Kraftwerk are a special case indeed. Founded in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the Düsseldorf-based group were the most artistically significant German music group of the 1970s. They exerted a formative influence on global pop music with their innovative approach to transpose academic, or ‘new’ electronic music into the realm of pop music. The defining characteristic of Kraftwerk’s work is the prominent incorporation of artistic concepts to which Hütter and Schneider had been exposed at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and within the local art scene. Accordingly, they saw themselves as performance artists rather than musicians.

Both musicians, and in particular Schneider, came from wealthy backgrounds. They had the financial means to purchase expensive synthesisers and other technical equipment for their Kling-Klang studio. Also, ownership of their label released Kraftwerk from the commercial restraints of a record company. Their strategic use of artistic autonomy was inspired by Andy Warhol and, like Warhol’s operation, Kraftwerk constituted a ‘myth machine’.

According to Dirk Matejovski, from Autobahn (1974) onwards, Kraftwerk formulated ‘an aesthetic concept that became ever more perfectly developed’. Initially Hütter and Schneider issued enigmatic interview statements of their artistic intentions to steer reception, but then ‘ceased all self-commentary in the 1980s’. The resulting ‘mystification through communication breakdown’ enabled the Kraftwerk myth to emerge.Footnote ¹ Johannes Ullmaier proposes an alternative to the self-created mythologies and tendencies towards monumentalisation that originate especially from the Anglosphere: he proposes a more sober view of the band that undermines hero-worshipping narratives. In his view, the development of Kraftwerk’s oeuvre is perceived ‘as a gradual, … situational niche creation via clever, international, trial-and-error market analysis and adaptation’.Footnote ²

This chapter opens an overview of key Krautrock bands. Yet the extent to which Kraftwerk can be strictly classified as Krautrock requires critical evaluation. Such a subsumption is certainly unproblematic regarding their first three albums alone, Kraftwerk (1970), Kraftwerk 2 (1972), and Ralf & Florian (1973). But it was precisely this trio of albums that Kraftwerk – in a move no other band discussed in this volume ever did – disavowed and exorcised from their œuvre. Instead, they made their next album, Autobahn (1974), the official starting point of their discography. Whereas its B-side is still strongly influenced by the Krautrock sound of the first three albums, the title track, which takes up the entire A-side, heralded no less than a paradigm shift in the history of German popular music: the advent of electronic pop music.

Kraftwerk’s claim to autonomy in the field of pop music is based on their definition of their artistic production as a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) and a ‘work in progress’. Not only can their output be divided into phases but also into two opposing modes of production: a conventional mode characterised by their ground-breaking concept albums (from 1974 to 1981) and then, from the 1990s onwards, a mode of curation. In the latter, they subjected their work to a permanent process of technical revision, stylistic adaptation, and intermedial expansion, which turned it into a transmedial, ‘open work of art’ (in Umberto Eco’s sense).

Finally, the most remarkable feature of Kraftwerk may well be that, more than fifty years after first emerging, they continue to give live performances, now under the sole artistic leadership of founding member Ralf Hütter. In addition to regular tours and festival appearances, Kraftwerk play concerts at prestigious venues such as symphony halls, world-class museums, and prestigious theatres. Their Gesamtkunstwerk approach, which unites sound and vision, has led to an immersive stage show with continuous 3D video projection and a multi-channel sound system based on wave field synthesis technology that creates sculptural sound effects.Footnote ³

Formative Influences

Hütter and Schneider were inspired to develop the concept of electronic pop music in the 1970s by local Rhineland musicians such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Pierre Boulez, Pierre Schaeffer, and György Ligeti. These avant-garde composers worked at the famous Studio for Electronic Music, which was founded in 1951 at the WDR public radio station. Equally significant for Kraftwerk were the technical experiments in electronic sound synthesis by the physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler, who was the first person to use the term electronic music in German in 1949.Footnote ⁴ Hütter and Schneider paid their homage with ‘Die Stimme der Energie’ (The Voice of Energy, 1975), a variant on a speech synthesis experiment conducted by Meyer-Eppler in 1949.

Via the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the local gallery and museum scene, Kraftwerk were influenced by the modernist avant-garde and contemporary Pop Art. Hütter and Schneider also adopted the strategy to subordinate their artistic project to conceptual principles. The latter encompasses far more than the mere fact that their œuvre consists of concept albums only. The band name itself, which translates as ‘power station’, has a conceptual function, since the electricity electronic music requires is generated in a power station. The conceptual approach is also evident in the artistic tactic of disappearing as private individuals behind the uniform group identity. This allowed Hütter and Schneider to reject the myth of authenticity surrounding rock musicians and style themselves as an artistic collective of ‘sound researchers’Footnote ⁵ and ‘music workers’.Footnote ⁶

Warhol’s influence, as already explained, looms large over the early work of Kraftwerk. The recurring use of pylons on the minimalist sleeves of the first two, untitled albums was evidently a nod to his serial art. Another important model was local Düsseldorf artist Joseph Beuys, whose conceptual art strategies were adapted by Kraftwerk in various ways. An important link to Beuys’s conceptual approach was provided by his student Emil Schult, who assumed the role of an unofficial band member. Schult guided Hütter and Schneider on how to align their artistic output to overarching conceptual ideas. Furthermore, he not only wrote most of the lyrics but also designed many record covers. Similarly, many ideas for Kraftwerk’s stage presentation stemmed from Schult. For instance, he devised the neon signs featuring the first names of the musicians that can be seen on the back sleeve of Ralf & Florian.

Industrielle Volksmusik from Germany (1970–1974)

Music journalists have made various attempts to label Kraftwerk’s electronic style of pop music. In addition to ‘synth pop’, Kraftwerk themselves suggested labels such as ‘electro pop’, ‘robo pop’, and ‘techno pop’ – the latter being one of the tracks on the album Electric Cafe (1986). Asked about the original artistic idea behind Kraftwerk’s music, Hütter told an interviewer: ‘To create music that reflects the moods and sentiments of modern Germany. That’s why we named our studio Kling-Klang [literally ding-dong], because those are typical German onomatopoetic words. We call our music industrielle Volksmusik from Germany.’Footnote ⁷

Illustration 6.1 Kraftwerk dolls.

© Ilse Ruppert.

This odd concept name, which literally means ‘industrial folk music’, requires critical analysis since it neither regards industrial music nor folk music in the received sense. The emphatic qualification ‘German’ is easier to comprehend: it reflects Krautrock’s impetus to create an alternative to the dominant, cultural imperialist model of Anglo-American rock/pop music. Kraftwerk, however, did not search for inspiration in cosmic expanses (like ‘Berlin School’ bands such as Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra Tempel), in the music of foreign cultures (like Can, Agitation Free, Popol Vuh etc.), in modernist aesthetics like the cut-up technique (like Faust), or in jazz (like Embryo). Rather, Hütter and Schneider decided to focus on forgotten German cultural traditions (such as the Gesamtkunstwerk, Bauhaus, or Expressionism) and often emphasised their Germanness, especially to anglophone interviewers. Thus, according to Melanie Schiller, ‘not least because of their German band name, they were an exception’Footnote ⁸ among the important Krautrock bands.

Kraftwerk also gave their songs exclusively German titles. The tracks on the first four albums can be categorised as follows: firstly, terms from electrical engineering, such as ‘Strom’ (Current), ‘Wellenlänge’ (Wavelength), or ‘Spule 4’ (Coil 4); secondly, German onomatopoetic or compound words such as ‘Kling-Klang’ (ding-dong), ‘Ruckzuck’ (in a jiffy), or ‘Tongebirge’ (Mountains of Sound); thirdly, programmatic terms from the field of music: ‘Tanzmusik’ (Dance Music) or ‘Heimatklänge’ (Sounds of Home). Therefore, the ‘industrial’ in industrielle Volksmusik does not primarily refer to factories – although the modernist redefinition of noise as music played a role in Kraftwerk’s work, along with their self-designation as ‘music workers’ – but rather to modern technology, in particular electronic machines that allow a new type of music to be made.

Kraftwerk understand this electronic music – against the background of the industrialisation and modernisation of post-war Germany – as constituting ‘Heimatmusik’ (ethnic/homeland music). As the band once proudly stated in a press release: ‘We make Heimatmusik from the Rhine-Ruhr area.’Footnote ⁹ Kraftwerk’s key work ‘Autobahn’, a homage to the extensive network of motorways in their home federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, is a case in point. This piece of music is ‘industrial’ not only by virtue of its electronic nature but also in view of sound effects such as a car door slamming, engine noises, and vehicle horns. These noises, which Kraftwerk simply took from a library record, evoke the sonic presence of the Volkswagen engine that, as it were, drives the very motorikFootnote ¹⁰ of the track.

The meaning of the polyvalent concept of ‘Volksmusik’ becomes more apparent if we consider instrumental pieces like ‘Heimatklänge’ or ‘Tanzmusik’. The romantic simplicity of their melodies is striking. They are clearly alluding to the German folk song tradition but, at the same time, they highlight the electronic instrumentation that makes them modern versions of traditional folk songs. Autobahn, as an album, unites both properties in the contrast between the monotony of the ‘industrial’ title track and a ‘folk’ composition like ‘Morgenspaziergang’ (Morning Walk), which features electronic birdsong and gentle flute sounds. Kraftwerk’s Volksmusik, though harking back to folk tradition, must hence be understood as the ‘music of the people (Volk)’, that is, the populus; ultimately, it is a literal translation of the English term ‘pop music’ into German. The seemingly opaque expression industrielle Volksmusik could thus be simply rendered as ‘electronic pop music’ in English.

Although Autobahn was not completely electronically recorded, the album steered pop music into hitherto unexplored realms. This quantum leap, however, went largely unnoticed at first. As of the release, there was only one review in the German music press. It rated the title track as a ‘a car ride with whimsical music and a lot of drive’ but found that ‘the vocals, which are used for the first time, as yet lacked their own style’.Footnote ¹¹

The initial reception in Britain – inevitably riddled with Germanophobic clichés – was similarly disparaging. ‘Odd noises, from percussion and synthesiser drift out from the speakers without any comprehensible order while a few words are muttered from time to time in a strange tongue. … Miss,’Footnote ¹² rated one reviewer, while another opined, ‘Synthesizer-tweakers Hutter and Schneider try for a concept – a drive down the motorway – and convincingly blow the few avant-garde credentials fans of their earlier work awarded them. … Simple minds only.’Footnote ¹³

In the United States, however, Autobahn became a surprise success; the magazine Cash Box, for example, had only praise: ‘Ethereal, inspired and well-conceived, Kraftwerk relates through electronic wizardry and soaring synthesizer tracks the moody feeling of motoring along the road. … Lovely and interesting.’Footnote ¹⁴ A heavily cut single version of the title track soared to number twenty-five on the Billboard charts, subsequently catapulting the album to number five on the album charts, where it remained for more than four months. Kraftwerk were now a force to be reckoned with.

Retro-Futurism (1975–1977)

Autobahn indeed marks the inauguration of Kraftwerk’s core œuvre in that – at least as far as the title track is concerned – it represents their first attempt to achieve a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic: musical style, car noises, lyrics, cover image, and stage presentation merge seamlessly to form a coherent concept. Radio-Aktivität (Radio-Activity, 1975), then became Kraftwerk’s first complete concept album. The record was also fully self-produced in the band’s own Kling-Klang studio and recorded entirely electronically. With a playing time of thirty-eight minutes, the album resembles an experimental radio play as it emulates a radio broadcast, forming a continuous collage of sound effects, instrumentals, spoken word sections, and pop songs.

The play on words in the title is a fundamental aspect of the album: Radio-Aktivität refers both to nuclear energy, a controversial topic in Germany at the time, and the radio as a medium for transmitting political propaganda as well as musical entertainment. This ambivalent neutrality was implied by the album sleeve, which replicated the front and back of a National Socialist Volksempfänger radio. What emerged out of this ‘radio set’, however, was avant-garde electronic pop music. Radio-Aktivität thus undertook a merger of opposites that proved to be one Kraftwerk’s core artistic strategies. This constitutive ambivalence was reflected in the hyphen of the title and the bright yellow Trefoil radioactivity warning sticker that adorned each cover.

This unprejudiced treatment of the topic of nuclear energy caused disgruntlement in left-wing ecological circles, especially since Kraftwerk had themselves been photographed in white protective suits in a Dutch nuclear power plant. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986 led Hütter and Schneider, however, to abandon their ambivalent stance on nuclear energy: the demand ‘Stop radioactivity!’ was added to the new recording of ‘Radioactivity’ for the compilation The Mix (1991); also, the line ‘Wenn’s um uns’re Zukunft geht’ (When our future is at stake) was replaced by the unequivocal ‘Weil’s um uns’re Zukunft geht’ (Because our future is at stake). For their June 1992 performance at the Greenpeace-organised anti-Sellafield benefit in Manchester, Kraftwerk also presented a new robot voice intro with a warning about radiation exposure from the Sellafield nuclear facility, which was later supplemented by other places associated with radiation accidents (Chernobyl, Harrisburg, and Hiroshima).

This modification demonstrates paradigmatically Kraftwerk’s understanding of their œuvre as an open work of art subject to a constant process of adaptation and updating. Their sensitivity to political considerations, however, resulted in a loss of ambivalence since it was precisely the tension between diverse thematic interpretations and a neutral presentation that had comprised Radio-Aktivität’s aesthetic value. The musician John Foxx (Ultravox) had described the original version of the title song to be ‘as neutral a Warhol statement as all their songs tend to be’.Footnote ¹⁵

This quality of neutrality, in turn, can be linked to Warhol’s artistic ideal of acting as a machine,Footnote ¹⁶ and forms a bridge to the man-machine concept because in ‘Kraftwerk there is no individual, experiential emotional language. They reject all emotionality and sensibility. The band members try to present themselves as emotionless musicians.’Footnote ¹⁷ Marcus Kleiner therefore considers Radio-Aktivität to embody Kraftwerk’s trademark ‘coldness’ that stands in direct contrast to the Anglo-American tradition. The latter can be described as a ‘narrative of heat and sweat and a history of excitement and sensuality’, which Kraftwerk countered with an ‘electronic coolness that has influenced the history of pop music history to the present’.Footnote ¹⁸

Today, the Radio-Aktivität sequence – performed in a mix of German, English, and Japanese and consisting of the tracks ‘Nachrichten’ (News), ‘Geigerzähler’ (Geiger Counter), and ‘Radioaktivität’ (Radioactivity) – is a highlight of every live concert. Visually, the performance is accompanied by video projections of animated warning symbols, excerpts from the original 1975 Expressionist video, and graphics showing nuclear reaction processes, while, musically, there is the shrill beeping of a Geiger counter, earth-shaking bass beats, and a beautifully simple melody – the whole, in total, constituting a magnificent pop-musical work of art.

Trans Europa Express (1977), released at the height of the punk explosion, most strikingly embodies Kraftwerk’s important stylistic principle of retro-futurism. Thus, the band’s nostalgic black-and-white cover photo marks a striking contrast to the zeitgeist of the time: the conservatively dressed musicians look like a group portrait from the 1930s or 1940s. While resembling a string quartet, on Trans Europa Express Kraftwerk defined a futuristic sound that made the album an electronic music blueprint that ‘inspire[ed] a new generation of electronic music producers to make sense of a developing post-industrial techno-world based on acceleration and electronics’.Footnote ¹⁹

Contrary to the gloomy urban realism of British punk, Kraftwerk evoked nostalgic images of the ‘elegance and decadence’ of the European continent on ‘Europa endlos’ (Europe Endless) and referred to the romantic tradition with the instrumental ‘Franz Schubert’.Footnote ²⁰ Pertti Grönholm argues that such references to the past in combination with innovative electronic music aim to merge utopian ideas with melancholy images to create an aesthetic tension that confronts the present with unfulfilled promises of a better future:

Trans Europa Express also exposes, as already implied in Autobahn, the ambivalent connotation of a means of transportation – in this case rail – in the historical context of Nazi Germany. While the project to build a national network of highways – the Reichsautobahn – was a propaganda tool of Hitler’s regime, the European rail network was used for the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps in the East. After the war, a transnational railway system was introduced to foster the idea of European integration: the Trans Europ Express (TEE) network was in operation from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. In its heyday, it connected 130 cities across Western Europe with regular services every two hours.

Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europa Express’, often considered one of their masterpieces, proved crucial to the development of electronic music. David Buckley considers it ‘the most influential possibly in their entire career’.Footnote ²² It consists of a sequence of three tracks that merge seamlessly into one another: the song ‘Trans Europa Express’ is followed by the instrumental ‘Metall auf Metall’ (Metal on Metal), which was originally followed by the short outro ‘Abzug’ (the sound of a train departing) as a separate track.

The thirteen-minute suite is based on relentlessly propulsive repetitions that imitate the velocity of a train. In this musical simulation of a train journey, the hammering sound of the railway wheels on the rails is transferred into music instead of translating the movement of the car journey into a motorik beat, as on ‘Autobahn’. Kraftwerk thus succeeded in converting industrial sounds into machine-generated music. Following in the footsteps of similar efforts by Dadaists and Futurists in the 1920s and 1930s to bring industrial modernism into art, Kraftwerk’s machine music allowed electronic pop music to become a perfect, danceable synthesis of avant-garde and pop.

This is especially true of ‘Metall auf Metall’, the central piece of the ‘Trans Europa Express’ suite. According to David Stubbs, it is ‘one of a handful of the most influential tracks in the entire canon of popular music’, while Simon Reynolds described it as ‘a funky iron foundry that sounded like a Luigi Russolo Art of Noises megamix for a futurist discotheque’.Footnote ²³ The repercussions of the furious, dissonant metal machine sound was used throughout British pop music in the 1980s: by Peter Gabriel (‘I Have the Touch’), Depeche Mode (‘Master and Servant’), Visage (‘The Anvil’), as well as by the left-wing industrial collective Test Dept, but also the Düsseldorf industrial pioneers Die Krupps (‘Stahlwerksynfonie’, i.e. Steelworks Symphony) or Einstürzende Neubauten in Berlin, who took the title of the Kraftwerk piece literally.

However, the futuristic sounds from Germany with which Kraftwerk sought to express their ‘cultural identity as Europeans’Footnote ²⁴ had a most decisive influence on African American minorities in urban centres such as New York and Detroit. There, they were adapted into new music styles such as electro or techno and re-contextualised as a means of expressing minority identity concepts. In the early 1980s, the New York DJ Afrika Bambaataa used the ‘Trans Europa Express’ suite for its uplifting hypnotic effect as a musical background to inflammatory speeches by activist Malcolm X.Footnote ²⁵ According to Bambaataa, Kraftwerk never knew ‘how big they were among the black masses in ‘77 when they came out with Trans-Europe Express. When that came out, I thought that was one of the weirdest records I ever heard in my life.’Footnote ²⁶

On the epoch-making track ‘Planet Rock’ (1982), Bambaataa fed the sonic exoticism of industrielle Volksmusik into the energy stream of the Afro-futurist tradition. By doing so, he unwittingly set in motion transatlantic electronic music feedback loops that have been operating ever since: ‘European art music’, according to Robert Fink, ‘is cast, consciously or not, in the role of an ancient, alien power source’.Footnote ²⁷ Martyn Ware (Human League/Heaven 17) summed up the artistic merit of the album as follows: ‘Trans-Europe Express had everything: it was retro yet futuristic, melancholic yet timeless, technical, modern and forward-looking yet also traditional. You name it, it had it all.’Footnote ²⁸

Post-humanism in the Computer Age (1978–1981)

Mensch-Maschine (Man-Machine, 1978) is Kraftwerk’s key work, since the concept of the man-machine lies at the core of their Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetics. ‘Strictly speaking, rather than the LP being a concept, the group themselves were now the concept, and the LP was merely a vehicle to further it’,Footnote ²⁹ Pascal Bussy concludes. The term ‘man-machine’ has appeared in Kraftwerk’s promo statements since 1975 and remains an integral part of live performances today, with a robot voice explicitly announcing the band as ‘the man-machine Kraftwerk’ at each concert.

In addition to ‘Das Modell’ (The Model), Kraftwerk’s biggest pop hit, Mensch-Maschine contains the conceptually significant song ‘Die Roboter’ (The Robots). This signature tune is linked to the doppelgänger mannequins of the four musicians that have replaced the real group members on album covers and promotional photos since 1981. Even more conceptually significant, these puppets appear on stage as substitutes for the ‘music workers’ at every live performance. Their proud statement ‘Wir sind die Roboter’ (We are the robots) can hence be related to the dummy lookalikes as well as the band members. In this respect, the mechanical doubles embody a concretisation or personification of the abstract concept of the man-machine.

