands.

 Can's early sound--spartan, crisp-and-dry trance-rock, like the Velvet

Underground circa White Light White Heat but with a smokin' rhythm

section and black American vocalist Malcolm Mooney--peaked with the 15

minute mindquake of "Mother Sky". As the influence of James Brownian

motion kicked in, Can began to fuse 'head' and 'booty', atmosphere and

groove, like nobody else save Miles Davis. After the shamanic avant-funk of Tago Mago and

the brittle angst-funk of Ege Bamyasi--both featuring their

psycho-surreal second singer Damo Suzuki--Can's music plunged into the

sunshine with Future Days, Soon Over Babaluma and Landed, their

mid-'70s "Gaia trilogy". A kind of mystic materialism quivers and

pulses inside these ethnofunkadelic groovescapes and ambient oases,

from the moon-serenade "Come Sta, La Luna" to the fractal funk and

chaos theorems of "Chain  Reaction/Quantum Physics". This is music that

wordlessly but eloquently rejoices in Mother Nature's bounty and

beauty.

The pan-global panoramic trance-dance of Talking Heads'  

Remain In Light owed a lot to Soon Over Babaluma, and yet 

more sincere flattery came in the form of David Byrne and 

Remain producer Brian Eno's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (1981). Its

use of ethnic vocal samples was unfavourably compared with Czukay's

contemporaneous Movies, whose "Persian Love" recontextualised an

Iranian ballad; in actual fact, Holger had got there 12 years earlier

with  Canaxis, which used Vietnamese boat-woman's song!

 Despite an almost utter absence of input from black music, Neu! were

probably the closest to Can, in their sheer hypno-groove power and

shared belief that "restriction is the mother of invention" (Holger

Czukay's minimal-is-maximal credo). Devoid of funk or swing, Neu! is

all about compulsive propulsion. Klaus Dinger was an astoundingly

inventive, endlessly listenable drummer who worked magic within the

confines of a rudimentary four-to-the-floor rock beat. Together with

guitarist Michael Rother, he invented motorik, a metronomic, pulsating

rhythm that instils a sublime sensation of restrained exhiliration, like

gliding cruise-control down the freeway into a future dazzling with

promise. That "dazzle" comes from Rother's awesomely original

guitarwork, all chiming radiance and long streaks and smears of

tone-colour.  Like the New York band Television  a few years later,

Neu! bridged Byrdsy psychedelia and punk. They also  wove  ambient

texturescapes (e.g. the oceanside idyll "Leb' Wohl") and  experimented  with weird noise (after  blowing their recording budget, they filled the second side of Neu! 2 with sped-up

and slowed-down versions of an earlier single!). But it's motorik

excursions like "Hallogallo", ""Fur Immer" and "Isi" that constitute

Neu's great legacy, one that's only now being fully exploited by

admirers like Stereolab and Trans-Am.

Faust similarly combined a proto-punk mess-thetic with acid-rock's galactic grandeur. But instead of Neu!'s streamlined symmetry, Faust oscillated wildly between filthy, fucked-up noise and

gorgeous pastoral melody, between yowling antics and exquisitely

sculpted sonic objets d'art. Above all, Faust were maestros of

incongruity; their albums are riddled with jarring juxtapositions and

startling jumpcuts between styles. Heterogeneity was their

anti-essence. This cut-up Dada side of Faust was explored to the hilt on The Faust Tapes, a collage 

album of some 26 segments, and it's a methodology they revisited on

their late Nineties comeback album Rien, which was assembled by

producer Jim O'Rourke using live tapes of the band's reunion tour of

America.  Paralleling the in-vogue cut-up techniques of William

Burroughs, Faust's collage aesthetic impacted the early 80s' burgeoning

"industrial" scene (Cabaret Voltaire, Zoviet France, This Heat, Nurse

With Wound, etc). But for all their avant-garde extremities, Faust were

also great songwriters, scatttering amid the zany chaos such gems as

the bittersweet psychedelic love-song "Jennifer" and the wistful acid

blues of "It's a Bit of a Pain".

