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KRAUTROCK AND THE BUILDING OF MODERN GERMANY.
West Germany after the Second World War was a country in shock: estranged from its recent history, and adrift from the rest of Europe. This proved to be fertile ground for a generation of musicians who, from the 1960s onwards, would develop the experimental sounds that became known as ‘Krautrock’.
Krautrock has taken its place in the firmament. From its origins in hippy circus tents around Dusseldorf in the late 1960’s, to the lofty likes of The Fall, Joy Division, Stereolab & LCD Soundsystem, it is globally revered. Whenever a new group wish to show their experimental credentials, they will reach up & pick out the word ‘Krautrock’ like a condiment to add a radical dash of cool to their press release.
Yet it is well over four decades since Krautrock petered-out, its demise practically unnoticed as the media were sent into paroxysms by punk, or confounded by the supersonic sequencers of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and the emergence of Disco, which, at the time, threatened to reset the global pulse. During this era (late 70s), Krautrock died away.
How did Krautrock, so lightly regarded in its own day both at home and abroad, become one of the cornerstones for modern pop & rock music? Its influence has been long reaching and wide ranging, created a similarly lengthy host of styles which descended from it – ambient, hip hop, post-rock, electronic, psych-rock, trance, rave, and post-punk. Yet for all its hipness, it is still disregarded or only dimly understood.
Krautrock signified the rebuilding of modern Germany. By the late 1960s, many cities were still in ruins & the people were shaking off the humiliation of the war; collective guilt. Starved of culture & desperately needing an injection of fresh philosophies, a new form of music was due to replace the outdated ultra-kitsch ‘Schlager’ music, Germany’s default trad music scene. Bands started emerging from Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Koln & Dusseldorf.
But, where did the term ‘Krautrock’ come from?
It’s an absurdly offensive term to Germans, yet it’s used unselfconsciously by a generation who would no more dream of calling Germans ‘Jerries’ or ‘Fritz’. The artists involved in this scene are bemused by the phrase. ‘Kraut’ means ‘herb’ in German = ‘Herb rock’. Over the years the word has lost the accidental pejorative connotation it once had. It’s become semantically cleaned with the wash of time. How could a single word encapsulate both the spacey, ambient extremes of Ash Ra Temple and the heavy industrial collage of Faust? The faux-bourgeois placidity of Kraftwerk and the angry, messy agitation of Amon Duul? The ecclesiastical heights of Popol Vuh and the sacrilegious depths of Can? The extreme, maximal suffocating noise of Neu! and the spare, horticultural ambient beauty of Harmonia?
There is, quite simply, something jaggedly appealing about the very way in which the word sits on the page or rolls off the tongue. It’s certainly preferable to other options that never really stuck, such as ‘Teutonic Railroad Rock n Roll’.
When Klaus Dinger & Michael Rother left Kraftwerk to form Neu!, with ‘hidden member’ Connie Plank, they created the famous “Motorik” beat, a continuous, pulsating 4/4 rhythm that became one of the musical trademarks of this experimental music. Krautrock draws on the gamut of styles – 20th Century classical, musique concrete, free jazz, progressive rock, blues, psychedelia, funk, electronic as well as its own, hand-wrought originality.
Dinger referred to the droning motorik or komische style as the ‘Apache Beat’. Neu!’s ‘Hallogallo’ sums up perfectly the designed experience and is the quintessential sound of 1970s Germany.
This mixtape celebrates this forward-flowing music, as Dinger himself emphasized, “It is very much a human beat, it is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on, and stay in motion”.
- Genre
- Krautrock