The highly influential cover, devised by the Düsseldorf graphic designer Karl Klefisch, shows the real, heavily made-up musicians appearing as artificial robot beings with pale faces. The distinct colour scheme of red, white, and black refers to the colours of the German imperial war flag as well as the National Socialist swastika flag while the (typo)graphic design of the cover directly refers to Bauhaus and Soviet constructivism. Accordingly, Mensch-Maschine can be linked to the attempt made in constructivism to establish a connection between revolutionary art and revolutionary politics; in Kraftwerk’s case, the band presents the pop-revolutionary concept of electronic future music. That is to say, the politically encoded hope for a better future is artistically imagined as a futuristic vision of a post-human synthesis of man and machine.

This technological eschatology is clearly celebrated by Kraftwerk. Yet, the Nazi experience does undermine the optimism of an invariably better future. Kraftwerk, as it were, remain mindful of the danger that the next paradigm shift in the evolution of humanity might easily lead to a relapse into totalitarian rule. The title of the instrumental ‘Metropolis’, which refers to the Fritz Lang’s Expressionist film of the same name – featuring the first robot in film history – also invites such a dystopian reading. After all, Lang’s prophetic vision was of a society that was deeply divided, both socially and politically; the critic Siegfried Kracauer famously condemned the film as proto-fascist in his influential book Von Caligari zu Hitler (From Caligari to Hitler, 1947). As ever so often, Kraftwerk’s retro-futuristic recourse to the German cultural tradition reveals a profound ambivalence.

The album mirrors the pronounced futurism of Mensch-Maschine and, at the same time, refers to a time before modernity. The fact that the cover gives ‘L’Homme Machine’ as the French translation of the album title creates a link to the 1748 treatise of the same name by the early Enlightenment philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. His polemical book offered a radically materialistic view of the unity of body and soul and had a large influence on philosophers from ‘Hobbes and Pascal to Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz’. Subsequently, in Enlightenment discourse, ‘the ‘automaton’ became a contemporary cipher for the most diverse aspects in the anthropological and socio-political discussions’Footnote ³⁰ of the true nature of man.Footnote ³¹

Mensch-Maschine thus positions itself in a broad, cultural-historical net of references and allusions. Despite its clearly futuristic orientation, the album simultaneously incorporates retro elements; one need only look critically at the doppelgänger dummies on stage during their performance of ‘Die Roboter’. As David Pattie soberly observes: ‘The robots do not look like the incarnations of a cyborgian future – if anything, they seem to hark back to a mechanical past.’Footnote ³² Once again, we encounter a deep-rooted ambivalence.

And it is such complexity that keeps Kraftwerk’s album relevant to today’s discussions about post-humanism. Leading experts in the field define objective post-humanist thought as follows: ‘The predominant concept of the “human being” is questioned by thinking through the human being’s engagement and interaction with technology.’Footnote ³³ As hardly need be highlighted, this sounds like a summary of Kraftwerk’s artistic project.

With Computerwelt (Computer World, 1981), Kraftwerk released another decidedly futuristic album, which in retrospect proved quite prophetic. A key musical merit of Computerwelt is that Kraftwerk recorded the album almost entirely in analogue, which only underlines its visionary character. This time, Kraftwerk ‘do not predict a robotised, sci-fi future. However, they do predict, with complete accuracy, that our modern-day lives will be revolutionised’Footnote ³⁴ by computer technology: console games, pocket calculators, and online dating, on the one hand, and computer-assisted surveillance, digital finance, and the total digitalisation of society, on the other, are the topics of the album.

Hard to miss on Computerwelt is its warning against social alienation and the political misuse of technology. The original German lyrics of the title track contain lines missing from its English-language version: ‘Interpol und Deutsche Bank / FBI und Scotland Yard / Finanzamt und das BKA / haben unsre Daten da’ (Interpol and Deutsche Bank / FBI and Scotland Yard / tax office and the BKA / have our data at their disposal). In an interview with Melody Maker, Ralf Hütter explained the aim of the album as ‘making transparent certain structures and bringing them to the forefront … so you can change them. I think we make things transparent, and with this transparency reactionary structures must fall.’Footnote ³⁵

This explicitly political statement must be understood against the contemporary historical background. The BKA (Bundeskriminalamt – federal criminal police agency) conducted computer-assisted ‘dragnet searches’ to apprehend terrorists of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang. ‘Computerwelt’s’ lyrics state that the BKA is part of an international network of financial organisations and law enforcement agencies, correctly predicting that such institutions would be conducting their daily business digitally today. Similarly, it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Kraftwerk anticipated the surveillance of digital privacy by state agencies such as the NSA or the British GCHQ.

Illustration 6.2 Kraftwerk live, 1981.

© Wolfgang Wigger.

With its obsessively repeated sequences of numerals in various languages, Computerwelt’s key track ‘Nummern’ (Numbers) fits perfectly into this context, simulating, as it were, the automated stock exchange deals and transnational financial transactions that characterise today’s digital economy. The track foresaw the proliferating flow of numerical data that has replaced traditional language-based communication and cultural exchange.

In ‘Nummern’, even more importantly, Kraftwerk also found a new musical form, a radically minimalist aesthetic that combined a modernist approach with strict functionality inspired by the Bauhaus: a hypnotic piece of music that was almost brutal in its reduction to a mercilessly hammering beat, audibly anticipating techno. ‘Numbers’, according to Joseph Toltz, ‘is a striking work, not only in the general context of Kraftwerk’s output, but also because it seems so different and more experimental than their other tracks’.Footnote ³⁶ ‘Nummern’ encapsulates the radically new sound aesthetic of Computerwelt, which Kraftwerk had worked on for three years – longer than any previous album. It was true Zukunftsmusik (future music), considering its clinically pure sound and perfect musical realisation of an electronic aesthetic that proved eminently influential transnationally.

Computerwelt concludes and artistically crowns the sequence of five pioneering albums Kraftwerk had released in the seven years since Autobahn. In the 1980s, their electronic music inspired both British synth-pop musicians and African American producers who developed synth pop, disco, new wave, and funk into techno and house. Likewise, Kraftwerk’s use of speech synthesis and electronic processing of vocals, for which Florian Schneider was primarily responsible, became a staple of music production today. With Computerwelt, Kraftwerk’s mission as the avant-garde of electronic pop music had come to an end; from now on, they were competing with the multitude of musicians who pushed their industrielle Volksmusik in new directions.

Digitisation (1983–2003)

After Computerwelt, a paradigm shift set in. With the acquisition of a New England Digital Synclavier, Kraftwerk ushered in the era of digital music production. This, in turn, heralded a new modus operandi: a shift from the production of new tracks to the curation of existing work. Under the aegis of sound engineer Fritz Hilpert, all analogue tapes were painstakingly digitised. This groundwork not only laid the foundation for the 1991 compilation The Mix, on which new versions of Kraftwerk’s most important songs were digitally reconstructed, but also for the transition to digital sound production at live performances.

The follow-up to Computerwelt was announced in 1983 under the title Techno Pop but then withdrawn, only to finally appear in 1986 as Electric Cafe. As the change of title indicates, the conceptual nature of the album was not particularly pronounced: Electric Cafe can be understood as a record about communication or as a self-reflective album about electronic pop music.Footnote ³⁷ The use of several, mostly European languages, explored for the first time in ‘Numbers’, also characterises the erstwhile title track ‘Techno Pop’, which celebrates the transnational omnipresence of ‘synthetic electronic sounds / industrial rhythms all around’ – in large part due to Kraftwerk – in German, French, English, and Spanish lyrics.

‘Tour de France’, which mirrored Hütter and Schneider’s obsession with cyclingFootnote ³⁸ and was to have appeared on the withdrawn Techno Pop, was released as a single in 1983. Some twenty years later, this celebration of cycling turned out to be the basis for Tour de France Soundtracks (2003), Kraftwerk’s final studio album. This often-underrated record features a clear concept and various thematic links to prior albums: it shares not only the motifs of movement und propulsion with Autobahn and Trans Europa Express but also the principle to musicalise sounds produced by modes of transportation, this time cycling. Furthermore, the pairing of cyclist and bicycle, in Hütter’s view, also represents a configuration of a man-machine.Footnote ³⁹ While the concept album Autobahn, which praised an ambivalent national symbol and featured German lyrics for the first time, served as their official debut, Kraftwerk’s remarkable run of studio albums is concluded by a concept album sung (almost) entirely in French that celebrates the most sustainable way to travel.

This reflects a notion that already characterised Trans Europa Express and became increasingly manifest using multilingual lyrics on their albums during the 1980s. Given the country’s fascist history, German identity in the post-war period involved a commitment to the idea of a European community of countries sharing the same culture and common values. Or to put it another way: Kraftwerk were always advocating a political utopia still unfulfilled today, namely, to move from a violent Nazi past into a European future characterised by peace, freedom of movement, and cooperation. On the occasion of seeing Kraftwerk in June 2017 at the Royal Albert Hall, Luke Turner succinctly remarked that ‘an idealised sense of the European is distilled in every vibration of every note and tonight feels like another world’; and considering Brexit, Turner added the valid question: ‘Do we Brits no longer deserve their European futurism?’Footnote ⁴⁰

A Pop-Cultural Gesamtkunstwerk?

During the band’s fifty-year existence, Kraftwerk’s orientation towards a concept-based aesthetic led to a process in which image, sound, and text were increasingly synthesised to form a unified body of artistic work. This process, however, took place as a successive reaction to external circumstances along conceptual lines, some of which emerged only during the development process. It is further noteworthy that Kraftwerk’s overall multimedia aesthetic not only concerns the audio-visual core of the œuvre (i.e. the officially released music and stage performances) but also such related marketing paraphernalia such as concert posters, tickets, the Kraftwerk website, and merchandise.

Following the release of Tour de France Soundtracks, the artistic activities of the project, now solely led by Hütter, shifted more and more towards the curation of the core work as well as the musealisation of Kraftwerk. With the help of the renowned Sprüth Magers gallery, Hütter moved Kraftwerk successfully from the context of pop music into the field of art. An important prerequisite for this undertaking was the remastered edition of the eight albums from Autobahn to Tour de France in the box set called Der Katalog (The Catalogue), released in 2009.

The now officially sanctioned corpus of albums formed the basis for the concert series Retrospective 12345678 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April 2012. Further performances of musical retrospectives, each spanning eight evenings, took place at other symbolic venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Vienna’s Burgtheater, the Tate Modern in London, the Arena in Verona, and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. In autumn 2011, the stage visuals, which have been presented in 3D technology since 2009 and are billed by Kraftwerk as ‘musical paintings’,Footnote ⁴¹ were exhibited at Munich’s renowned Lenbachhaus museum. Increasing recognition of Kraftwerk by the art scene as a performance art collective (rather than a mundane pop band) closed a circle insofar as many of the band’s first public appearances had taken place in Düsseldorf galleries due to a lack of music venues in the early 1970s.

Hütter’s curation activities in the twenty-first century have focused on updating and extending the visual component of the core works. In addition to the introduction of continuous 3D live projections, this involved the revision of all cover designs and a radical revision of the œuvre in the 3-D Der Katalog boxset released in 2017. The first version of Der Katalog already featured some noticeable changes in the album artwork. For example, the Nazi Volksempfänger on the sleeve of Radio-Aktivität was replaced by an intense yellow cover with the nuclear Trefoil symbol in bright red, and the photographs of the real musicians disappeared from the artwork of Trans Europa Express and Mensch-Maschine.

In the radical design overhaul of the 2017 version of Der Katalog, however, all cover designs have been replaced by monochrome record sleeves. This move towards abstraction was accentuated by substituting the numbers one to eight for the album titles, which made the records appear as segments of a coherent, eight-part work. Finally, all the tracks were re-recorded with current equipment – ostensibly during live performances from 2012 to 2016, but possibly in the Kling-Klang studio – and in several cases the original track sequence was altered.

Given the decidedly inter- as well as transmedial nature of the œuvre, one can argue that Kraftwerk firmly belong in the tradition of the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk. Many of their formative stylistic influences, especially Bauhaus and the theatre reform movement, point to modernist updates of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk model. For example, Erwin Piscator’s vision of a ‘total theatre’ – in which he sought to unite the stage with the cinema – bears an evident resemblance to Kraftwerk’s conceptual notion of moving, three-dimensional ‘musical paintings’; similarly, Piscator’s goal of an ‘ecstatic overcoming of the “only-individual” in a communal experience’Footnote ⁴² in the theatre audience finds its counterpart in the immersive, audio-visual experience of a Kraftwerk concert. Anke Finger sees ‘teleology as the central tenet’ of the Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetics of modernism, which is why every Gesamtkunstwerk ‘represents something which is in the process of emerging, something which may be perfectly conceived but is not perfectly executed and perhaps never can be’.Footnote ⁴³

Kraftwerk’s astounding fifty-year body of work is a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk that confirms Finger’s theoretical assessment and, in accordance with the pop musical core strategy of ‘re-make, re-model’,Footnote ⁴⁴ Kraftwerk’s œuvre remains in flux. Their live performances deliver an unprecedentedly immersive experience that fuses art, technology, and music and are a true ‘Kunstwerk der Zukunft‘ (future work of art), to borrow a term from Wagner, which one should experience while it is still possible.

Essential Listening

• Kraftwerk, Ralf & Florian (Philips, 1973)

• Kraftwerk, Expo Remix (EMI, 2001)

• Kraftwerk, Minimum–Maximum (EMI, 2005)

• Kraftwerk, Der Katalog (EMI, 2009)

• Kraftwerk, 3–D Der Katalog (EMI, 2017)

This chapter focuses on Can, a band who formed in Cologne around 1968 and remained active until 1979 – reforming to record a final album in 1986 and then a single song in 1999. It first considers the formation of the group, and contextualises their position in post-war West German culture as well as West German and international networks of music making. The chapter then surveys and analyses Can’s musical practice, releases, tours, and relationship with the press and public in sections divided by who undertook lead vocals: Malcolm Mooney, Kenji ‘Damo’ Suzuki, and finally a revolving vocalist system (typically Michael Karoli and sometimes Irmin Schmidt). It concludes by providing an overview of Can’s legacy in global music making since the 1970s.

Can and their collaborators fostered a remarkable camaraderie that lasted despite the pressures of the music industry, touring, and negotiating the politics of personalities, individual musical expression, and meaningful collective music-making. They made use of varied approaches to and styles of music, and developed connections and collaborations that left a mark enduring on modern music across the world. Ulrich Adelt noted that the band were uncommonly outward-looking, going ‘beyond Germany’s borders for musical influences’, which enabled them to comment upon and distinguish themselves from ‘the Nazi past and the influx of Anglo-American music into West Germany’.Footnote ¹ This search for new influences – sometimes documented in their ironically-named ‘ethnological forgery series’ – extended to collaborating with musicians from different racial and cultural backgrounds. They worked with Malcolm Mooney, an African American sculptor, Damo Suzuki, a Japanese hippie found singing improvised tunes on the street in Munich when travelling through Europe, and, during the late 1970s, Rosko Gee, a bassist from Jamaica, and Anthony ‘Rebop’ Kwaku Baah, a Ghanaian percussionist.

As Beate Kutschke argued, Can represented an international network of ‘politically engaged, New-Leftist’ musicians who ‘shuttled between cities in different countries and continents and exchanged knowledge of musical styles, aesthetics and socio-political issues’.Footnote ² Can performed across Britain extensively, where they charmed music journalists and enraptured members of the emerging punk, post-punk, and electronic music scenes, and had enough of a following in France to play sporadic concerts and occasional short tours. The band even scored hits: ‘Spoon’ reached number six in the German charts in 1971 and the band skirted the British mainstream with a performance of their number twenty-eight hit ‘I Want More’ on Top of the Pops, a Friday night television institution. However, they are better remembered as a group who cultivated a devoted international cult audience, which included numerous musicians from a diverse range of genres.

Can before Can

Considering the musical training of two of Can’s so-called founders, their place in the rock scene and on the margins of pop success is curious – perhaps only comparable to John Cale of the Velvet Underground, who was taught by the minimalist composer La Monte Young as a postgraduate student. Czukay and Schmidt were conservatoire-trained and studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Germany’s most notable post-war composer and a pioneer of electronic music. This brought them into contact with several luminaries of post-1945 Western modern composition, including John Cage, the American composer known for his explorations of chance composition. In interviews, Czukay and Schmidt often characterised themselves as too playful and outward-looking towards the 1960s pop and counter-culture scenes for the rarefied world of composition. Czukay advocated a method that encouraged spontaneity over technique, and Stockhausen had been one of few in the academy who tolerated this approach. Speaking to Richard Cook in the New Musical Express in 1982, Czukay reminisced: ‘I was always being thrown out of music colleges. Stockhausen took me in – he asked me if I was a composer and I had to reply I don’t know. If you are an “artist” you can lie the music away in professionalism.’Footnote ³

Liebezeit, on the other hand, was a jazz drummer before joining Can. He explained his pre-Can career to Jono Podmore, who has edited a book on Liebezeit’s life and approach to drumming.Footnote ⁴ Liebezeit began performing in high school bands but was picked up by semi-professional rock ’n’ roll bands in Kassel. He soon became aware of American jazz, and jazz drummers Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Elvin Jones caught his ear. This led him to performing with Manfred Schoof’s group. Liebezeit played with an impressive list of jazz stars during his twenties, which were spent between Cologne and Barcelona, including Art Blakey, Don Cherry (they shared a flat in Cologne), and Chet Baker. However, from 1964, Manfred Schoof’s group had moved towards atonal and arrhythmic free jazz, whereas Liebezeit had developed an interest in ‘Spanish, Arabic, Gypsy, North African and Afro-Cuban music’.Footnote ⁵ In 1968, Liebezeit began to work with Can as they were fellow devotees of his ‘cyclical approach to rhythm’.Footnote ⁶

Michael Karoli, Can’s guitarist, was ten years younger than his bandmates – Holger Czukay was born in 1937, both Schmidt and Liebezeit were born in 1938. He had moved from Bavaria to St. Gallen in Switzerland as a schoolboy; Czukay had been his guitar teacher in high school. After Karoli had graduated and accepted a place to study law at the University of Lausanne (where he played in several amateur jazz and dance bands), Czukay convinced him to join Can instead. Wickström, Lücke, and Jóri have noted that most West German musicians in the post-1945 period were self-taught and generally first learnt from American GIs and catered to their tastes – few were schooled in the Western art music tradition like Can.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, even fewer were able to integrate aspects of the emerging pop sounds of the 1960s and free jazz into their approach.

As has been documented in Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt’s comprehensive autobiography/biography, Can: All Gates Open, the band’s initial successes were related to composing film soundtracks.Footnote ⁸ Schmidt had made waves as a solo film score composer alone but moved towards a collaborative approach when commissioned to provide accompaniment to Peter F. Schneider’s film Agilok & Blubbo (released in 1969) in 1968 – a year of student uprisings, and social and political unrest in Germany and the wider world. They named the new band The Inner Space; it featured Schmidt alongside Czukay, Karoli, and Liebezeit, with a vocal turn from Rosemarie Heinikel, an actor and counter-cultural figure, and accompaniment from David C. Johnson, an American composer who had assisted Stockhausen at Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s (WDR) electronic studio in Cologne. The film attempted to capture and lampoon the politics of the moment; it was a satire of West German politics and the counter-culture that followed two young revolutionaries who conspired to kill an establishment figure until their plan was disrupted by a co-conspirator, Michaela, whom both of the film’s protagonists fall for. Between 1968 and 1979, Can were credited with creating seventeen original film and television soundtracks – a selection of their early soundtrack recordings was released on the compilation Soundtracks (1970).

Can’s success in the film industry was not universally well received. In what may be a case of envious revisionism, Chris Karrer, a member of Amon Düül II and labelmate on United Artists, claimed to Edwin Pouncey in the Wire that Can had knowingly undercut other bands competing for soundtrack work.Footnote ⁹ This animosity might stem from how, unlike Amon Düül and Amon Düül II, Can shied away from direct political commentary and tended not to play radical squats or communes – although they were generally of the left and anti-authoritarian. Can made their political points and represented the struggles of their generation through musical practice and sound.