Once you've immersed yourself in the best, what about the rest? Ash Ra

Tempel took The Stooges' downered wah-wah rock ("We Will Fall", "Ann',

"Dirt") way way out into the mystic. Guitarist Manuel Gottsching's

subsequent solo records have their moments  but veer too often into

beatific New Age wispiness. An exception is  Gottsching's astonishing

E2-E4,  an album-length electronic track that paved the way for the

ambient techno watercolors of Carl Craig, The Black Dog, and The Orb,

and even became a Balearic rave anthem when remade by Sueno Latino.

Another, less acknowledged precursor to Nineties techno--especially

the metronomic and Teutonic sound of trance--was Tangerine Dream, who

evolved from the transcendental guitar  tumult of their first four

albums to a synth-dominated, hypnotic style  not far from the silvered

rush of  English neo-hippie outfit Hawkwind.

Amon Duul II were the most baroque and bombastic of the krucial Kraut kontenders: imagine Led Zeppelin produced by John Cale with Nico on vocals and a crate of magic mushrooms to hand. They

had a fab line in lysergic song titles too: "Halluzination Guillotine",

"Dehypnotised Toothpaste", "A Short Stop At The Transylvanian Brain

Surgery". Their estranged and  more politicized sister-band Amon Duul I

pursued a similarly drug-burned rock, but were more primitivistic and

sloppy.  Also on the acid-soaked, kosmische tip, Popol Vuh  recorded  a

sprawling, diverse  oevre ranging from meditational, Mediaevalist

reveries to primordial, percussive freak-outs. 

After Can/Faust/Neu!, Cluster were probably the most innovative and ahead-of-their time of the early Seventies German bands. After a spell as the purely avant-garde Kluster, the two-man soundlab

of Hans-Joachim  

Roedelius and Dieter Moebius hit their stride with the mesmeric

dronescapes of Cluster II and Cluster '71. Later, they traded in their

armoury of FX-pedals and guitar-loops for synths, knocked out a bunch

of bewitching albums in collaboration  with Brian Eno, and chalked up a

mammoth discography (as Cluster, but also solo and as Roedelius and

Moebius) with the odd gem lurking amid much  New Age mush. Hooking up

with Neu!'s Michael Rother, the duo also recorded as Harmonia,

producing two albums worth of serene and soul-cleansing

proto-electronica. Cluster's Zuckerzeit, the Harmonia records, and the

Neu! sound were a big influence on Eno and his pal David Bowie during

the latter's mid-Seventies sojourn in Berlin; you can hear it in the

lustrous guitar canopies of "Heroes" and  the glum, pensive

synth-strumentals on side two of Low. 

Krautrock brought into focus an idea latent in rock, from Bo Diddley to the Stooges to the Modern Lovers: that the rhythmic essence of rock music, what made it different from jazz, was a kind of

machinic compulsion. Pitched somewhere between Kraftwerk's man-machine

rigour and James Brown's sex-machine sweat, bands like Can and Neu!

created grooves that fused the luscious warmth of flesh-and-blood funk

with the cold precision of techno. There was a spiritual aspect to all

this, sort of Zen and the Art of Motorik Maintenance: the idea that

true joy in life isn't liberation from work but exertion, fixation, a

trance-like state of immersion in the process itself, regardless of

outcome. Holger Czukay declared: "Repetition is like a machine... If you can get aware of the life of a machine then you are definitely a master ... [machines] have a heart and

soul... they are living beings'." . Taking this idea of the 'soft

machine' or 'desiring machine' even further, Neu! created a new kind of

rhythm for rock, bridging the gap between rock'n'roll's syncopation and

disco's four-to-the-floor metronomics. As Stereolab's Tim Gane says,

"Neu!'s longer tracks are far closer to the nature of house and techno

than guitar rock".

But Kraftwerk  was the group that really bridged the gap between rock

and electronic dance music.  (In fact, Rother and Dinger were briefly

members of Kraftwerk, before going off to do their own thing as Neu!).