The Malcolm Mooney Era: 1968–1969

Soundtrack composition paid for Can’s equipment and recording space. Christoph Vohwinkel, an art collector with aspirations to host an artistic commune, rented them rooms within a castle near Cologne, Schloss Nörvenich. There they practiced in a group that included Malcolm Mooney, and recorded and made their initial live appearances – playing spontaneously composed music – in June 1968. Their first concert was later released as a tape in 1984 entitled Prehistoric Future. The band, as is documented on Prehistoric Future, improvised together extensively, developing, refining, and combining their own approach(es) to musical practice. During Mooney’s time in the band, Can developed a distinctive sound as their rhythm section, Czukay and Liebezeit, played ostensibly simple but intricate, repetitive rhythms. The drums and bass complimented Schmidt’s novel electronic approaches, which incorporated ambient textures and more abrasive sounds in tandem with Karoli’s overdriven and expressive guitar lines and Mooney’s impassioned vocals. Les Gillon suggests that Can’s egalitarian football-based metaphor for improvisation – ‘the collective and non-hierarchical nature of the band as a team’ – could illustrate a broader point about social freedoms that diverged from concepts of freedom in a ‘rational’ capitalist society.Footnote ¹⁰ Till Krause and David Stubbs have each argued that the social meanings associated with this approach and the resulting music were powerful in creating new ideas of national identity in West Germany.Footnote ¹¹

Can’s approach to musical practice was innovative and has been explored by journalists and authors both during and after the band effectively disbanded in 1979. They were keen listeners and drew from a broad array of reference points beyond their musical training. Each has spoken about the influence of American bands such as the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention (Karoli is claimed to have introduced his older counterparts to Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones as well); Liebezeit introduced Czukay to the propulsive rhythm of James Brown’s funk, and they shared enthusiasm for non-Western approaches to rhythm.Footnote ¹² Can, in general, were open to non-Western music as documented in their ‘ethnological forgeries’ series, which set to tape their attempts to emulate a range of non-Western musics. Liebezeit and Czukay developed a system based upon painstakingly accurate repetitions and minor variations of drum and bass patterns, which was often understood as a reaction to Liebezeit’s aversion to the unstructured clang and clatter of free jazz.

The band privileged intuition alongside repetition. Schmidt and Karoli often described this approach as telepathy, with Karoli going so far to claim a telepathic relationship with ‘the green eye of the reverb machine’.Footnote ¹³ The intensity of their approach was described by Mooney when he recalled the recording of their first released album Monster Movie (1969):

What Mooney fails to mention is that the lengthy improvisations that made ‘You Doo Right’ were recorded to two tracks of tape later edited into pieces by Czukay. Throughout the existence of Can, Czukay would edit, cut, and recut two-track tape recordings of their sessions into coherent pieces, only moving to more conventional multi-track recording from the recording of Soon Over Babaluma (1974) onwards. Adelt argues that Can, and particularly Holger Czukay, used recording technology as a means to experiment with recorded sounds ‘long before it became common practice’.Footnote ¹⁵ Kai Fikentscher similarly noted that Czukay was, like Phil Spector, George Martin, and Trevor Horn, a pioneer in using the studio as an instrument, demonstrating that ‘recorded music could now be a product of illusionary performance’.Footnote ¹⁶ This approach had a bearing on the work of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, among others, in their Kling-Klang studio.

Can independently released only 500 copies of Monster Movie at first. The first pressing was hoped to attract major label interest, and ultimately led to them signing a record deal with the American label United Artists. The album could be seen as one of the first templates for what would be deemed ‘Krautrock’ as it was codified and adapted into a recognisable sub-genre. Even though Krautrock is frequently questioned by its supposed creators, and its derogatory name misrepresents the work of musicians who were as outward-looking and aware of international music making as possible at the time, Monster Movie contains its hallmarks of repetitive, subtle rhythms and a free approach to guitar, synthesiser, and vocal embellishments. Mooney’s lyrics were existential and surreal. He explored motifs from gospel songs and nursery rhymes, and vented thinly veiled anguish about relationships, sex, desire, reproductive anxiety, and hedonism. The album led to Can’s first mention in the influential British music press (which was distributed across parts of Western Europe and the United States), when Richard Williams gave Monster Movie a positive review in Melody Maker.Footnote ¹⁷ The album’s opening track, ‘Father Cannot Yell’, was played twice to a nationwide British audience on John Peel’s BBC Radio One show ‘Top Gear’ on 16 May and 26 June 1970. Several tracks from this time were later rediscovered and released as The Lost Tapes (2012) – they are a testament to Mooney’s importance to Can’s early music.

Mooney left Can and West Germany in December 1969, having experienced heightened anxiety due to the possibility, as an American citizen, of being drafted into the Vietnam War or accused of avoiding the draft. A psychiatrist advised Mooney to return to the Untied States, where he used his experiences as a sculptor to teach art to socially and economically disadvantaged children in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods of New York City.

The Damo Suzuki Era: 1969–1973

Between 1969 and 1971, Can toured across West Germany despite losing Mooney. In 1970, as well as releasing their collection of film soundtracks, Can played numerous Stadthallen (municipal halls), youth centres, a few festivals, and Munich’s trendy Beat Club. In 1970 their concerts were, however, predominantly clustered around Cologne, Essen, and Dortmund within the Rhine–Ruhr area, their home region. During their travels, Can met Damo Suzuki singing improvised songs outside a café in Munich for spare change. They asked him if he would like to perform in their band that evening and he agreed because he had nothing better to do.Footnote ¹⁸ Damo Suzuki was born in 1950 near Tokyo in the town of Ōiso. Teenage Kenji – before he was known as Damo, an affectation in honour of his favourite comic book character that he adopted in Europe – became enraptured with the post-war American trope of the romance of the open road, which inspired him to move to Europe. He certainly sought a free approach to lyrics and vocal delivery: Suzuki broadly continued the style pioneered by Mooney, but Can’s new singer was more abstract lyrically and slightly less informed by the blues and rock ’n’ roll canon.

The first album that Suzuki recorded with Can was Tago Mago (1971). The album’s title refers to the Mediterranean island of Tagomago, which is near Ibiza and had putative links – arguably contrived by Can members to impishly mislead the British music press – with Aleister Crowley, the English writer and occultist who was a practitioner of ‘magick’ and libertinism. Crowley, often reduced to his adage ‘do as thou wilt’, had provided inspiration to numerous hedonistic and sexually adventurous, if not rapist, rock musicians and their entourages during the late 1960s and 1970s. The album is remarkable on a sonic level as the lack of separation between each instrument when recording – only three microphones were used – caused sounds to bleed into each other creating unplanned harmonic characteristics and sounds to arise.

Illustration 7.1 Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay, Damo Suzuki, Jaki Liebezeit, and Michael Karoli of Can, early 1970s.

Courtesy of Spoon Recs.

Typically, by the 1970s, when multi-track recording had become well established in the music industry, each instrument could be recorded with its own microphone or direct input cable and heard separately, even when recorded simultaneously (i.e. live). In a conventional recording, these multiple tracks could then be brought together as a balanced multi-instrumental whole once the volume levels were mixed and frequencies blended during mastering. In another departure from conventional recording techniques, Czukay also captured on tape what he termed ‘in-between-recordings’ – the sound of the band jamming but unaware that they were being recorded – and used them in the final mix.Footnote ¹⁹ The resulting sounds are darker, and although some of the lyrical content shares themes with Monster Movie there are moments of greater intensity, such as ‘Mushroom’, which interprets the atomic bomb as a moment of symbolic rebirth.

By 1971, assisted by their manager Hildegard Schmidt and accompanied by Damo Suzuki, buoyed by an appearance on WDR Television in January, and with their new album Tago Mago ready for release in August, Can were booked to play most major West German cities and larger towns between March and the album’s release date. At the same time, the band’s appeal in Britain was beginning to grow. In January 1972, for instance, Mike Watts of Melody Maker wrote an effusive – if strewn with casual assumptions about Germans – review of Tago Mago. He teased the prospect of Can’s forthcoming British tour: ‘Can are coming to Britain soon. I’m looking forward to their visit with guarded interest. They sound a weird bunch of geezers.’Footnote ²⁰ After a German tour in February and March, Can indeed toured Britain for the first time. They started at Imperial College on 28 April 1972, then played the university circuit and a few other small-to-medium-sized venues for a month, before returning to the continent to play festivals in France and Germany. They visited later in the year as well, to play a one-off headline concert at The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, London on 22 July, which was impressive considering the venue had a capacity of nearly 3,000 people, much larger and more prestigious than the stops on their tour earlier in the year.

Can’s tours around Germany and Britain demonstrate a willingness to play venues large and small in both the usual cities on the touring circuit and smaller less frequently visited towns. In 1973, taking advantage of Britain’s widespread infrastructure for live rock performances and entry into the Common Market, Can made a somewhat unusual move (for a non-British band of their profile) by visiting smaller towns including Penzance, Plymouth, Westcliffe-on-Sea, and Chatham as part of a concert tour with nineteen stops across Scotland, Wales, and England. They then played their longest French tour (six stops), which included concerts in Paris, Rennes, and Bordeaux. This persistence, alongside the release of two of their most well-loved albums, Ege Bamyasi (1972) and Future Days (1973), meant that despite Damo Suzuki’s departure from the band in late 1973 the band was in a strong position commercially. Suzuki had left Can to become a Jehovah’s Witness like his new wife, and saw life in a band as incompatible with his new faith and lifestyle (Liebezeit recalled that Suzuki ‘left with no warning’ and claimed that he was ‘brainwashed’).Footnote ²¹ Gitta Suzuki-Mouret, his then wife, has rejected Liebezeit’s account; she claimed that the internal politics of the group left Suzuki feeling isolated and keen to move on.Footnote ²²

Thanks to Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, Suzuki’s remaining time in Can was well documented. Ege Bamyasi was the first Can album recorded in a former cinema, soundproofed with army-issue mattresses in the town of Weilerswist (some fifteen miles south of Cologne), which they named Inner Space. The album included ‘Spoon’ which was Can’s biggest hit in West Germany, reaching number six in the charts. Its success was mostly due to being the theme of Das Messer (The Knife), a West German crime thriller that appeared on television from November 1971. The album, which is less intense and more immediately alluring than Tago Mago, received critical acclaim. The lyrics are again existential and often not always clearly meaningful but evocative and filled with imagery.

Future Days was also well-received by critics (the New Musical Express’s eleventh best album of the year). It is punctuated by more prominent electronic sounds, ambient stretches, and Liebezeit’s polyrhythmic drumming than its predecessor. If Ege Bamyasi provided a template for experimental rock, post-punk, and indie musicians, Future Days is perhaps more aligned with Can’s contribution to electronic music – particularly the way that the album’s final track ‘Bel Air’ cleverly progresses through different movements and variations. Suzuki’s vocal approach is more understated, even marginal, but – when heard – he questions the meaning of life in a modern consumer society and interrogates the possibilities of personal freedom within such a society’s constraints.

Can after Suzuki: 1974–1979 (and Beyond)

After Suzuki left, Karoli and Schmidt slightly reluctantly shared vocals. The change did not upset the band’s popular momentum, and Can’s growing profile on the British rock scene allowed them to undertake a twenty-two date tour, with two live sessions on BBC Radio 1 and a television appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test to play ‘Vernal Equinox’ in 1974. With each of the four Can founders born either just before or just after World War II in Germany, an interesting dynamic emerged, as music fans in Britain, a society often obsessed with the war and prone to seeing Germany and Germans through the lens of Nazism during the 1960s and 1970s, adopted Can most eagerly.Footnote ²³ Can tended to get on with British journalists, particularly Sounds’ Vivian Goldman, the daughter of German-Jewish refugees who had escaped the Holocaust to London, and were typically presented as disarmingly funny eccentrics.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, during interviews, the band often seemed compelled (and it is not clear if it was a personal compulsion or at the request of journalists) to describe moments of their youth in post-war West Germany in a way that constructed them as inherently predisposed to anti-fascism – few British or American artists were pressed on their political affiliations in the music press during the early and mid-1970s.

Can recorded six further albums after Damo Suzuki left. The first was Soon Over Babaluma (1974). Perhaps due to capriciousness of the British music press, the album had become somewhat of a joke. However, it has been reappraised since the 1970s and is now viewed as a development of Future Days that informed electronic music styles of the 1980s and 1990s. The line-up of Czukay, Karoli, Liebezeit, and Schmidt alone made two more albums, Landed (1975) and Flow Motion (1976), their first records recorded with a full sixteen-track recording set-up – a distinct move away from their sometimes muddy, if alluring and often unique-sounding, two-track records. Flow Motion is a more pop and disco influenced album in comparison to the more experimental sounds of Landed. It delivered Can’s biggest hit in Britain when ‘I Want More’ reached number twenty-six in the singles chart. This gained them an invitation to Top of the Pops, with Karoli, who was on a safari holiday at the time, replaced by a friend for the performance. The song caught the public’s ear and gained radio play, and between 1974 and 1977 Can seemed to have played almost every town in Britain, in addition to cities where they had a large following – like London and Manchester – where they performed on multiple occasions.

Can’s later albums saw Holger Czukay take a lesser role, and this is often seen as precipitating the band’s split. Czukay moved from bass to manipulating electronics such as transistor radios and tape recorders. He met his replacement on bass, Rosko Gee, when performing on the The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1974, when Gee had appeared backing Jim Capaldi, his former Traffic bandmate.Footnote ²⁵ Can had also taken on an engineer, René Tinner, which marginalised Czukay’s contribution even more. Rebop Kwaku Baah, another former member of Traffic and an accomplished percussionist, was brought in to enhance and embellish Liebezeit’s polyrhythms; however, he ultimately clashed with Czukay.Footnote ²⁶ Notwithstanding an enhanced level of creative tension (Czukay did not contribute to Out of Reach and only edited tape on Can), their final (non-reunion) albums Saw Delight (1977), Out of Reach (1978), and Can (1979) have their merits even if they are less well appreciated than their predecessors by fans and journalists. On these albums, Can warped and explored pop sounds in a way that could be seen as a precursor to the approach taken in scenes such as the 1980s New York underground.

The band disbanded on good terms in 1979. However, in the summer of 1986, Malcolm Mooney temporarily returned to Can for a ‘reunion’ album entitled Rite Time (1989), which was recorded in the south of France. From 1979 onwards, Hildegard and Irmin Schmidt curated Can’s re-releases, box sets, and remix albums through their label Spoon Records. On the band’s thirtieth anniversary, Spoon also promoted the Can-Solo-Projects tour. The showcase exemplified the richness of the original Can members’ solo work and collaborations: Holger Czukay and U-She performed alongside Jaki Liebezeit’s Club Off Chaos; Irmin Schmidt played (with Jono Podmore); and Michael Karoli’s Sofortkontakt! appeared. Many Can solo albums and remasters were released through a collaboration between Spoon and Mute Records – the latter label founded by Daniel Miller, one of the British post-punk musicians influenced by Can and other German musicians of the 1970s that used electronic instruments and employed studio-as-instrument techniques. Czukay’s music arguably gained the most acclaim, perhaps due to high-profile collaborations with Jah Wobble of Public Image Limited, David Sylvian, formerly of the British group Japan, and the Edge, the guitarist in U2. Czukay released much of his later solo work and moments from his back catalogue on Grönland Records.

Can’s Legacy

Can have been often cited by post-punk, indie, and electronic musicians as a key influence on their taste and musical practice. Perhaps their most prominent early advocates were British post-punk musicians like Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes (author of Krautrocksampler), Mark E. Smith of the Fall, Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. Alex Carpenter’s essay in this collection notes the influence of Krautrock – and to varying extents Can – on Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Cabaret Voltaire, and Simple Minds as well. Smith wrote the song ‘I am Damo Suzuki’, which appeared on the This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985), in homage to Can. The lyric refers to aspects of Suzuki’s life and the band’s history, and bemoans the later Can albums that were released on Virgin Records in Britain; the song’s descending bassline has similarities with the Can track ‘Oh Yeah’ from Tago Mago and ‘Cool in the Pool’, a track from Holger Czukay solo album Movies (1979). The band’s appeal to musicians from the north-west of England was also clear in the amalgamation of electronic and avant-garde rock found in bands on the Factory Records label based in Manchester.

Illustration 7.2 Can live in Hamburg, 1972.

© Heinrich Klaffs.

Despite Can never visiting the United States, American musicians from the 1980s and 1990s alternative underground, such as Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and the members of Sonic Youth, have declared Can’s influence on their music making. In 2012, as part of a celebration of the album’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, Malkmus performed Ege Bamyasi in full with Von Spar – appropriately a band that came from Cologne with a singer from elsewhere. Several post-rock musicians and even mainstream rock artists such as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Radiohead have paid their respects. Local musicians from the underground, post-punk, indie, and alternative rock tradition, alongside improvisers and electronic musicians, have typically made up the nightly changing ‘sound carriers’ that accompany Suzuki’s (almost) continual international tours since 1997.

The link between Can, other Krautrock artists, and the development of electronic music may be overplayed, considering the roots of electronic music can be drawn as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, but a certain form of ‘danceable’ electronic music has certainly taken cues. Simon Reynolds has argued that Can anticipated and inspired ‘dance genres like trip hop, ethno-techno and ambient jungle’.Footnote ²⁷ On a local level, Hans Nieswandt has argued that they popularised electronic music in Cologne by bringing the approaches and sounds pioneered by Stockhausen to a wider public.Footnote ²⁸ Rob Young has noted that the band’s legacy is kept intact by the Kompakt record label in Cologne, artists such as Mouse on Mars, and those involved with the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction/Rhythm and Sound labels in Berlin.Footnote ²⁹ Can’s position as forerunners of ambient music has been recognised by their peers, not least Brian Eno. Furthermore, Can’s enticing beats and sounds have also been sampled by hip-hop producers. Kanye West, for instance, sampled ‘Sing Swan Song’ on his track ‘Drunk & Hot Girls’ (Graduation, 2007), on which he collaborated with Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def), and Q-Tip sampled ‘A Spectacle’ to create a backing for ‘Manwomanboogie’ (The Renaissance, 2008). There are few bands that could claim to have caught the ear of such diverse communities of musicians and compelled them to try to incorporate the sounds and approaches into their own work, with so many varied effects. To borrow a pun from Malcolm Mooney, it’s all about a ‘CAN DO’ attitude.

Essential Listening

• Can, Monster Movie (Music Factory, 1969)

• Can, Tago Mago (United Artists, 1971)

• Can, Ege Bamyasi (United Artists, 1972)

• Can, Future Days (United Artists, 1973)

Tangerine Dream has long held an exceptional dual status as one of the most popular and productive bands to have emerged from the Krautrock scenes of the 1970s. With over 100 live or studio albums and over 60 soundtracks to its name, the task of covering Tangerine Dream’s influence and legacy is formidable.Footnote ¹ Initially part of the arts scene of West Berlin, the band were formed by Edgar Froese in 1967; their founding thus preceded the student revolutions by a year. However, Tangerine Dream’s musical productivity has been unceasing since then, moving far beyond the classic 1970s era of Krautrock. After a turbulent and experimental early period, the band managed by the late 1970s to attain heights of popular status that stretched from Hollywood films to world tours. With respect to Krautrock’s experimental aesthetics and countercultural ideals, this commercial success and the band’s resulting shifts in musical approach have repeatedly drawn criticism.Footnote ² And yet, as an originator of the ‘Berlin School’ of electronic music, Tangerine Dream have garnered high praise and a devoted fan following to this day.

Froese remained the bandleader until his passing in 2015, leaving an extraordinary legacy in his solo work and as the driving force behind Tangerine Dream. The band have also continued to perform, curating Froese’s legacy as managed by Thorsten Quaeschning, with the guidance of Froese’s widow, Bianca Froese-Acquaye.Footnote ³ Still, given such productivity in terms of musical releases and media presence, a critical ambivalence regarding Tangerine Dream is practically unavoidable. A tension resides within Tangerine Dream between such distinctions as Krautrock and New Age, ambient and cosmic rock, synthwave and trance, and electronic live-act and soundtrack. Listening for that tension, whether in terms of cultural status, media, or musical style, can arguably be the most fruitful way of appreciating their achievements. The band’s influence on these genres and practices has resulted in a unique cultural constellation that other Krautrock bands did not touch in the same way – with the exception of Kraftwerk.

In this over-arching respect, this chapter provides an account of Tangerine Dream that expands beyond the traditional focus of the Krautrock 1970s. To be sure, Tangerine Dream made their most compelling leaps in audio experimentation and production during this time, with four classic albums released by Ohr between 1970 and 1973, followed by Phaedra (1974) and Rubycon (1975) with the band’s move to Virgin Records. We will first address Tangerine Dream’s musical transformation in the context of the 1970s. Our account then moves beyond this classic Krautrock study in the following respects. First, Tangerine Dream’s live career through the 1980s will be highlighted, involving multiple ground-breaking performances that had both geographic and political consequences: from iconic events at European cathedrals to concert spectacles across the United States, and landmark tours in the Eastern Bloc during the 1980s. A parallel tradition of live albums, inaugurated by the classic Ricochet (1975), demonstrates that the band maintained some of their better experimental traditions in the live context.

The final sections continue with this expanded frame by addressing Tangerine Dream’s legacy in music for visual media. Tangerine Dream’s numerous film scores, especially during the 1980s, have been as consequential as their live and studio albums. Far beyond a commercial footnote, this Hollywood career has helped to solidify the band’s legacy while reaching new audiences. Such a perspective, which highlights the 1980s as much as the 1970s, requires a leap beyond orthodoxies that focus primarily on the early albums as the band’s Golden Age. This original view was arguably cemented in Julian Cope’s landmark Krautrocksampler, where he focused almost exclusively on the early albums. Indeed, Cope even omitted Phaedra, long seen as a definitive album, from his list of the top 50 Krautrock albums. He finished with Atem from 1973Footnote ⁴ – although in fairness, he gave some praise for the later albums of the 1970s. Regardless, the critical tension between freeform Krautrock and the sequenced future of Tangerine Dream’s later albums is implied here.

To a certain extent, this desire to focus on early Tangerine Dream is related to the band’s overwhelming productivity, which is matched only by Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze, coincidentally the original members on the debut album from 1970.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography can seem daunting, as though one is climbing a cosmic Mont Blanc. Reasonable concerns about a dilution of quality are also evident here. In this sense, if Kraftwerk achieved cult status on account of their minimalist approach, Tangerine Dream occupy the other extreme of abundant overload. And yet, this dive into discographic oceans of sound might also yield its own benefits, and not just for the most committed Tangerine Dream fans. While a canon of landmark albums exists for legitimate reasons, especially between 1972 and 1977 when the band established their definitive sound,Footnote ⁶ this wider discography should also be revisited. Some surprising outcomes can result, from the spectacle of live performances to a world of visual media.

The Ohr Years and kosmische Musik

This multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream was not foreseeable at the band’s inception. With their initial years in the late 1960s as part of the Zodiak club scene in West Berlin, involving related bands such as Ash Ra Tempel and Kluster, Tangerine Dream initially had a constant turnover of members – It was a feat that Edgar Froese managed to keep the band active. Still, practices of professionalisation and productivity were established for the band early on by Froese. He was older than the other band members, as he was born on D-Day in 1944. Froese grew up in West Berlin playing piano as a teenager and initially focusing on sculpture and painting. His talents eventually led to a brief period of study at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He experienced the 1960s Beat era and toured with his first band, The Ones, which resulted in a life-changing experience. In Spain, Froese met Salvador Dali and was inspired to devote his artistic efforts to the experimental Berlin scene, with a kind of sonic surrealism that combined psychedelic rock and Dali.Footnote ⁷

After founding Tangerine Dream in 1967, the band went through a number of formations before recording their first album, Electronic Meditation (1970), on Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Ohr label. At this time, apparently in response to Kaiser, Froese also began using the term kosmische Musik to describe the band’s musical vision.Footnote ⁸ With Schulze and Schnitzler, Tangerine Dream’s freeform rock was already on full display on Electronic Meditation, though Cope astutely sums up this album as ‘really neither electronic nor meditative’.Footnote ⁹ Kaiser himself offered elaborate esoteric descriptions in representing this new cosmic music of the Berlin School, stating at one point: ‘[K]osmische Musik more narrowly relates to the specific direction of musicians who, as a medium, realize life’s molecular processes directly through their instrument of electronic vibrations.’Footnote ¹⁰ Tangerine Dream’s audio experimentations also gradually involved more electronic equipment. Ulrich Adelt describes these ideas about the synthesiser and Kaiser’s vision as aiming at a ‘deterritorialized, postnational cosmological identity’.Footnote ¹¹ While the origins of the term are unclear, it was Kaiser who popularised this idea by adapting it for one of his record labels, founded in 1973. However, Froese would later become dissatisfied with such psychedelic rhetoric and reject the idea of kosmische Musik. He decided to abstain from drugs and maintained an artistic discipline that ensured Tangerine Dream’s prolific output, which included splitting from Kaiser and the Ohr label at the right time.

Still, the 1970s legacy of kosmische Musik has accompanied Tangerine Dream with associations of science fiction and space music. Following Electronic Meditation, the albums Alpha Centauri (1971), Zeit (Time, 1972), and Atem (Breath, 1973) all had distinct cosmic trappings, and eventually achieved marked success, especially in Britain and France. The influential British DJ John Peel named Atem his album of the year for 1973, placing it in heavy rotation on his radio show. Such reception would make Tangerine Dream one of the most internationally successful German acts of the decade. Zeit was a landmark release, the glacial outlier to the more rhythmically driven albums on Ohr. An extended double LP, Zeit explored outer space – and head space – to its sonic limits. Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh joined in with his Moog synthesiser on the opening movement, ‘Birth of Liquid Plejades’, and Tangerine Dream would carry cosmic electronica even further on such chilling tracks as ‘Origin of Supernatural Possibilities’. With such titles and extended forms, Tangerine Dream became a kind of Berlin answer to Pink Floyd and other British progressive rock acts. The progressive scene in France was likewise devoted to Tangerine Dream’s music.

This mix of psychedelic rock, German romantic tropes, and surrealism formed a compelling intersection of cultural references for fans of Tangerine Dream. As mentioned earlier, Froese did not partake in the mind-altering drugs of the sub-culture, but the psychedelic connection is undeniable. After all, the band’s name comes from having misheard the lyric ‘tangerine trees’ in the Beatles’ LSD-inspired song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.Footnote ¹² The band’s custom of performing in cathedrals in the 1970s reinforced the spiritual, mystic aura around them and their music. The 1973 album Atem proved to be an extraordinary musical moment that represented the band at the pinnacle of their Krautrock phase, with freeform drumming and sonic experimentation that evoked the sublime, featured especially on the twenty-minute title track of the album.

The band line-up had also crystalised by this time. As mentioned, Edgar Froese had always been at the heart of Tangerine Dream, though most fans view the classic trio of Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Bauman as central to the band’s sound. This trio worked together from 1971 through 1977 for most of Tangerine Dream’s classic albums, from Zeit (1972) to Sorcerer (1977). Franke had been classically trained at the Berlin Conservatory before joining Froese in 1971 to record Alpha Centauri, and Baumann, an accomplished pianist who knew Franke and joined by the time that Zeit was recorded, completed the trio. Together, they also made the leap from Ohr to Virgin Records.

This trio of Froese, Franke, and Baumann is thus comparable to Kraftwerk’s classic quartet formation from 1975 to 1987. While Baumann had already left by 1977, Franke stayed on as a key member to shape Tangerine Dream’s sound in music and media of the 1980s until his departure in 1987. Between 1971 and the move to Virgin in 1973, the trio gradually acquired new equipment and, Franke especially, worked tirelessly in the studio to develop the definitive sound. The band’s close association with Krautrock is also confirmed by the fact that Alpha Centauri, Zeit, and Atem were all recorded in Dieter Dierks’s iconic studio near Cologne and released on Ohr. But with their extraordinary international success, a young label owner named Richard Branson would become interested in signing Tangerine Dream, which would result in some radical changes.

The Virgin Years: Sequenced Success

The album that most fans and critics view as Tangerine Dream’s most influential release followed their move to Virgin Records – the aforementioned Phaedra (1974). It could practically be seen as Tangerine Dream’s equivalent to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn – as its new sequenced patterns on the fully electronic title track, an electronic statement comparable to ‘Autobahn’, would mark a new definitive style for the band. By signing with Virgin, Tangerine Dream also gained access to the Manor Studio in Oxfordshire to record their next releases. The instruments the band would have had access to at the time were the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) VCS3 synthesiser, a Mellotron, the Minimoog, a phaser for achieving various effects, and a rhythm controller called the PRX-2. These were the instruments primarily used to record the band’s LPs of this era, including Atem and Phaedra, followed by Rubycon (1975),Footnote ¹³ which had similar critical and commercial success. With this series of albums, the experimentation with synthesisers and the complete discarding of traditional instrumentation on PhaedraFootnote ¹⁴ became crucial to the new sound.

Musically, Tangerine Dream offer listeners a particular kind of experience – usually expansive with tracks regularly clocking in at ten to twenty minutes. These were sometimes more meditative, such as on Zeit, and sometimes propelled by rhythmic sequencer patterns. Froese described their compositional process as follows: ‘We could start very simply, with a bass line, the function of which is like the old basso continuum [sic] in Bach, and then move into nearly a classical counterpoint structure with up to five or six independent voices … if you do this in popular music today, most people would not realize what really goes on.’Footnote ¹⁵ If Froese here is referring to the sequenced synthesiser bass line that appears in much of their music, it seems he mistook the term basso continuo for ostinato, which is a more fitting label in this context. When their music is not conjuring ambient cosmic soundscapes, the ‘basso continuum’, in Froese’s terms, gives the music a dance-like momentum. Exotic melodies and atonal elements, from Mellotron choirs to white noise, were also distinctive marks of Tangerine Dream’s signature sound, which would overlay the sequenced synthesisers.

The music at times became a pastiche of concert and art music echoes, such as Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which is practically quoted on part 1 of Rubycon (at 13:30–14:05), or György Ligeti’s Atmospheres, evoked in the haunting choirs of the Mellotron on part 2.Footnote ¹⁶ The same year as Rubycon, Froese further cemented his reputation with the release of his second solo album, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975). An ambient landmark, this solo album was listed by David Bowie as one of his favourites, and an important influence especially on the B-sides of his own Berlin trilogy. Bowie and Froese would also meet and become good friends at the time of the English star’s move from Los Angeles to West Berlin in 1976 – quite a new mark of recognition for the Berlin School.Footnote ¹⁷ Along with these new networks, Froese’s own solo career would evolve in the coming years.

However, following Tangerine Dream’s next landmark album, Stratosfear (1976), it must be admitted that the band’s output gradually became uneven. In strictly compositional terms, Tangerine Dream lost some of their edge by the end of the 1970s, and particularly with the last major release on Virgin, Hyperborea (1983). New Age sounds and attempts at pop vocals and more standard structures gradually crept into these studio albums. In this context, in its most unfortunate examples the music descended from cosmic heights to planetarium ‘Muzak’, although still boasting standout moments that anticipated techno/trance. By taking on such an overwhelming number of projects in the late 1970s and 1980s, Tangerine Dream seemingly lost their experimental edge.

Franke comments: ‘We did not have the time to explore our minds or the great computer instruments we had at our disposal … I began to feel our quality was dropping.’Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, by having so many projects, including major releases on other record labels, a split with Branson and Virgin occurred in the mid-1980s. Johannes Schmoelling, member of the band from 1979 to 1985, deeply regrets losing Branson’s support and business acumen, as he felt that ‘after Branson, it petered out’.Footnote ¹⁹ The efforts at record promotion by other labels and Froese himself could not match Virgin’s support. Indeed, it is ironic here that such corporate trajectories would eventually make Branson – now famously – the first billionaire space-voyager in 2021 as head of Virgin Galactic. However, he certainly owes this partly to the success of Tangerine Dream’s cosmic music in building his Virgin brand.

From Australia to Poland: Tangerine Dream on Tour

We do not have space to discuss the expanded discography in detail, although across the late 1970s and 1980s, as mentioned, Tangerine Dream continued to release a wide variety of studio albums, ranging from the initial adventures in song structures with Steve Jolliffe on Cyclone (1978), to the proto-trance pop of Optical Race (1988). To be sure, Froese maintained an excellent discipline in seeing these projects to fruition, while rapidly expanding Tangerine Dream’s work on soundtracks and keeping the band on tour. However, following the split with Branson around 1985, the second major blow came, with Franke’s departure in 1987. Froese thus had ever more challenges maintaining the band’s studio innovations into the next decade. As Paul Stump states: ‘The departure of Franke, the engine-room of the Tangerine Dream mothership … was something else entirely. He was the man responsible for the trademark sequencer squiggle, chatter and thud that was the Tangerine Dream sound.’Footnote ²⁰

But that signature sound and Froese’s own innovations, along with other key band members, left a major mark in two significant areas also during the 1980s: the realm of live performances and of film scores. Indeed, the parallel importance of Tangerine Dream’s influence as a performing act is difficult to overstate. Tangerine Dream constantly toured at a level that had important social and cultural consequences, which reflected back on Krautrock. A tradition of live albums thus evolved in parallel with the studio albums. With Phaedra, a major UK tour took place in 1974, to be followed up by an additional UK tour and an Australian tour in 1975.

The most symbolic events at this time were a series of concerts in European cathedrals. These first occurred in Reims, France on 13 December, 1974, at the conclusion of the first UK tour, with a performance night also featuring Nico.Footnote ²¹ Though Tangerine Dream were later banned from playing additional Catholic churches, this event was a landmark success, attended by 6,000 people. It was followed by two performances in Anglican cathedrals, at Coventry Cathedral on 4 October 1975 and Liverpool Cathedral on 16 October 1975, both part of their second major UK tour.Footnote ²² These three events, along with additional performances at concert halls and arts venues, established the iconic imagery of Tangerine Dream as an electronic trio.

Ricochet brilliantly inaugurated their tradition of live albums, as it was based on the materials from these tours in Britain, Europe, and Australia. This album would also be used as the soundtrack to Tony Palmer’s BBC film, Live at Coventry Cathedral, with vintage footage of Froese, Franke, and Baumann in performance.Footnote ²³ To be sure, the performance at Coventry, a cathedral that had been bombed during World War II and now houses an International Centre for Reconciliation, was also a symbolic moment of political transformation and the emergence of a new musical culture in the 1970s.

Illustration 8.1 Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral, 1975.

© Michael Putland/Getty Images.

Ricochet would be followed by Encore, the live album based on Tangerine Dream’s first major American tour of 1977. Of the Krautrock bands, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had been receiving the most press in the United States at that time.Footnote ²⁴ While the band’s German identity remained a topic of fascination, this helped rather than hindered interest in America. Indeed, the tour represented Tangerine Dream’s transatlantic success in popular music, and the tour appropriately took place in the same year as their crossover to Hollywood soundtracks. With a lightshow provided by Laserium, a pioneering technology launched by Ivan Dryer in 1973, the spectacle of Tangerine Dream live took on new dimensions of laser visuals accompanying the synthesiser consoles. It should be noted though that the stress of touring and production resulted in new friction, as Baumann famously split with the band in Colorado while on tour.Footnote ²⁵

Along with such tours that crossed oceans, the other major influence that Tangerine Dream would have on live performance was their extensive Eastern European tours during the 1980s, singular among Krautrock bands. On 31 January 1980, this bridge across the Cold War divide was inaugurated with the iconic performance at the East Berlin Palast der Republik as part of the East German radio station DT40 ‘Youth Concert’ series. Tangerine Dream were formally introduced with a practically diplomatic announcement, involving a discussion of the band’s discography and new currents of ‘electronic rock’.Footnote ²⁶ East German concerts in cities such as Rostock and Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) followed in 1982, along with concerts in Hungary and Yugoslavia. An Eastern European tour in 1983 brought Tangerine Dream to new cities in East Germany and Poland. This last tour resulted in another landmark in their live discography, Poland: The Warsaw Concert (1984), and these tours made Tangerine Dream an important influence on East German and Eastern European electronica, foreshadowing the explosion of techno music and rave culture in the 1990s.

Tangerine Dream continued to tour extensively through 1988, though by the 1990s, the band’s activities and musical innovations comparatively declined. Nevertheless, the band continued to tour in subsequent decades, and dozens of bootlegs of the live performances have been collected by fans under the Tangerine Trees and Tangerine Leaves bootleg series. Such recordings have also circulated online to invite listeners into new directions of Tangerine Dream’s almost endless discography. This legacy also involves a performance schedule that continues to this day, involving a new generation of band members. The international networks of Tangerine Dream’s formation and reception, as a perpetual work-in-progress, have thus extended to new dimensions in the context of their iconic live performances.

Hollywood Scores: 1977, 1981–1988

The influences of Tangerine Dream’s film scores should likewise be seen as more than an addendum to the studio albums or live albums, even if the scores sometimes consisted of reworked sections of those albums. Through film music, just as with their live tours, Tangerine Dream have attracted new audiences from multiple generations to the band, and to electronic music and Krautrock generally. In film music alone, the group were one of the key forces behind Hollywood’s shift in the late 1970s and 1980s towards scores with driving synths and electronic textures. To be sure, Popol Vuh also had an extraordinary influence on film music history on account of their classic soundtracks for Werner Herzog’s films.Footnote ²⁷ However, these soundtracks were in the context of New German Cinema, whereas Tangerine Dream became the primary Krautrock influence in Hollywood itself.

No other Krautrock groups had such extensive careers in film music. The closest examples of German electronica in Hollywood at that time were the ‘Munich Machine’ producers Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express (1978), Flashdance (1983)) and Harold Faltermeyer (Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Fletch (1985)). Their combined talents were then featured on the song hits and score for the blockbuster Top Gun (1986). Tangerine Dream, Moroder, and Faltermeyer thus became the primary examples of 1980s composers in Hollywood that crossed over between Krautrock, new wave, and Euro-disco. Tangerine Dream were also certainly part of the larger trend of electronic composers, most prominently Wendy Carlos and Vangelis, who transformed Hollywood film music during the 1970s and 1980s.

The band’s career in Hollywood took place in stages. Tangerine Dream’s opportunities were foreshadowed by their colleague at Virgin, Mike Oldfield, whose Tubular Bells (1973) became a massive hit following the use of its opening theme for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Friedkin likewise realised the possibilities of Tangerine Dream for Hollywood films. He met the band in 1974 when he was on tour in Europe to promote The Exorcist, having the luck to see a performance at an abandoned church in the Black Forest.Footnote ²⁸ Friedkin states plainly: ‘I was mesmerized. I met with them afterward and said I’d like to send them the script for my next film.’Footnote ²⁹ The tradition of live performances thus helped to bring about the new leap to Hollywood. Friedkin’s interest was understandable, as his musical experiences on The Exorcist were rocky. He had been dissatisfied with the score by Lalo Schifrin and chose a compiled soundtrack of music, which ranged from Penderecki to Oldfield. The Exorcist thus became a kind of horror-music answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

After this meeting in 1974, Friedkin followed through, and Tangerine Dream would eventually score Sorcerer (1977). He sent them the script after a second meeting in Paris, and late in the filming process, Friedkin received their musical impressions via tape. He purportedly edited the film ‘around the group’s music’ as inspiration.Footnote ³⁰ Sorcerer has also remained one of Friedkin’s most critically acclaimed works, despite an initially disappointing box office performance. The film had the misfortune of being released in the same year as Star Wars. Indeed, there is a certain irony that the first major film scored by the pioneers of cosmic music would suffer because of the science-fiction epic of Star Wars. Still, despite these challenges, Sorcerer would be held in high regard. Tangerine Dream released the vinyl soundtrack to Sorcerer that year, inaugurating their new tradition of soundtrack albums. For the liner notes to the soundtrack, Friedkin would claim: ‘Had I heard them sooner, I would have asked them to score [The Exorcist].’Footnote ³¹

The story of Sorcerer is a fatalist tragedy about characters unable to escape the consequences of their life decisions. Tangerine Dream’s ostinato figure, what you might call the main ‘theme’, musically symbolises the wheel of fate that carries the protagonists towards their demise. The climactic scenes of a terrifying truck haul through jungles and rough terrain also resemble a hallucinatory tripscape that is effectively underscored by Tangerine Dream’s otherworldly music. At this time, the band’s line-up still consisted of Froese, Franke, and Baumann, which would have consequences for all three artists.

As mentioned, Franke and Baumann contributed the most to shaping Tangerine Dream’s sound, especially Franke,Footnote ³² who was also involved in the major scores of the 1980s. He went on to have a lucrative scoring career – most famously for the TV series Babylon 5 (1993–7) and The Amazing Race (2003–19).Footnote ³³ For Baumann, Sorcerer proved to be his only score with Tangerine Dream, though he would likewise develop a scoring career. Indeed, Franke and Baumann, as well as Paul Haslinger and Michael Hoenig, would all eventually relocate to Los Angeles and score numerous films and TV series. The Berlin School of electronic music thus seems partly to have evolved into a ‘Berlin–LA School’ of visual media composers.