On their  first three albums,  Kraftwerk's creative core Ralf Hutter

and Florian Schneider jumbled the New York minimalist school (La Monte

Young, John Cage, Steve Reich etc) with German avant-electronics (Stockhausen). Then they staked everything on the idea that the synthesiser was the future, and won.  The  band's pop

breakthrough was "Autobahn", the 24 minute title track  of their fourth

album:  a synth-and-drum-machine  symphony that evoked  the  Zen

serenity  of gliding down the freeway. The track combined Beach

Boys-style harmonies with musique concrete sound effects --a

celebration of the car as "a musical instrument,"  proclaimed Hutter.

In  edited form,  the song became a global hit in 1974. But Kraftwerk's

aesthetic pinnacle  was  1977's "Trans-Europe Express, an awesomely

minimal slice of "Industrielle Volkmuzik" that did  for the locomotive

what "Autohahn " did for the motor car. With its Doppler Effect synths

and indefatigible beats, the  album's "Trans-Europe Express/Metal on

Metal" segue captured the spiritual passion behind technological

progress--"all the dynamism of industrial life, of modern life," as

Hutter put it.  Two further albums--1978's The Man Machine and 1981's

Computer World--consolidated Kraftwerk's achievement, and sealed the

staggering enormity and sheer pervasive range of their legacy: in the

Eighties and Nineties, they were reknowned and revered as the

godfathers of  (just count 'em!) Eurodisco, New Romantic synth-pop,

electro, Miami Bass, Detroit techno, and  North of England

bleep-and-bass (LFO, Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters).

Why is the Krautrock legacy such a touchstone for contemporary

musicians. Firstly, Krautrock is one of the great eras of

guitar-reinvention. Expanding on the innovations of Hendrix, Syd

Barrett, the VU, etc, the Krautrock bands explored the electric

guitar's potential as source of sound-in-itself. Fed through

effects-pedals and the mixing desk, the guitar ceased to be a

riff-machine and verged on an analog synthesiser, i.e. a generator of

timbre and tone-colour. As such, the Krauts anticipated the

soundpainting and texturology that characterises today's computer-based

music,  while still retaining the rhythmic thrust of rock'n'roll. 

 Simultaneously kinetic and cinematic, Krautrock is one of the golden

phases in a continuum that runs through rock history: the textured

groovescape. It's a  thread that runs from Hendrix, Sly Stone, Miles

Davis, dub reggae, and Parliament-Funkadelic, through the early

Eighties avant-funk of PiL, The Pop Group, A Certain Ratio, et al,

right up to the more ambient  and atmospheric forms of electronic dance

music (Orbital, Seefeel, Basic Channel/Chain Reaction, Mouse On Mars).

Whether they're live bands jamming in the studio then editing and

resequencing their improvs, or  solitary computer boffins constructing

digital mosaics  using a mouse, a VDU, and a library of samples and

synth-tones, all these artists create pulsating, vividly textured

soundscapes through which the listener is gently transported.

Krautrock belongs on a  continuum of psychedelic dance music based

around the intensification of  rock's three most radical aspects:

groove, space, and timbre/texture/chromatics.  "Groove"  relates  to

repetition, to the loop, to timelessness--the  dream of escaping

History by getting back into the body.  Conjured on the mixing board

through  echo, reverb and delay,  "space"  induces  a stoned way of

listening,  hallucinatory  eyelid movies.  Created through  effects

pedals,  analog synths, or  sampladelic treatments,   "timbre"  is

trippy, paralleling the synaesthetic effects of drugs like LSD, where

sound is tactile or immersive.

Beyond all its claims to radicalism, though, Krautrock is simply

fabulous music, a dizzy kaleidoscope of crazily mixed up and

incompatible emotions and sensations (wonder, poignancy, nonchalance,

tenderness, derangement), an awesome affirmation of possibility that

inevitably appeals in an age when guitar-based music appears to be

contracting on a weekly basis. Listeners are turning to Krautrock, not

as a nostalgia-inducing memento of some wilder, more daring golden age

they never lived through, but as a treasure trove of hints and clues as

to what can be done right here, right now. Krautrock isn't history, but

a living testament that there's still so far to go.