Tangerine Dream were naturally the most prominent representatives here, as guided by Froese and Franke during the 1980s, along with Schmoelling and Haslinger. Following Sorcerer, the most active and successful years in Hollywood were between 1981 and 1988. One familiar with Tangerine Dream’s music, with its mind-bending cosmic flavours, might expect that they would be confined to science fiction or David-Lynchian psychological horror. However, the band’s filmography boasts a surprising variety of genres, from neo-noir thrillers to teen comedies, and from action movies to sword and sorcery fantasies. Across this history, their sound became synonymous with a certain 1980s aesthetic, with its propulsive sequencer ostinati, dark ambient tones, and sustained Mellotron pads. With respect to the film industry, the band also took on all forms of projects, from major studio features to B-movie shlock to cult classics. Furthermore, they participated in some interesting shifts in the studio system, providing, for example, the music to Flashpoint (1984), the first theatrical release by HBO Films.

In addition to Friedkin, Tangerine Dream worked with several major Hollywood directors. The band’s reputation in Hollywood became fully established by working with Michael Mann on his first two films, Thief (1981) and The Keep (1983). Also in 1983, Tangerine Dream scored the teen blockbuster Risky Business, which established Tom Cruise as a major star. Firestarter (1984), based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel, prominently featured Tangerine Dream’s score as a blend of horror sound effects, a method comparable to The Keep. Two additional films with major directors followed – Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). While filmographies of Tangerine Dream tend to focus on these films, a few cult classics should be added to this legacy – the teen satire Three O’clock High (1987) and especially the apocalyptic sci-fi film Miracle Mile (1988), which features a Los Angeles fever dreamscape that is remarkably complemented by the score. Furthermore, Tangerine Dream developed a parallel career composing for West German film and TV, which had already begun in the early 1970s. During the 1980s, this included a number of episodes of the popular TV series Tatort, as well as Edgar Froese’s score for Kamikaze 89 (1982), which featured the final starring role for Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

As the band’s Hollywood reputation grew, they earned many commissions, and their arsenal of gear and scoring techniques became more sophisticated. This slew of new commissions meant more disposable income for the band, which they invested in the acquisition of new instruments and recording equipment.Footnote ³⁴ The Mellotron was still a favourite of theirs, but from the late 1970s onwards polyphonic synthesisers made it easier to layer sounds and achieve a more varied range of effects.Footnote ³⁵ In the 1980s, digital sampling and the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) made the compositional process even more efficient, but at the cost of the analogue grit that characterised their older material.

The lack of memorable tunes and the unyielding rhythmic ostinato also gave a homogenised feel to the overall sound, what Paul Haslinger describes as their ‘monochromatic’ scores, which all have ‘the electronic-analog trademark sound that TD had become famous for’.Footnote ³⁶ That is not to say their music fails in the context of film, or lacks quality of craft. Many of their scores certainly stand on their own purely as musical compositions. However, in comparing their music from this period to other electronic scores of the era, especially the monumental works by Wendy Carlos for A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Vangelis for Blade Runner (1982), Tangerine Dream does not achieve a commensurate level of musical depth or nuance in underscoring visuals and narrative.

Still, many of these soundtracks work so effectively because the music does not interfere melodically with the narrative. It consists primarily of rhythm and texture, which complements and enhances the tone, atmosphere, and pacing of the film. Haslinger, although he didn’t join the band until later in their scoring career, shares the sentiment that a good score should not obstruct the narrative: ‘[I]t’s not good if you notice a film’s music. If you don’t notice it and the effect is created, that’s what we are striving for.’Footnote ³⁷ The soundtrack to Risky Business (1983) is consistent with this philosophy, especially the track ‘Love on a Real Train’, which is a clear homage to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Their score for Risky Business also provides a compelling emotional contrast to the 1980s hit songs for the teen drama. As mentioned, Tangerine Dream’s last major score could be said to be Miracle Mile from 1988. While the band’s activities in major Hollywood studios ended at that time, Tangerine Dream left an impressive and often underestimated filmography to be added to the studio and live discography of a band that maintained an extraordinary pace across multiple decades.

Stranger Dreams: Legacies in Music and Media

Indeed, the legacies of Tangerine Dream’s music have traversed popular culture in subsequent decades. Most prominently during the 1990s, the band became recognised as one of the forefathers of electronic dance music, especially within the genre of trance music, but also techno and ambient chillout music. For example, on the ‘Intro’ to the 1991 album Frequencies, the British electronic duo LFO presented their own homage to house and rave culture, prominently including Tangerine Dream among ‘the pioneers of the hypnotic groove’. Numerous techno artists, both German and international, as well as post-rock artists, have also listed Tangerine Dream as a major influence. To this day, the band are repeatedly reported on in such prominent venues as the website Pitchfork, introducing new fans to the music.

In related ways, Tangerine Dream’s legacies in music and sound for visual media have been just as prominent. In concluding our account, this intriguingly returns us to Froese’s original interest in visuals, but now in the form of TV and video games rather than modern painting. Froese’s final major project with Tangerine Dream before he passed away in 2015 was an extraordinary opportunity to produce music for a major video game in the new era of visual media: Grand Theft Auto V. The influence of this game is difficult to overstate, as it was for a time the best-selling video game in history. The significant opportunity, but also the enormous task, for Tangerine Dream to contribute music to this compiled score is striking. Thorsten Quaeschning explains: ‘For GTA 5, we composed and wrote 35 hours of music in 1.5 years. The deal was such that we had to upload 5.5 minutes of music every day, five days a week. The game mixes the music itself, so we upload the stems, the subgroups, layers, basses, rhythms, etc., separately.’Footnote ³⁸ Thus, the prolific maximalism of Tangerine Dream practically concluded with electronic music as a kind of minimalist craft of stems, woven into the tapestry of sound design. GTA 5 received numerous awards for innovations in video game design, and it can be presumed that many new listeners of Tangerine Dream were reached along the way.

Just as consequential to this legacy, Tangerine Dream also experienced a TV revival in the mid-2010s that has resulted in a re-evaluation of some of the group’s film scores. This is most evident through the band’s central influence on the Netflix smash-hit series Stranger Things (2016–present). An homage to the science fiction and horror genres of the 1980s, Stranger Things loops back to Tangerine Dream’s scores in multiple ways. In a feature for MTV, ‘Stranger Things and How Tangerine Dream Soundtracked the ‘80s’, Molly Lambert astutely observed these connections.Footnote ³⁹ The series’ Emmy-winning composers, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, cited Tangerine Dream as arguably the most prominent influence on their original music for the series – another indication of a Berlin–LA School of soundtrack influence.

Dixon and Stein’s score was a highly innovative expansion upon those synth soundtracks, since Tangerine Dream’s music was sometimes used in the temp track.Footnote ⁴⁰ Along with Sorcerer and Thief (1981), Dixon and Stein cite The Keep (1983) as a key influence. The music for the show’s title theme provides evidence for this influence, since it resembles ominous synth tracks like ‘Betrayal (Sorcerer Theme)’. Tangerine Dream’s own tracks ’Exit’, ‘Green Desert’, and ‘Horizon’ were also used on three episodes of the first season. Similarly, the plot of Stranger Things recalls Firestarter (1984), as it involves an escaped girl from a lab who has special powers. As mentioned, Firestarter innovatively used Tangerine Dream’s cues as sound effects for psychic terror, with a blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Similar innovations helped make Stranger Things – with superior production values, acting, and writing compared to Firestarter – one of the most popular series that Netflix has released.

Stranger Things has thus confirmed that Tangerine Dream’s sound is as inseparable from 1980s Hollywood scores as it is from Krautrock in the 1970s. It is appropriate here that the TV show highlighted this mix of science fiction and horror, to which Tangerine Dream’s soundtracks were ultimately best suited. This TV revival of Tangerine Dream has continued with the use of ‘Love on a Real Train’ on multiple shows, such as Mr. Robot in 2016.Footnote ⁴¹ And finally, the 2018 film Bandersnatch: Black Mirror, related to the critically acclaimed British series Black Mirror, used Phaedra as a key record in its musical and video game narrative. The main character actually receives Phaedra as a recommendation from a co-worker, expanding his musical tastes while doing creative work on video games. In such a spirit, with the weaving of Tangerine Dream’s legacy through new music and media, it does not seem that the band’s influence will end anytime soon. As former band member Klaus Schulze said: ‘It was Edgar and me who fought hard, who starved, who put our souls into electronic music … . Today, electronic music is a normal thing. We have won, if I may say so.’Footnote ⁴²

Essential Listening

• Edgar Froese, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (Virgin, 1975)

• Tangerine Dream, Zeit (Ohr, 1972)

• Tangerine Dream, Phaedra (Virgin, 1974)

• Tangerine Dream, Ricochet (Virgin, 1975)

• Tangerine Dream, Sorcerer (MCA, 1977)

The Düsseldorf duo Neu!, comprised of guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, are, particularly for many anglophones, emblematic of Krautrock. Their first three albums, released between 1972 and 1975, did not see them achieve the sort of international success enjoyed by Can, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream. There were several factors for this lack of success: commercial failure, the duo’s inability to sustain a working relationship, and a failed romance (Klaus Dinger and his estranged girlfriend) at the heart of their lyrical narrative. As with so much of West German music of the time, their success was posthumous.

Neu! cemented their own individual freeway of departure from the dominant orthodoxies of Anglo-American blues-based rock, which held such sway with West German youth in the 1960s and the 1970s. It was a lonely freeway back then, but it has since proved immensely influential on post-punk and subsequent experimental bands such as Joy Division, Sonic Youth, and Stereolab. A host of twenty-first century bands, including Britain’s Toy and Now, were also fired by the velocity of Neu!’s trademark motorik beat, the deceptive simplicity of which had profound implications for the future shape and direction of rock music.

Rubble Music: Neu! and the German Past

As with their experimental contemporaries across West Germany, Neu! were not immune to the profound political upheavals that took place as they came of age in the late 1960s. On the one hand, it was hard for Rother and Dinger to feel patriotic pride: Dinger declared himself ‘not a big fan of Germany’.Footnote ¹ On the other hand, an inescapable sense of cultural pride – obligation even – impelled them to make a political point through the nature of their music-making, according to Rother:

In both name and approach, Neu! strove for originality, or at least an escape from Anglo-American rock norms. However, as Lloyd Isaac Vayo observes, Neu! came into existence in a West Germany in which the debris of the past was still a feature of the 1970s urban environment, a reminder of unresolved issues: ‘The material reproduction of the state lags well into the 1970s and beyond, with lots remaining clogged with the detritus of the bombs dropped so long ago, the rubble of shattered buildings merely pushed aside rather than removed.’Footnote ³

Neu! falls short of the pristineness and serenity of Kraftwerk’s new electronic architecture. There is a sense of a lack of resolution, an emotional undertow, a future that has not yet arrived, and a country still in the grips of a patriarchal past, against which Dinger rages. The inner sleeve of Neu! ‘75 features an image of Dinger with a black-and-white photo of his grandfather and great uncle from World War I. They remain, for Dinger, a presence in the ‘new’ Germany of the Federal Republic. The notion of motorik in relation to Neu! Is also helpful. Much as Kraftwerk were not a purely futurist concept, but also concerned with re-connecting with the tenets of the Bauhaus movement cut abruptly short by the Nazis in 1933, so motorik connects Neu! with the music of composer Paul Hindemith, for whom the term was previously used, and whose music was condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis.

In the context of Neu!, Vayo speaks of the ‘record-as-mirror’.Footnote ⁴ The duo found it curiously difficult to recreate their records live, their subtle simplicity being too much for guest musicians such as Guru Guru’s Uli Trepte and Eberhard Kranemann to grasp and carry out. They only played a handful of concerts in their lifetime, and as such were never able to manifest themselves effectively as a live spectacle. And so their records are all we have, their mirror surfaces inviting reflection by the listener on past, present, and future, their forms offering the prospect of a new mode of rock practice drawn from West German origins, sources, and ingenuity.

Rock and Krautrock

Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger had enjoyed a liberation through imported rock music. In the 1960s, Dinger joined a group called The No, clearly influenced by the British art school rock of groups like The Who. Michael Rother, meanwhile, had been influenced by the surging dynamism of Little Richard and later fell in love with a Danish cover of pre-Beatles British group The Shadows’ instrumental hit ‘Apache’.

There was no Krautrock manifesto: the movement was too heterogenous to be reduced to a common denominator. While Neu!’s motorik beat is considered by some to be Krautrock’s rhythmical signature, it is but one aspect of the new music produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While there is no distinctive Krautrock style, the groups assembled – albeit reluctantly – under its banner share some common properties, which make the term useful. These properties include: an understanding of twentieth-century avant-garde visual art that was often lacking in their Anglo-American contemporaries; an embrace of electronics as vital tools in the construction of any new music; a tendency towards instrumental music, reflecting the cultural ‘implicitness’ of the genre, which represented more of a ‘formal’ protest than one of content; and a rejection of the ‘strong vocalist’, the big, declarative character up front and centre stage.

Krautrock vocals, from Kraftwerk to Faust to Neu! themselves tend to be deliberately ‘weak’, deadpan, and understated. Krautrock also departs from orthodoxies such as the verse–chorus structure as well as the hierarchical format of the traditional rock group, with the rhythm section subordinate to the lead guitar. Arising as it did from the commune ethos, Krautrock regards all musical elements as equal, counterbalancing and complementing one another; and in Düsseldorf, Neu! would abide by most, if not all of these characteristics.

Kraftwerk and Neu!

Much as there was a rivalry of sorts between the flamboyant Liverpool and the more terse, severe Manchester in the post-punk years in Britain, so there was a contrast in character between the rival cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf in the 1970s, with Can bearing some of the character of Cologne’s anarchic sprawl, while Kraftwerk reflected the industrious, elegant efficiency of Düsseldorf. Rother and Dinger were briefly members of Kraftwerk during a short period in 1971 when Ralf Hütter temporarily left the band to focus on his architectural studies. It was the first time the pair met, and was a fortuitous meeting at that.

The ‘Kraftwerk’ that consisted of Rother, Dinger, and Florian Schneider represent a very different iteration of the group. This early era is one that the modern-day Kraftwerk seem almost anxious to suppress: their messy, organic, pre-Autobahn phase, none of which features in their live shows or has been reissued by them on CD. They have the sense of propulsion, of unremitting forward momentum one associates with Kraftwerk, but the most dominant feature is the flute of Florian Schneider, with which Kraftwerk would dispense entirely after Autobahn.

Rother and Dinger soon left Kraftwerk and do not appear on any of their recordings. There was a telling tension between Dinger, and Schneider and the returning Hütter. Dinger was very assertive of his working-class origins and was resentful of their more privileged family background. He also resented their reliance on electronic instruments. Dinger was horrified that such machines would displace skilled, artisanal manual labourers on the drumkit like himself, with Kraftwerk-like factory owners switching to automated techniques to put flesh-and-blood workers on the breadline. This disagreement marked the distinction between the two Düsseldorf groups.

As Rother said, ‘I think an important element of the Neu! music – that along with the beauty there is a portion of dirt. And that’s something that separates Neu! music from Kraftwerk, in my own understanding. There is a contradiction in our sound.’Footnote ⁵ It was here, then, that Neu! and Kraftwerk parted company. The sheer rhythmic regularity of Neu!’s sound and the layers of treated guitar make it seem ‘electronic’ in nature, but it is a new form of rock music, in which guitars and drums feature most prominently, and strong emotions, from melancholy to outright rage, are frequently evoked through Dinger in particular. Although Kraftwerk’s music is subtly soulful – Ralf Hütter once explained that ‘the “soul” of the machines has always been a part of our music’Footnote ⁶ – they would come to deal wholly in electronics, their emotional register serene, reflecting a symbiotic relationship between man and machine.

Rother and Dinger

The contrasting, yin and yang characters who made up Neu!, and their differing upbringings, were both the reason for their artistic success and their ultimate break-up. Theirs was an unusual set-up by the standards of Krautrock, which tended to deal in more ‘communal’ line-ups of at least three or more members, reflecting the role of communes in the origin of groups like Amon Düül II. Neu!’s duality later become more commonplace, in groups like Suicide (who formed in 1970 but did not release their debut album until 1977), DAF, The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, and others.

Illustration 9.1 Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother of Neu!

© Anton Corbijn.

Rother brought to the group a pacific, ambient element, born out of his fondness for water. ‘I always lived near water’, said Michael Rother. ‘In Pakistan at the seaside, Düsseldorf near the Rhine – I feel comfortable near water – it has an effect I can’t quite explain. It has to do with the passage of time, it also moves along like music itself – there are some parallels.’Footnote ⁷ Having lived in Pakistan as a child, with his father employed by an airline that operated in that region, Rother absorbed at first hand the particular strain of oriental music that emanated from the region. ‘I do remember being completely fascinated by the strange sounds of Pakistani music as a child – snake charmers, local musicians playing at the gates to get some money. This music that seemed to go on and on with no structure that I could make out – just an endless stream of melody and rhythm, like a river.’Footnote ⁸ That fluidity is demonstrated on, for example, ‘Weissensee’ (White Lake) on Neu!’s self-titled debut album.

Dinger was always at loggerheads with his own father – a recurring theme in Krautrock and its rejection of rigid, patriarchal structures. His combative rage was lifelong, a ‘permanent sense of opposition’,Footnote ⁹ but provided the impetus for Neu!, the forward pulsation, whereas Rother provided the scenery, the blues, the greens, and the oranges: the full colour palette. Dinger studied for three years as a carpenter – work in which he took an immense pride – as well as in architecture. Like Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, he rejected machines out of a pride in his own mechanical exactitude as a player. As Dinger’s widow Miki Yui said: ‘He knows what is “straight” and what is “not straight”. You hear it on what people call his Hammerbeat – he did three years of carpentry training and learnt to be very good with his handwork and in using his tools. All of these things came together in his playing.’Footnote ¹⁰

Neu! and Düsseldorf

Thanks to the regeneration of the Rhineland, and its proximity to the provincial town of Bonn, declared capital of West Germany in 1949, Düsseldorf prospered in the post-war years industrially and commercially. However, it wasn’t merely a manufacturing base. From architecture to fashion to its many art galleries and the patronage of Joseph Beuys, it also had a strong aesthetic sense. Commerce and style met in its extensive advertising industry, of which the Neu! logo was a product.

Klaus Dinger himself founded an ‘advertising agency’ while living in a commune in Düsseldorf in 1971, though it existed on paper only. This was the impetus for him to strike upon the band name ‘Neu!’ (New!). ‘Neu! at that time was the strongest word in advertising, everybody knew, and I think it still is, everybody knows, so I don’t know why nobody else did that before.’Footnote ¹¹

The Neu! logo functions as a brilliantly acute piece of branding; the group were, after all, striving for absolute originality. It also satirises, however, the nakedly commercial imperative with which so much modern music making was bound up, an industry from which Rother and Dinger sought to set themselves apart. Although they welcomed any sales that came their way, their work was in no way dictated by pop ambition, but by artistic imperatives, the primary one being the rejection of the tried and tested, the formulaic, the dominant hegemony of Anglo-American rock and pop.

As with Kraftwerk, Neu! had a complex relationship with time. Kraftwerk are considered ‘futurists’ but in their often kitsch-like imagery and neo-Bauhaus aesthetic, their love of Schubert, they are conscious of the German past, its ruptured heritage. Neu! in their branding are making a play for originality rather than novelty; they want nothing to do with the commercial pop industry, whose concept of the ‘new’ is merely a series of short-lived trends, soon to be dated. They sought, successfully as it turns out, a timelessness in their music.

This timelessness is evoked through the natural, physical flow of their sound, and through an ambient sense of the natural, eternal elements – water in particular. Neu! do not ‘fetishise’ the future, as do Kraftwerk, with (often playful) dehumanising evocations of mechanisation, automation, and the effortless conquest of nature. Yes, they are motorik, but this represents a necessary moment of intensification in the 1970s, a fast-forward motion that is bound up with their cultural circumstances in the early 1970s.

The Role of Conny Plank

Neu! were fortunate in that they were produced by Conny Plank. He was fully sympathetic to the broad, non-commercial aims of the genre while being au fait with, and having access to, the most advanced technological means to realise the musical visions of, among others, Kraftwerk, Can, and Cluster. Unlike some producers, including Joy Division’s Martin Hannett or ZTT label founder Trevor Horn, Plank did not have a signature style that he imposed on the artists with whom he worked.

Rather, he functioned as an enabler, spending considerable time with the artists he worked with. Only when he had gained a good sense of the character and musical ambitions of the artists would work begin. Using all the technologies at his disposal, as well as his improvisational ingenuity in the studio, he would assist Neu! in achieving their ideals with a stark clarity and impact that matched their striking logo.

Michael Rother recalled how struck he was by Plank’s open mindedness. ‘He was, in a way, crazy. He was open to everything. It couldn’t be crazy enough.’ And while he had advanced technical means, they were by no means the match of twenty-first century standards. He had at his disposal a tape machine to create delays and an echo chamber, but mostly he benefitted from his extraordinary sense of timing and memory, without the assistance of a computer.

They played ‘Hallogallo’ to him, over a twelve-minute period on an eight-track, and he was able to offer notes from memory as to which elements worked and which did not. His ability to organise sound, his selflessness in not imposing his own pre-set ideas, and his exploratory spirit and clarity of vision that exceeded the technology of his day were all vital to the development of Neu!’s design and momentum.

Birth of a New Sound: Neu! (1972)

Neu!’s eponymous debut was recorded in December 1971 and released in 1972. While Kraftwerk took a few years to arrive at what is considered their trademark sound, Neu!’s sound came fully formed on ‘Hallogallo’, track one of their first LP. The song proceeds at a steady, not breakneck speed, with a relentless disregard for the protocols of verse, chorus, and bridges. Dinger’s 4/4 drumbeat (labelled ‘Dingerbeat’) is maintained without distraction, with Rother’s guitars throwing up shapes and colours like scenery – streetlamps, fields, buildings – receding in a rear-view mirror, or creating a windscreen-wiper whiplash effect. The engine ticks over, the (instrumental) mood one of sustained excitement at what might lie beyond the horizon.

While Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ is evidently a sonic simulation of an automobile journey, Neu!’s music is more open-ended, abstract. The images and narrative it conjures in the mind of the listener depend on one’s individual perspective. Rother himself professed himself bemused at some of the impressions and feedback of fans and critics but did not deny their validity. As with ‘Autobahn’, however, there is a physical sense of landscape traversed, and here again is the West German landscape, an alternative topography to that of Route 66 rock ’n’ roll Americana. Neu! travel hopefully, though ‘arriving’ will be another matter. There is a perpetual, existential sense of getting somewhere yet remaining in the same place, implied in the velocity and repetition of the ‘Dingerbeat’, a yearning that remains tantalisingly unfulfilled.

This momentum has already broken down by ‘Sonderangebot’ (Special Offer), with its rush of panning, its strange note of desolation – like a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. A high note pierces like the unforgiving sun. The weather of the album has taken a turn. As a result of this experience, ‘Weissensee’ proceeds at a much more thoughtful, slow pace, as if the landscape has run out and an uncertain seashore beckons, with Dinger’s cymbals crashing like waves. These are not individual tracks but seem to follow on from one another, bleeding into each other in a narrative flow. There is a physical reflectiveness about Neu! thus far, a sense of the album as mirror-scape in which the listener is invited to contemplate themselves, to evaluate and reassess. ‘Via the record-as-mirror, the listener aurally comprehends both their own literal individuality, as well as their emblematic status as German, therefore creating the individual as initial locus of and venue for action’, according to Vayo.Footnote ¹²

The album puts to water again with ‘Im Glück’ (Happiness), a grainy sample of a recording made while rowing with Dinger’s girlfriend Anita Heedman. This is the beginning of a key thread in the Neu! saga: the recording is of Dinger with his then girlfriend, in a hazy, indistinct, brief moment of tranquillity. Rother’s guitars lie like horizontal patterns on the slow, shifting water: distorted, shimmering. Following the violent, jackhammer interlude of ‘Negativland’, which signals the past, in the form of a sample of applause of a Kraftwerk concert, and the future, in its prefiguration of the post-punk of Joy Division, romance resumes with ‘Lieber Honig’ (Dear Honey), in which Dinger serenades his girlfriend with the most affecting of vocals, as if so love-stricken and emotionally dependent he can barely muster the oxygen to sing. This is among the most effective deployments in the Krautrock canon of the ‘weak’ vocal, in which the individual is not all-dominant in vocal might, but just a small player subject to much larger forces.

Beginning Again: Neu! 2 (1973)

Neu! 2 sees the duo follow a very similar arc to their debut, as if once again travelling hopefully. The Dingerbeat of the opening track ‘Für immer’ (Forever) varies only subtly from ‘Hallogallo’: it is less dreamlike, sharper – aggressive almost – with a stormier ambience. ‘Für immer’ implies the length of the journey undertaken, perhaps by a ghost-rider, condemned to live out the same loop of forward propulsion. Again, with ‘Spitzenqualität’ (Top Quality), a companion to ‘Sonderangebot’ and another title that might have been taken from an advertising hoarding, the album decelerates, traffic whooshing past as you stand by your broken-down vehicle. Once again, the sanguine spirit of the opening track suffers a puncture. By the end, it’s as if Dinger is not so much drumming as hammering a dashboard in frustration.

‘Lila Engel’ (Lilac Angel) is a further paean to Dinger’s girlfriend, a fevered dervish of a track in which his vocals feel like a desperate incantation. The remainder of the album is the result of simply having run out of money, a series of proto-‘remixes’ of their ‘Neuschnee’ (Fresh Snow) single, sped up, slowed down, distorted, stretched out. Such plasticine use of sonic matter would be commonplace thirty years on but in 1973 it was supposed that Neu! and producer Conny Plank had taken leave of their senses. ‘I remember at the time, the critics hated us for the second side and many fans in Germany thought we had gone completely crazy. The idea of treating recorded music in an unusual way simply wasn’t understood’, recalled Michael Rother.Footnote ¹³

Later critics were more forgiving. Simon Reynolds described the remixes as ‘not as irritating as you’d expect, highly listenable, actually, and, sheer desperation aside, conceptually clever in a John-Cage-meets-turntablism style’.Footnote ¹⁴ Julian Cope, meanwhile, in his Krautrocksampler, described the album overall as more ‘lush and fertile’ than the ‘short-grassed plains’ of its predecessor. As for the budgetary mishap that resulted in the B-side, he writes: ‘What’s an experiment for if there is never a failure? And this failure is undoubtedly one of the most successful ever.’Footnote ¹⁵

Artistically, however, in the cold reality of 1973, Neu! were in a lonely place, having arrived somewhere too soon. Their lack of chemistry saw them drift temporarily apart, with Rother hooking up with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius to form the ‘supergroup’ Harmonia, whose eventual liaison with the likeminded Brian Eno sowed the seed of the future high regard in which Neu! and others of their West German generation would be held. But not yet.

Famous Last Words: Neu! ‘75

After the release of the sophomore album, and the subsequent hiatus, the Rother–Dinger partnership would resume in 1975 with Neu! ’75. The two members recorded across separate sides, and Dinger brought on personnel who would join him for his breakaway group La Düsseldorf, who would break away from the orthodoxies of Krautrock itself.

Once again (on the A-side, Rother’s side), the album sets forth in determined motorik vein, with ‘Isi’: bathed in evening sunlight, blues-less, an anthemic instrumental. Once again, the mood breaks down, the vehicle slows as the sun sets on ‘Seeland’ (Sea Land), as Neu! arrive at those lonely waters with only their own reflections for company. Finally, with the melancholy of ‘Leb Wohl’ (Farewell) and its spare, ambling piano, mortality seems at hand. The waters have all but ceased to lap, and the image that comes to mind is that of Arnold Böcklin’s portrait Die Toteninsel (The Island of Death, 1880/86). Rother’s vocals are weak emissions, like a dying man trying to muster breath for a last testimony. It’s as if, over the course of twenty minutes, we have gone through the three ages of a life.

Dinger takes the reins on the B-side, eschewing drums for a guitar. ‘E-Musik’ is perhaps the most advanced version of motorik to date: chromium-plated, swerving with abandon along a freeway regardless of destination, topped and tailed by the winds of desolation. It is preceded, however, by ‘Hero’, which is, in effect, Dinger’s breakout track. In the posture he assumes – declamatory, explicit, guitar brandished, self at the forefront – he has abandoned Krautrock protocols, in which sublimation, implicitness, green investment in the musical future, laboratory avant-garde exploration, and the subjugation of excessive individuality are all pushed to the fore.

But the fabric has to be torn. In his sneering, lowing, nihilistic tone he prefigures John Lydon on the Public Image Ltd track ‘Theme’. ‘Just another hero, riding through the night’, Dinger cries out. The reason for this despair? ‘Honey went to Norway, to Norway’, he laments. His girlfriend Anita has left him, pulled away by the malign force of her family, Dinger suspects, her businessman father having deemed the unkempt, lower-class Dinger an unsuitable mate.

Nazism may have ended in 1945 but the oppressively masculine values of the fascist era continued to thrive in the Federal Republic. The tyrannies of commerce, the snide, reactionary values of the monopolist tabloid Bild Zeitung, the persecution of ‘longhairs’ by a society still dominated by a former Nazi party faithful have all conspired against Dinger, it appears, robbing him of the love of his life. ‘Fuck your business, fuck the press / Fuck the bourgeoisie!’, Dinger screams. It is hard to blame him for breaking Krautrock’s customary, meaningful silence on political matters, though having done so, there is no way back. Anita represents a romantic dream of what once was, flickering across these albums, tormenting Dinger in his own dreams: what was suppressed, what has been lost, perhaps for good, in Dinger’s generation at least.

After Neu!, What Now?

Neu’s first three albums are their essential trilogy. Neu! made a further, poorly received album, Neu! 4, made up of tentative but abandoned studio recordings, but the chemistry between the pair was not really there. Dinger did not approve of Rother’s use of synthesisers in the sessions, while Rother was upset that Dinger went ahead and released the album without Rother’s knowledge or consent in 1995, followed by the live album Neu! ‘72 Live! in 1996, again not having sought Rother’s approval. This led to the final breakdown of relations between the two musicians.

Dinger’s unauthorised actions may have been an attempt to resurrect the Neu! brand following the demise of his follow-on project La Düsseldorf, as well as multiple other attempts to return to the limelight through collaboration with various partners. La Düsseldorf, his only post-Neu! project worth mentioning in this context, enjoyed some success in the early 1980s, as leftfield West German music, though still formally innovative, became more brutally explicit than its Krautrock forbears: Einstürzende Neubauten and DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft) in particular.

A trio comprising Dinger, his brother Thomas, and Hans Lampe, La Düsseldorf made three albums: La Düsseldorf (1976), Viva (1978), and Individuellos (1980). These were impressive records, bearing the fruit of the seeds of proto-punk embedded in Neu! They were in the spirit of the times. They departed, however, from the protocols of Krautrock in key ways, especially in Dinger’s desire to be up front and centre stage. Predictably, the money that came with (relative) fame and fortune brought its own disputes and, as so often was the way with Dinger, personal recriminations with his fellow band members. Following a further project, Japandorf, Dinger passed away in 2008 while recording his last album, released posthumously in 2013 under the name Klaus Dinger + Japandorf. Dinger was only sixty-one years old when he died.

Herbert Grönemeyer, one of the most successful German musicians in German-language album-oriented rock, re-released the Neu! trilogy in 2001 on his label Grönland. This led to a renaissance of the band in Germany and renewed interest internationally. Michael Rother, meanwhile, has navigated the quiet, rewarding seas of his own solo career. He has released a total of ten albums since his 1977 solo debut Flammende Herzen (Flaming Hearts). His solo works reflect the aqueous, ambient element of Neu!, while never lapsing into the clichés of New Age music.

Comprehensive box sets called Solo (2019) and Solo II (2020) on Grönland collect Rother’s solo oeuvre of nine studio albums between 1977 and 2004. His 2020 album Dreaming marked a triumphant return to form. He still performs regularly, playing tracks from Neu! and his own work, supported by a band including Hans Lampe – is the closest possible replacement for the ultimately irreplaceable Dinger.

Legacy

Back in the 1970s, Neu! benefitted from the blessing of Brian Eno – who described the Dingerbeat as being as important as those of James Brown and Fela KutiFootnote ¹⁶ – and, by association, David Bowie. Bowie understood, not least from personal experience, that the momentum of Anglo-American rock was all washed up on the West Coast of the United States by 1975, and that decadent old dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin, The Who, and John Lennon were in every sense physically incapable of taking the music any further. It was time to look eastwards, to Europe; hence Bowie’s relocation to Berlin. This led to a reconsideration of the value of West German experimental music among those who had not fully embraced it, and an understanding that its conceptual approach – as opposed to one based in mere technical aptitude, à la prog rock – lent it a kinship with the spirit of punk.

There was even the possibility, in 1977, that Bowie would recruit Michael Rother as his guitarist. As Rother himself explained on his website, he had been surprised to read Bowie’s claim that Rother had declined to work with him. Rother had not; he had been told that Bowie no longer needed him. Rother suspected that wires had been deliberately crossed, possibly by someone at Bowie’s record company anxious about the sluggish sales of his experimental ‘Berlin trilogy’. As was his wont, Bowie feted the avant-garde – in this instance, Neu! and Kraftwerk – while prudently never travelling too far in that direction himself.

Ian Curtis was keen to educate his bandmates in Joy Division by bringing in LPs in his collection for them to listen to and absorb: Neu!’s albums were among them. Their spirit can be heard in the skittering, linear, reflective surfaces of ‘Isolation’ on Closer, for one. ‘This was the first record where I thought, “I want to do this too! And I could do this!” Krautrock was like punk in that way’, confessed Joy Division and New Order’s Stephen Morris.Footnote ¹⁷

For subsequent generations of musicians, Neu! would become emblematic of Krautrock cool – Sonic Youth in particular picked up on this from afar. Under their side moniker of Ciccone Youth, they cut ‘Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening To Neu!’ which featured on 1988’s The Whitey Album, while Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley sat in as replacement for the late Klaus Dinger on the Michael Rother & Friends tour in 2010.

It may well have been the scarcity of Neu! that added to the group’s widespread appeal beyond Sonic Youth. Certainly, for those aficionados for whom the esoteric nature of Krautrock was an attraction, Neu! developed a mythical status. As Julian Cope put it in Krautrocksampler: ‘[T]he music and story of Neu! is a legend with a great canon of work attached to it.’Footnote ¹⁸ For while contemporaries such as Can, Faust, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, and Kraftwerk either continued to perform or at least had their 1970s back catalogues available throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ongoing disputes ensured that Neu! had only circulated as vinyl rarities or on pirated cassettes up until the belated reissue of their first three albums in 2001.

In Neu!’s absence, Stereolab came to the fore, the relentless, 4/4 beat element of their music key to their overall Franco-German homage. This lent further grist to Klaus Dinger’s sense of rage and injustice. Tim Gane of the group recalls Dinger being persuaded to come to one of their concerts to be assured they were not a mere rip-off, only for him to refuse to set foot in the hall once he got there.Footnote ¹⁹ Therefore, and maybe not surprisingly, Stereolab is missing on Brand Neu!, a compilation released in 2009, a year after Dinger’s death. The tribute album reflected the esteem in which Neu! were held, as well as their influence, featuring as it did contributions of self-written material by, among others, Primal Scream, Cornelius, LCD Soundsystem, and even Oasis, as well as Michael Rother himself.

All of this meant that there was a significant delay of at least a quarter of a century before the albums of Neu!, reflective as they were of the early 1970s post-war condition in West Germany, were more widely disseminated (and even then, not to a vast international audience). For while Neu!’s music aggressively, if sometimes implicitly, laid claim to a ‘new’ German identity, it must be admitted that if their mission, and that of Krautrock as a whole, was to remake German popular cultural identity and displace the old Anglo-American hegemony, the mission failed. Anglo-American music styles from rock to hip-hop continue to dominate the musical tastes of pop music listeners in Germany, and we can only talk about the emerging Krautrock renaissance in Germany happening some twenty years after anglophone audiences re-discovered the music.

The contrast between Krautrock’s effect on the national mood and that of Britpop could not be starker. But then, 1990s Britpop was triumphalist, retrograde, and nostalgic in mood, as well as formally conservative. Krautrock was the very opposite of these things in every respect: no big chants to sing along to, silently haunted by past trauma and ruin, invested in future prospects, and musically difficult, which made it a tough sell to West Germans (like any other mainstream audience). This certainly applied to Neu!, whose innovations and departure from commercial musical norms inevitably cost them in terms of sales, not least domestically.

However, Neu! did help profoundly impact perceptions of West German identity as others in Europe and America saw it, working to break down ubiquitous stereotypes and aiding the healthy regeneration of the country’s reputation internationally. At the same time, if not wholly at the behest of Neu! or Krautrock generally, post-war West Germany has undertaken civic acts of reparation and self-cleansing: it is not in the same place it was in 1968, and time alone has seen to that. Meanwhile, with each successive generation and the temporal distance West Germans put between themselves and World War II, the music of Neu! – its immaculate surfaces, rippling with underlying drama and emotion – remains, ‘Für immer’, forever, on offer as a paradigmatic product of West Germany.

Essential Listening

• Neu!, Neu! (Brain, 1972)

• Neu!, Neu! 2 (Brain, 1973)

• Neu!, Neu! 75 (Brain, 1975)

• La Düsseldorf, La Düsseldorf (Teldec, 1976)

• Michael Rother, Dreaming (Grönland, 2020)

Listed among the handful of prominent Krautrock groups lies Faust, who were a self-described ‘amalgam of eight people, and the only thing they had in common was the fact that they belonged to the male species’.Footnote ¹ They are the first band after Can and Neu! on leading American online music publication Pitchfork‘s Best Krautrock list (an aggregate ranking compiled from reviews as far back as 2001).Footnote ² Academic research on the band is non-existent prior to Arne Koch’s 2009 article, and critical efforts before that, such as Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler, have disseminated either false or highly exaggerated information often perpetuated by the band members’ elusive and contradictory responses to direct questions. It is therefore a challenge to academically assess the band based on any solid statement, researchers like Koch, Wilson, and Adelt having been left to speculate both Faust’s history and intentions based on scattered anecdotes.

Furthermore, Faust’s abrasive sound is unlike other Krautrock bands. Rather than the driving motorik beats and kosmische synthesiser soundscapes, Faust created experimental cut-ups incorporating any noise imaginable, reaching solipsistically for ‘the sound of yourself listening’.Footnote ³ The reactions of listeners to Faust’s dissonance range from surreal laughter to horrified confusion; Faust’s music is not social music, and tracing the lineage of their influence creates a complicated path with no easily distinguished progenitors and inheritors.

While their acclaim was not immediately felt, Faust would be appreciated for decades to come. The band’s legacy leaves a fractured gaze into a world of invention that reacted against the contemporary prevailing norms of Anglo-American rock music. Faust aimed to find a specifically German approach to inject the established rock mythos with avant-garde experimentation, mixing noise, and radical aesthetics within a Romantic-Dada spirit.

Chance Encounters: Formation, 1969

In 1969, Polydor approached journalist Uwe Nettelbeck to create a German rival to The Beatles. In Hamburg, Nettelbeck found Nukleus (Jean-Hervé Péron on bass, Rudolf Sosna on guitar, and Gunther Wüsthoff on saxophone) and suggested adding drums, contacting Campylognatus Citelli (Werner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier and Arnulf Meifert on drums and Hans-Joachim Irmler on organ).

For a name, Nettelbeck suggested Richard Wagner’s Norse-influenced opera ‘Götterdämmerung’ (Twilight of the Gods). Band members rejected this by stabbing a note with the name onto Nettelbeck’s front door.Footnote ⁴ Instead, they settled on Faust, which translates as ‘fist’ and references the Faust folk tale, their decision to sign a deal with a major label suggesting they ‘sold their souls’, much as Faust does to Mephistopheles as portrayed most famously in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1808 play. These foundations, and Nettelbeck’s love of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick,Footnote ⁵ suggest a Romanticist mindset nestled within their musical experimentation.

In 1970, Faust recorded two tracks for a demo in an abandoned air-raid shelter: ‘Baby’, a psychedelic jam sung in falsetto, and ‘Lieber Herr Deutschland’ (Dear Mr Germany), a collage of protest shouts and improvised noise, followed by steady rock accompanying a mumbled recitation of a washing machine manual. The political reaction against consumerism targets the machine’s destruction of conscious thought, comparing political organisation with mechanic automation and illustrating the necessity of individual autonomy.Footnote ⁶

Polydor signed the group after hearing the demo, providing full studio equipment in a converted schoolhouse/commune in small-town Wümme in north Germany. Kurt Graupner (described as ‘a straight mind’Footnote ⁷ when compared to the rest of the odd cohort) sat beside Uwe Nettelbeck and tinkered behind the production desk, finding new ways to process and organise the chaotic sounds. Equipment was wired through the house so members could record new sounds from the comfort of their beds. Television and radio were prohibited, blocking outside influences. Artists and girlfriends occasionally visited the site, which was a hotspot for ‘hippie’ living and far-left politics. Nevertheless, Faust’s ethos could not easily be defined as ‘hippie’ or ‘radical’. The music often attacked ‘flower-power’ sensibilities with claustrophobic noise, and Irmler claimed later that while ‘you can’t make music while being political’, he felt that they ‘were not really a political group’.Footnote ⁸ Even though the protest recordings and the clenched fist of their debut’s cover art lampshade a flirtation with the political, ideological unity is erased in the large band’s multiplicity of potential intentions and perspectives.

Their German heritage contributed to what commune frequenter (and later collaborator) Peter Blegvad described as ‘a need for a radical exorcism of their [the German peoples’] recent past’.Footnote ⁹ Faust were of a generation shielded from the horrors of Nazism yet living in the shadow it had left over perceptions of German culture. Faust acknowledged the paradoxes of these cultural tensions but sought past it to discover new states of being. Critic Pierro Scaruffi stated, ‘Faust had little or no interest in psychedelia, and even less interest in the universe. They were (morbidly) fascinated by the human psyche in the 20th century.’Footnote ¹⁰ Support for this claim runs deep, such as in a manifesto issued in 1972, wherein they claimed they were influenced by ‘the Heisenberg principle, anti-matter, relativity, Hitler, relativity, cybernetics, D.N.A., game theory, etc.’.Footnote ¹¹ While several ‘influences’ directly reference German identity, some are purely physical or biological, each reflecting an aspect of that over-arching nature from which the individual could never free itself, against which the individual is found helpless in the world.

The band’s music comes out of the limitations of each member’s socio-psychological states, but also resists these limits through collaboration, all in search of new frontiers of expression and being. Much like Dada and Fluxus artists, Faust acted on a need to eschew all authority and form, to react to the constraints of modernity and industrialised society with not only a recognition of but a commitment to the absurd. Indeed, this quest was always Romantic in nature. Tzara claimed: ‘Dada was born of a moral need … that man, at the centre of all creations of the spirit, must affirm his primacy over notions emptied of all substance.’Footnote ¹²

This relates to Northrop Frye’s claim that the Romantic hero gains his individualist power from nature as separated from civilisation, a power that civilisation supposedly lacks.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, Faust wished to rediscover man’s supposed primacy in reaction to modernist nihilism. Escaping to their commune and combining psychoactive drugs with ‘hippie’ spirituality, Faust were in search of thought at the edge of the eternally fleeting present, lacking essence and meaning, but embodying momentum and physicality. To explain, Faust wrote an English manifesto (with the help of fellow musician Peter Blegvad) on their 1973 tour, wherein they declared:

The goal was not only to discover the enlightened state of present awareness and absurdity but to create music that destroys the constraints limiting the individual from achieving that state. A group consciousness takes hold both in the communal living style and introduction of mechanical ‘black boxes’ to the musical processes, whereby any musician could alter another’s sound by the quick flip of a switch, with effects such as ring modulation and extreme echoes rendering instruments’ timbre and performance unrecognisable.Footnote ¹⁵ Musicianship was purposefully removed from the performance, distorted and filtered through Graupner and Nettelbeck’s chaotic mixes.

That said, the role of these overseers adds composition to the chaos. The futurist aesthetics of fascist spirit in the sounds of machinery and protest (‘Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?’) clash with moments of pastoral folk (‘Chère Chambre’) and psychedelic improvisations (‘Krautrock’), but nevertheless, the aesthetics function on their own logic outside the crutch of exploiting associative signs. Rather than create a spectacle of disorientation, Faust make music that functions, as if ideological, as a cohesive whole, composing noise to avoid pop music’s repetition of timbres and forms. What monomania this ‘wholeness’ points to is without a singular rhetoric, instead opening itself up to multiplicities of differing meanings. Ian MacDonald, in his review in the New Musical Express, once described this paradoxical form by claiming:

This suggests an acousmatic process, blurring this original ‘picture’ to make sounds displaced with new states of reference. As Péron suggests, approaching the albums in chronological order both mirrors the development of 1970s upheaval and Faust’s own philosophy and artistry.Footnote ¹⁷

Experiments in Sound and Spirit: Faust (1971)

Polydor announced the band’s debut as follows: ‘Faust have taken the search for new sounds farther than any other group.’Footnote ¹⁸ As if in defence, Cope argued, ‘Faust were brought up with middle-European dances and a staple of folk and tradition which was not 4/4 … German bands could get far more complex than U.S. and British bands would ever dare.’Footnote ¹⁹ While his description displays a tendency to exoticism, it aligns with the band’s own postures, tapping into clichéd half-thoughts of Germanic pagan roots uncomfortably associated with Nazi imagery, reclaiming rather than abandoning their presence.

The opening song ‘Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?’ fades in with a thick, distorted wall of radio hum, washing out hooks from The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, and reworking them into a fluid whole while ironically quoting them to contrast the mess of dissonant marches and foghorns to follow. Deranged, drunken voices join in, clapping and chanting or screaming into the torment of industrial hell. Analysing the lyrics here seems futile, the words forming an exquisite cadaver. Being mostly written in English, the album’s lyrics were meant to be heard by English-speaking audiences abroad, creating a denied expectation for meaning and creating confusion. It is not the conscious semantics, but language’s unconscious energy – the rhyme and meter – that end up possessing the listener.

The next two tracks carry the album’s visceral, psychedelic flow through messy jams and abstract soundscapes, deconstructing the boundaries of music and noise in composition. Field recordings give attention to space, pairing ‘private’ sounds of creaking doors and clinking dishes with ‘public’ sounds of machinery, producing an indistinguishable mass that, as in Adelt’s applied analysis of Lipsitz to Krautrock, creates a hybrid space that both offers revolution and creates culture anew.Footnote ²⁰ Lyrics dismantle the supposed difference between the primitive and modern: for example, on ‘Meadow Meal’, Faust state that to avoid becoming ‘a meadow meal’ eaten by wild beasts, man industrialises, wherein he must ‘stand in line, keep in line’, only to ‘lose [his] hand’ in a red (i.e. blood-stained) accident. Faust suggests that industrialisation, rather than solving man’s problems, simply rearranges them into new, obfuscated forms. Even these more serious moments are interrupted by humour, pitch-shifted voices, and jarring dynamic shifts, resisting even their own systems in a carnival of Bakhtinian-Dionysian gestures.

Most explanatory perhaps of the band’s whole project are the closing lyrics of ‘Miss Fortune’, a deadpan manifesto bouncing across the stereo image, quipping ‘Are we to be or not to be?’ and ‘Voltaire … told you to be free / and you obeyed’. In consequence of these questions and demands, Faust conclude: ‘We have to decide which is important: … / A system and a theory, / or our wish to be free?’

Faust confronts the listener here, rhetorically pointing to a humanist liberation from disillusioning societal expectations, supporting inaction in the final line’s attack on praxis, reaffirming the purpose of Faust’s music: to liberate the listener from those contexts and expectations to which he is enslaved, and invent new values. To experience ‘the sound of yourself listening’ is to understand how to experience reality. This single proclamation does not explain the music in an all-too singular narrative, but it does invite the listener to participate in Faust’s ‘here and now’.

The album went up for sale in October 1971 and sold less than 1,000 copies in Germany. To promote their music, the group would play at Hamburg’s Musikhalle, fifty speakers surrounding the audience as if geared to play Stockhausen. Critics and locals prepared for the show, but equipment malfunctioned, and the performance devolved into ‘an improvised happening’.Footnote ²¹

English sales of the record comparatively succeeded, mostly thanks to the unique packaging. Radio DJ John Peel fondly described his encounter: ‘When I saw their extraordinary first LP with its equally extraordinary sleeve and felt that, regardless of the music within, I had to acquire one.’Footnote ²² The sleeve and vinyl disc were transparent except for a black and white X-ray image of a hand clenched into a fist, communicating revolt or an industrial-zen look into man’s (and, being an album cover, advertising’s) emptiness, making the cover into one of Krautrock’s definitive images.

Illustration 10.1 Faust in Wümme, 1971.

© Jürgen D. Ensthaler.

Stepping Backwards: So Far (1972)

In response to Polydor’s dismay at the poor sales, Faust made quick changes, kicking out Meifert for being too ‘conventionally con-scientious’,Footnote ²³ and making their second release far more accessible. In place of dizzying cut-ups and massive suites are songs with melodies and riff-focused, yet subversive jams. In the pastoral piece ‘On the Way to Abamäe’, listeners find they have been deceived by a flute revealing itself to be a synthesiser, complicating the boundary of mechanic and organic. Chord progressions throughout are complex, yet harmonious, comparable to Soft Machine’s particular style of jazz-rock. But snuck into the B-Side where Polydor might not be listening as closely, ‘Mamie is Blue’ assaults the listener with metallic percussion, radio buzzes, and distorted guitar, foreshadowing 1980s industrial and EBM.

The lyrics on So Far are naive and silly, yet subtly hint at their debut’s themes of alienation. ‘I’ve got my Car and my TV’ echoes Zappa’s critiques of consumerism, while ‘Mamie is Blue’ comments on Germany’s generational issues stemming from an inability to discuss denazification.Footnote ²⁴ Most direct, lyrics from ‘ … In the Spirit’ read: ‘It’s never you / it must be others / sleeping tight / thinking of the past / I wonder how long / is this gonna last?’ While some may ask this question in relation to the track’s obnoxious, parodic Schlager-jazz, Faust attacks Germany’s inability to reconcile with its past. The lyrics attack individuals living in blissful ignorance, further problematising German identity rather than addressing Nazi issues.

So Far contains the Krautrock hit ‘It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’. For seven minutes, the track features Diermaier’s monotonous quarter-note tom pattern, played on a deliberately dented drum,Footnote ²⁵ before the introduction of jangly guitar, keyboards, and a chanted repetition of the title lyric. The naturalist lyrics and mantra of ‘A-Ohm’ at the end of each line suggest an imitation of Native American music. Bluesy harmonica and saxophone, a shift from Wüsthoff’s cacophonous, yet mathematically patterned free jazz (‘typical of the dry humour and systematic thinking of the northern German’,Footnote ²⁶ said Péron) to a pastiche of Afro-jazz, are heard partway through the track, transporting listeners to an America of Faust’s making.

This is not the only example of Krautrock’s fetishistic interest in Native Americans, most recognisable when Gila named their 1973 album Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee after Dee Brown’s 1970 book. While motivations vary, one that held appeal for these German bands was the discovery of a common identity in ‘primal man’, idealising a connection between America’s Natives and Germany’s pagans. The reference brings awareness to the horrors of British and American colonialism, horrors that Brits and Americans supposed their own culture to have avoided – and are still less acknowledged than the Holocaust – and horrors that were topical to the unrest leading up to 1973’s Wounded Knee massacre. Recognition of this controversial appropriation is fundamental to understanding Krautrock’s goals and cultural context.

Perhaps due to the song’s length, Polydor didn’t think ‘Rainy Day’ would be a hit, instead releasing the album’s title track as a single. The album and single hit the press and, even with favourable reviews, sold worse than the debut.

The Eternal Now: Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973)

With tensions rising, the band distanced themselves from the label and sought to collaborate. Tony Conrad was in New York, playing violin in La Monte Young’s renowned minimalist band The Dream Syndicate. However, he was disillusioned, stating the scene was ‘too boring’.Footnote ²⁷ By this time, he had gained some notoriety for his 1966 short film The Flicker, which consisted of strobing black-and-white frames for thirty minutes. The movie often made viewers sick, even giving them seizures, so Conrad justified: ‘I had felt that my own experience with flicker was a transporting experience in the way that movies affect the imagination at their best by sweeping one away from reality into a completely different psychic environment.’Footnote ²⁸ This transcendental minimalism informed Faust’s jam-oriented aesthetics in their collaboration.

Outside the Dream Syndicate was recorded over three days in semi-improvised sessions led by Conrad, who found time to visit Wümme between showing his films and helping La Monte Young perform in Berlin. The songs were basic in construction, the first starting with a steady, monotonous drum and bass paired with long, buzzing drones. These drones would hardly change throughout the song, but Péron played ‘a deep bass note tuned to the tonic on Conrad’s violin and … the drummer “tuned” to a rhythm that corresponded to the vibrations’,Footnote ²⁹ invoking the kind of harmonic and rhythmic interplay that would inform the Totalist-rock of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chrystham. The B-side is more energetic, but the harmonic content never shifts from the initial tonic key, the composition driven by atmosphere rather than any melody or riff.

Many listeners and critics argue the album expresses Conrad’s creative voice louder than Faust’s, but said evaluation fails to recognise in it Faust’s ethos: the embodiment of an eternal present. Outside the Dream Syndicate is The Velvet Underground’s drone-rock taken to a transcendental extreme, melody denied and exchanged for a complete focus on soundscape. The effect is a joined expression of Faust’s and Conrad’s ethos, pushing art’s boundaries to transform the mind.

Surprising Success: The Faust Tapes (1973)

With Polydor refusing to support Faust any longer, Uwe Nettelbeck reached out to Simon Draper and Richard Branson of the up-and-coming Virgin Records in London. The label started as a shop and mailing service importing Krautrock releases, but after finding success, became a professional label.Footnote ³⁰ Mike Oldfield’s classic Tubular Bells was released alongside records by Gong, Tangerine Dream, and the new Faust release, which sold for forty-eight pence, the price of a seven-inch single. The radical idea: Nettelbeck would offer the tapes ‘for nothing’ if the label would sell the record for no profit.Footnote ³¹ The price would be just enough for the label to cover pressing costs, and the action would not increase profit, but notoriety for the band and label.

Part of the record deal allowed Faust to record at Virgin’s studio in Oxfordshire, forcing the band to leave for England. While the liner notes claim the tapes were compiled from Wümme recording sessions, Irmler claimed the collection ‘was not old material’.Footnote ³² Songs interrupt each other constantly, tracks often less than thirty seconds in length earmarking lengthier ones. This approach allowed Faust to introduce musical moments without concern for an over-arching continuity, compiling a barrage of experimental feats not to be reproduced until a decade later by post-punk bands like Swell Maps and This Heat.

The Faust Tapes’ longer songs are among Faust’s most lyrical. The laid-back psychedelia of So Far returns with the mature balladry of ‘Flashback Caruso’ and the softly plucked chanson of ‘Chère Chambre’, while ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’ screeches and noisily stumbles along. Lyrics beckon to a counter-cultural hope for peace and love, inviting listeners ‘bring our minds together’ and ‘stretch out time / dive into my mind’. A dichotomy forms between nature and industry. Nature evokes sensuality, as in the ‘rainbow bridge’ and ‘dancing girls’ of ‘Flashback Caruso’, or, in ‘Der Baum’ (The Tree), the description of a woman’s ‘bum’ (‘see her lying on the grass / must be a nice feeling for her ass’) and winter’s cold winds leading said ‘bum’ to bed. It is notable that ‘Baum’ translates to the phallic ‘tree’, the title’s pun joining the ‘bum’ with the ‘tree’.

Meanwhile, industry awakens an individualist apathy, as in the ‘man hard working song’ on ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’, the singer imitating a factory manager, snarling ‘If it means money / this is time … because you are crying and I don’t listen / because you are dying and I just whistle’, all behind the lamentation of pained teeth and feet. This is Faust’s strongest anti-capitalist statement, the singer mocking working-class listeners buying into an alienating, middle-class ideal.

The song’s refrain seems to change with repetition’s desensitisation, with Cope proposing the alternative interpretation ‘Chet-vah Buddha, Cherr-loopiz’ before Faust accepted another fan’s ‘Schempal Buddah, ship on a better sea!’Footnote ³³ Phrases are de-territorialised from meaning and re-territorialised into idyllic nonsense, as if to suggest, even in the subtext of a joke, a hidden liberation in industry’s mechanical repetition only if its meanings can be reclaimed from selfishness and exploitation. The Faust Tapes concludes with ‘Chère Chambre’. Its French poetic prose suggests that – as society’s limits fail at the whim of human will – rather than to rely on empty promises of an easy life of creature comforts, we have to connect our pasts, both socio-culturally, and introspectively, to the changes that make up our selves.

Bearing a sleeve of reviews and a note claiming it was ‘not intended for release’ with ‘no post-production work’, the record was released in May 1973. Owing to the cheap price, the record was a hit, reaching number eighteen on Melody Maker’s chart before controversially being removed. Virgin Records did not calculate taxes into the cost of production, and 60,000 records lost the label and band 2,000 pounds.Footnote ³⁴ Not all the listeners enjoyed the strange music, but many did, and with rave reviews and a (pre-recorded) performance on John Peel’s radio programme in March,Footnote ³⁵ Faust toured England and France to promote the album.

The reputation of these live performances is legendary. Following the academic-inclined opener Henry Cow, Faust would clutter the stage with machinery, TVs, and pinball machines, upon which members might contribute a barrage of balls and bells into the soundscape. Sets would shift from written songs to more improvised, playful material, and would often stretch to over two hours in length, with varying sound quality. Members were noted to have been shy and nervous at times, perhaps owing to their history of fault-ridden shows, but were nevertheless a hit. Some shows were still a disaster, with hydraulic drills dangerously firing cement chips into an unsuspecting audience,Footnote ³⁶ but these incidents only added to the band’s rising prominence.

Under Pressure: Faust IV (1973)

Faust’s fourth and final 1970s album was created out of demand for a new release to market with the band’s fresh surge in popularity. Members of Faust felt alienated, living in England and facing the stress of their first tour, contributing to a notable departure from their previous work’s abrasive experiments into conventional song structures, at least by Faust’s standards. This change in sound estranged Faust’s fans, who considered Faust IV a ‘sell-out’.Footnote ³⁷

The album was recorded in June 1973, only one month after the last album’s release. Richard Branson invited the band to The Manor in Oxfordshire, his residential studio for the label. But all was not well, as band members disagreed with Branson’s desire for a marketable product, and recordings stretched further beyond the intended schedule. Nettelbeck dismissed the band to finish the album himself. Making up for lost time, ‘Picnic on a Frozen River’ from So Far was reworked with an increased tempo and intricate multitracking, and the previously performed ‘Krautrock’ and previously released ‘It’s a Bit of Pain’ bookend the album.

‘Krautrock’ opens with walls of pulsing fuzz, mixing various instruments into an indecipherable sound-mass. After a timeless seven minutes, the drums kick in, and the song, like Neu! before it, creates a simultaneous feeling of motion and stillness. Contrastingly, ‘Krautrock’ is neither meditative nor utopian, but violent and noisy. As Irmler said of the song, ‘We are not those “krauts” that you think we are and who you hate so much but we also don’t play that “rock” that you want to force upon us. So we said, let’s play a really heavy song and then we’ll call it “Krautrock”.’Footnote ³⁸

The album continues with the dreamy ‘Jennifer’. Lyrics describe the titular woman with ‘burning hair’ and ‘yellow jokes’, while the bass follows with a laid-back, two-note jam. The sparse repetition creates a sense of unease, which collapses into cacophony. The Summer of Love has died, and in its wake grows a claustrophobic ennui, tension without the release of a cadence. Noise floods the composition before disappearing in a mess of detuned piano. The song is a bridge between the naïveté of the 1960s and the moody introspection of the 1990s.

The rest of the album consists of focused, energetic jams. Gone are the cut-ups, replaced instead by cohesive, melodic riffs interspersed by clouds of atmosphere. ‘Run’ (mistitled ‘Läuft … Läuft’) reminds one of Terry Riley’s minimalist synths, while anticipating Eno’s ambience, while ‘Läuft … Läuft’ (mistitled ‘Giggy Smile’) anticipates the orchestration of 2000s indie-folk. It’s hard to say the music is inventive, but Faust’s unique, playful style distinguishes these jams from blander jazz-rock stylings. The closer, ‘It’s a Bit of Pain’, incorporates a painful screeching noise to comically interrupt what sounds like The Byrds’ psychedelic country rock over a Swedish reading of Germaine Greer’s feminist manifesto The Female Eunuch.

Released with a cover of empty musical staffs, Faust IV was a commercial failure, Faust’s reputation and change in sound inhibiting new listeners and discouraging old fans respectively from buying the album. But to quote Pitchfork’s retroactive review, ‘the record’s rep has mostly recouped … it’s an easy starting point [into the band’s music]’.Footnote ³⁹

Epilogue, or: The Death and Return of a Legend (1986) and Other Releases

After Faust IV’s commercial failure, Virgin Records was not happy with Faust’s refusal to create a marketable product. Some band members were bitter with Nettelbeck’s musical and packaging decisions, made without consulting the band. This caused Irmler and Sosna to quit and Nettelbeck to return to Hamburg. The remaining members replaced the missing musicians to tour again and, sensing their demise, returned to Germany.

Without Nettelbeck, Faust attempted one last recording and entered Musicland Studios in Munich, where Irmler recounts meeting the owner Giorgio Moroder, who had recently produced and co-written Donna Summer’s international disco hit ‘Love to Love You Baby’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The band claimed to be from Virgin, directing any hotel and recording costs to the label, and recorded for a couple weeks. When Virgin received the bill, the band attempted to escape with the tapes, but were arrested by police and bailed out by their parents. A low-quality promotional cassette later surfaced as a bootleg.

Faust subsequently disappeared. Chris Cutler (Henry Cow) opted to re-release several Faust records on his Recommended Records label along with unreleased material, compiling 71 Minutes of Faust. The compilation is a notable addition to the band’s legacy, documenting quality songs from their demo up to their initial demise. Cutler also released Return of a Legend (1986) and The Last LP (1988), each repurposing material released through bootlegs or to be released on the BBC Sessions (2001).

Interest in Faust grew as more popular musicians (i.e. Merzbow, Joy Division, Radiohead etc.) cited them as an influence. Some members returned to record 1994’s Rien, an industrial-tinged take on their older material. The band have released albums since then, touring in two separate configurations and often collaborating with guest musicians. They have resumed elaborate live shows, providing a soundtrack for Nosferatu, or droning while separated by miles of desert in Death Valley, California.Footnote ⁴¹

It appears the band are not trying to surpass the historical impact their old material has had, nor repackage the music for a new generation, but are simply, as they always have done, making music for themselves. Indeed, if anything, the band are often attempting to solidify the legacy of their old material, playing fan favourites and keeping the music in circulation. Independent record label Bureau B has re-released nearly all 1970s Faust releases in 2021 in one box set, including the original Polydor demo, higher-quality and more complete recordings of the fifth album, and previously unreleased tracks from the original Wümme tapes, displaying the band’s obfuscated penchant for the space-rock jams of Pink Floyd or Gong. The release will prove essential to any efforts, scholastic or fan-driven, to understand the band’s explorations.

Throughout their career, Faust have functioned within the constraints of the contemporary popular rock band’s mythos, mirroring The Beatles’ studio experimentation, Jimi Hendrix’s use of noise, and The Beach Boys’ symphonic approach to composition. But Faust are remembered not for meeting the paradigms established by these bands, but by creating a new syntax that extended these paradigms, creating something recognisable, yet extreme and disruptive, a new space where the Romantic hero flourishes in poetic expression divorced from civilisation’s rigid repetitions and where a new identity, both German and international, can thrive. While not as technological as Kraftwerk, as professional as Can, or as cosmic as Ash Ra Tempel, Faust pushed a playfully experimental, yet existential edge into the fringes of experimental rock music.

Essential Listening

• Faust, Faust (Polydor, 1971)

• Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate (Caroline, 1973)

• Faust, The Faust Tapes (Virgin, 1973)

• Faust, Faust IV (Virgin, 1973)

The track ‘By This River’, on the Brian Eno album Before and After Science (1977), is structured very simply; a repeated keyboard figure, placed against a descending bassline which ends on the track’s relative minor. The track captures a moment of absolute serenity – a moment where any sense of a past or a future collapses into an eternal present. The instrumentation contains no drums; indeed, there is no percussion on the track at all. The time is kept by the metronomic keyboard bassline; above this, a piano, an electric piano, a synthesiser, and what sounds like a celeste weave simple harmonic and melodic patterns around the keyboard figure.

‘By This River’, however, is not a solo track. It is a collaboration with the musicians Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of the avant-garde electronic group Cluster. It grew from a specific moment in Eno’s and Cluster’s careers. Roedelius, Moebius, and the guitarist Michael Rother (a former short-term member of Kraftwerk, and one half of the influential duo Neu!) had come together to form the group Harmonia, and by the time that Eno came to record with them both Cluster and Harmonia had released albums that were to prove very influential in the development of ambient music and electronica more generally. Cluster’s Zuckerzeit (1974) and Sowiesoso (1976), and Harmonia’s Musik von Harmonia (1974) and Deluxe (1975), had no impact on either the German music scene of the time or the kind of European and American audiences that Kraftwerk could command; but crucially for the future reputation of the musicians, they attracted the attention of tastemakers such as David Bowie, who contemplated asking Rother to play on the sessions for ‘Heroes’ (1977), and Eno, who was going through a period of accelerated artistic transformation, from the louche experimental songwriter of his first two albums to the ambient artist of Another Green World (1975), and beyond.

Eno’s fame means that, in most publications about the group(s) in English, the relatively short time he spent working with Roedelius, Moebius, and Rother in Germany has tended to dominate discussions of their work. In this chapter, I would like to reverse that narrative, and to look, not at the relation between Cluster, Harmonia, Eno, and the wider history of electronica, but at the way that Cluster’s music itself changed during the 1970s. This was part of a wider transformation in Krautrock. It was also related to the setting in which the bands produced their music. I will argue that the changes in Cluster’s music (and Harmonia’s) is intimately related to the fact that the musicians settled in an out-of-the-way part of rural Germany – Forst, in Lower Saxony, on the banks of the river Weser.

From the City to the Country

The musicians who went on to form Cluster first came together in a setting that was as remote as possible from the rural idyll captured in ‘By This River’. The motive force for their collaboration came at first, not from either Moebius or Roedelius, but from Conrad Schnitzler, an avant-garde musician and artist who was based, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Berlin. Unlike other Krautrock groups (Can, for example, or Kraftwerk), neither Moebius nor Roedelius had much formal training in music. Moebius (born in Switzerland in 1944), had received some instrumental instruction when he was growing up (at this point, his main instrument was piano). However, his formal musical training was set to one side when he encountered popular American music, and rather than pursuing his instrumental studies he went on to train as an artist in Berlin. Roedelius (born in 1934) had an especially complex history. A native of Berlin, he had been at various times a child actor, an unwilling member of the Hitlerjugend, a prisoner of the Stasi, a postman, a refuse collector, and a masseur. Their collaboration began at the Zodiak Arts Lab in Berlin, a music venue co-founded by Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler in 1968.

The Arts Lab did not exist for long but during its brief life the loose collection of musicians and artists who used the venue became influential figures in the development of some of the styles associated with Krautrock. It provided a venue for the agit prop rock group, Ton Steine Scherben, the jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and the psychedelic music of the early Ash Ra Tempel.Footnote ¹ In particular, though, the venue was crucial in the formation of Tangerine Dream, one of the earliest of the Krautrock bands to become both widely known and successful. The very earliest version of the group (captured on their first album, Electronic Meditation (1970)) is, in retrospect, a fascinating mixture of the two most influential musical styles that would grow from the work of the Arts Lab. Two of Tangerine Dream’s founder members – Edgar Froese and Klaus Schulze – were drawn to the expansive soundscapes of what would come to be known as kosmische Musik. The third, Conrad Schnitzler, was by his own admission drafted in as a non-musician, on the understanding that he would disrupt the harmonic structure of the music. The resulting album is best described as a collision between Pink Floyd’s early cosmic improvisations, and Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète. Froese and Schulze went on to develop long-form electronic music, making heavy use of synths, sequencers, and the latest musical and studio technologies; Schnitzler formed the trio Kluster with Moebius and Roedelius, and set off in a very different direction.

The beginning of Moebius’ and Roedelius’ musical collaboration was, significantly, as spontaneous as the music they were to create. They met in a bar in Berlin’s Charlottenburg area; according to Moebius, Roedelius and Schnitzler simply asked: ‘Hey, Moebius, do you want to play with us in our band?’Footnote ² It is not simply that there is a neat correlation between the musicians’ first meeting and the style of music they produced. From the outset, the onus was placed on the act of spontaneous creation, rather than on the careful preparation of previously composed music. This was, at times, problematic – Harmonia proved unsustainable largely because Michael Rother wished to rehearse and perform material the band had previously released. On the other hand, it gave Kluster (the name adopted by the original trio), Cluster, and Harmonia a way of working that enabled them to create music that was, as it proved, uniquely responsive to the interaction of musicians within a specific environment.

However, this is not to say that they automatically moved into territory that Eno would later occupy. The music produced by Kluster, in the first instance, was if anything the antithesis of the kind of music that Eno, Moebius, and Roedelius would go on to create. Schnitzler was affiliated to Fluxus, a loosely organised group of artists whose goal was the disruption of the outcomes and practices of art. For Schnitzler, this tended in practice to take the form of an assault on the conventional markers of acceptable music: tone, rhythm, harmony, and above all melody. As a result, the first Kluster albums, Klopfzeichen (1970); Zwei-Osterei (1971), and Eruption (1971), are rather challenging listens – made even more challenging by the spoken text that was imposed on much of the music by their label (the Catholic Schwann-Verlag).

Kluster was an unstable grouping. Schnitzler, by his own admission, was a ‘harsh guy’,Footnote ³ and his approach proved to be incompatible with that of the other two musicians. However, the trio prefigured Cluster in three very important ways. Firstly, the music was created spontaneously; the first three albums were recorded (with the exception of the unwanted vocal samples) in the same amount of time it takes to play the tracks. Secondly, the music was made from whatever elements were to hand. Synthesiser technology was too expensive for Kluster to afford; or, and they thought of themselves as non-musicians, so they improvised, using what instruments and effects they had at their disposal.

Thirdly (and most significantly) the trio left their base in Berlin, and started to tour. In doing so, they removed themselves from the emerging musical framework that groups like Tangerine Dream and artists like Klaus Schulze were beginning to map out. West Berlin, as much as any place could be in the dispersed musical systems that constituted Krautrock, was the home of kosmische Musik; in divorcing themselves from the city, Kluster, and then Cluster, began to mark out a different musical territory – one that, as it happened, led them to create work that musicians like Brian Eno would find particularly congenial. The ensuing collaboration between the German musicians and the British music conceptualist hence exemplified Krautrock’s transnational quality: Cluster’s de-territorialisation from its original context made it particularly suitable to travel across cultural borders and enter into exchange processes of hybridisation.

Shorn of Schnitzler, Moebius’ and Roedelius’ music began to change. The first album they released as a duo, Cluster 71 (1971), was markedly less assaultive than anything released by Kluster, although it could not be said to have embraced any conventional notions of musical harmony. The music does now have structuring elements, in particular a series of low electronic pulses that run behind each one of the album’s three tracks. Cluster II (1972) moves closer to the kind of music that later came to be associated with the band. In particular, the track ‘Im Süden’ (In the South) is based on two simple repeated melodic fragments – a four-note rising guitar arpeggio, and a contrasting, angular four-note figure, also played on guitar. Shortened, and with a rhythm track behind it, ‘Im Süden’ could fit neatly on Zuckerzeit (1974), Sowiesoso (1976), or Musik von Harmonia (1974).

The change discernible on record was mirrored in the duo’s live performances. Gradually, they moved away from the kind of abrasive soundscapes of Kluster and Cluster’s first album, towards music that showed an emerging interest in rather more conventional ideas of harmony (if not of structure). When asked, Moebius was dismissive of the idea that this change was born of a desire to be more commercially successful; rather, he saw it as an understandable outcome, when two self-declared non-musicians found themselves involved in creating music. Partly, then, the progression from Cluster II to Zuckerzeit is explicable in terms of simple competence; however, it is also at least partly attributable to a change in the band’s location and lifestyle.

In 1971, Roedelius and Moebius were given the chance to live and to set up a studio in Forst, in the Lower Saxony region of north Germany. An antiques dealer had been given the lease on buildings hard by the river Weser. The buildings themselves were historically significant, having been in place since the Renaissance; as part of the condition of the lease, the dealer promised to develop a cultural centre on the site. Forst did more than give the musicians a secure base. As Roedelius put it, in a 2010 interview with The Quietus: ‘Cluster without Forst is unthinkable.’Footnote ⁴ Fixing and maintaining the properties in Forst required a great deal of hard work, but according to Roedelius, the site itself had an impact on the band’s music. A clear difference can be seen when one compares the music that Cluster and Harmonia produced in the mid-1970s, with the music produced by Tangerine Dream, Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, and early Popol Vuh – the kind of music loosely described as kosmische Musik. Harden has identified some of the key features as follows:

These features could be realised in a number of ways; there are discernible musical differences between the monumental synth chords of Popol Vuh’s Affenstunde (1970) and Klaus Schulze’s propulsive, sequencer-driven Timewind (1975). However, Harden is right to point out that the general kosmische soundscape has a number of recurring features, which together aim to create a sense of limitless space, free of the taint of the human. Cluster’s – and Harmonia’s – music sounded rather different. Produced on the kind of amended instruments and cheap technology that had been used on earlier albums, the music Cluster/Harmonia produced from Zuckerzeit onwards has, for the most part, a rather more lo-fi quality than the music produced by contemporaries such as Tangerine Dream. This was, as the band admitted, because they had no money; the rhythm machine used on Zuckerzeit, for example, was a cheap, basic Italian model made by Elka.

Their manipulation of this basic piece of technology was, first of all, an economic necessity. The band were never commercially successful. This meant that necessarily, the band found themselves working with simple synths and other instruments (a flute, a cello, and two organs) that they could manipulate. From Phaedra (1974) onwards, Tangerine Dream’s music had the kind of sheen associated with the professional production standards of the time. Cluster’s and Harmonia’s music sounds different; a track like ‘Es war einmal’ (There Once Was) on Sowiesoso has a rather more indistinct production, with the different musical elements seeming to bleed into each other. More than this, the tones employed across the range of Cluster’s and Harmonia’s recordings frequently sound as though they come from manipulated acoustic instruments – and rather than being placed within the soundscape of the production in a fashion that suggests space, they sound as though they have been crowded in together, growing organically around each other. If Schulze’s ‘Echoes of Time’ sounds as though it soundtracks the limitless depths of space, ‘Es war einmal’ sounds as though it comes from the tangled undergrowth of the German countryside.

Illustration 11.1 Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möbius of Cluster, 1970.

© Cluster Archive/Bureau B.

Cluster, Harmonia, Landscape, and Germany

German musicians of the post-1968 generation responded to the complex problems of national identity in various ways; by mocking it (as Amon Düül II did on the album Made in Germany (1975)); by reconnecting with those German cultural traditions interrupted and destroyed by Nazism (as Kraftwerk did); by embracing world music (as Can did); by heading off into space (as the kosmische musicians did); or simply heading away, as fast as the music would allow (Klaus Dinger, the drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf, described the motorik beat he pioneered as the rhythm of endless movement).Footnote ⁶ In general, the most common impulse felt by musicians associated with Krautrock, was to escape the idea of Germany as it currently existed. This could be said even of Kraftwerk, whose escape was both into the future and the past.

Cluster/Harmonia’s escape route was different. The environment of Forst, the Weser, and the surrounding woods was, for Roedelius especially, a crucial influence on the music the band produced. Moebius, by his own admission rather less romantic in outlook than his collaborator, also admitted that Forst had ‘some kind of influence’Footnote ⁷ on their music. Going to the countryside for inspiration was a common trope in the popular music culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s; Rob Young’s Electric Eden (2010) captures the relation between the resurgence of folk music in England between 1968 and 1972, and an idea of the English landscape as simultaneously profoundly familiar and unknowable. American psychedelia was, by 1968, overtaken by musicians who drew on folk and country (such as Gram Parsons, The Byrds, The Band, and The Eagles). A strong strain of pastoral, folk-influenced music ran through British progressive rock, and even, through Led Zeppelin, into early hard rock and heavy metal. For musicians in post-war West Germany, going to the German landscape for inspiration was a rather more overtly problematic idea. From the nation’s formation in 1945, the German countryside functioned as a timeless backdrop to the tumultuous and violent development of the nation.

After the war, this paradoxical relation to the German countryside (as both unchanging and part of a restless, protean nation) was no longer sustainable. After an interim period of four years, the country was split into East and West; the Heimat was no longer whole. Moreover, the country had been conquered as armies had swept over the inviolable German soil from both the East and the West.

Michael Imort, in an essay collected in T. M. Lekan’s 2005 volume Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History, argues that the forest occupies a special place in the German cultural imagination. It is seen as something primeval, something that is tied into the formation of German identity, and, as with so much in the representation of German culture in the twentieth century, this link was used by those who wished to make claims for the ethnic unity and rootedness of the German people:

English musicians like Traffic and early Genesis could retreat to the archetypal English rural location (cottages in the rural home counties) and be sure that, in doing so, they were acting in line with the Zeitgeist. For musicians such as Roedelius and Moebius, in the cultural context of post-war West Germany, the retreat to a rural idyll (the river and woods of their base at Forst) did not carry the same automatically positive implications. It is not that the musicians, and Rother when he came to work with them, improvised music that was imbued by an innate distrust of the German countryside, and the uses to which the idea of an archetypal German landscape had been put. Rather, one of the main musical differences between Krautrock and British prog rock is that progressive musicians in Britain found it very easy to include pastoral elements in their work; Krautrock musicians, almost unanimously, did not. When the countryside figures, it does so as a source of disturbing imagery (compare the front cover of Amon Düül II’s Yeti (1970)) or as something that is tamed, and orderly. The landscape described in passing in Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ is ordered, designed, and mapped out in poster colours, as though designed at the Bauhaus: the green of the verges, the glittering sun, the road stretching out in front of the car.

The musician whose work comes closest to the type of pastoral compositions common in prog rock is Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh. Fricke’s work, from Hosianna Mantra (1972) onwards, makes greater use of acoustic instruments than is the norm for Krautrock; and especially in the soundtracks he composed for Werner Herzog, his music is strongly linked to the representation of primordial, untamed landscape. However, these landscapes are, sometimes, not German; perhaps the most striking marriage of Fricke’s music and Herzog’s images comes in the opening shots of Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972), as monumental block synth chords play over footage of the Spanish expedition and their bearers traversing the narrow mountain paths of the Andes. Where the films are set in Germany and middle Europe, Fricke’s music helps to delineate a landscape that is profoundly unheimlich – the haunted settings of Nosferatu (1979) or the uncanny, disintegrating Alpine landscapes of Heart of Glass (1976).

The musical approach of Cluster/Harmonia was rather different. For one thing, as the quotes from Imort and Lekan might suggest, they were rooted in the German countryside in a way that few other musicians of the time could match. Other groups, such as the Amon Düül collectives, also had rural retreats in Bavaria, but the music produced by Moebius, Roedelius, and the other musicians who came to Forst came into being within a particular landscape, and could not be reproduced outside of the setting in which it was spontaneously composed. Also, as Roedelius pointed out, music was produced at Forst as one part of a cycle of activities necessary to keeping the small commune going. Even Eno, who had a far higher international profile than any of the German musicians at Forst, was expected to play his part. Lastly, for Roedelius at least, the idea of being surrounded by natural sound was itself an inspiration. As Roedelius put it in 2015: ‘Listening to the richness of sound in nature is something you should be aware of, to select what you really want to do, to find your own tone language.’Footnote ¹⁰

In practice, given the comparatively low-tech instruments the musicians worked with, the music produced at Forst suggests a landscape completely different to that created by the kosmische groups. To go through Harden’s typology point by point: whereas kosmische musicians oversaw the creation of large, unrealistic, and non-static acoustical spaces, Cluster/Harmonia created acoustical spaces that were smaller, and crowded with detail. Kosmische musicians focused on the manipulation or generation of sounds with little or no correlation with acoustic instrumentation. In Cluster’s and Harmonia’s work, manipulated acoustic instruments take their place beside electronically generated sounds, and as for timbre, all are given a production that emphasises the roughness and the grain of the music, rather than the sheen of kosmische Musik. It is not so much that there is a direct connection between the implied subject matter of Cluster’s and Harmonia’s music and the countryside around Forst; rather, it is that the soundscape the music creates is far more earthbound than that of Tangerine Dream – closer to Eno’s idea of music as landscape, than to music as cosmic journey. In the last section of this chapter, I will examine two contrasting pieces of music – one from Cluster and one from Harmonia – in order to suggest the soundscape the musicians working at Forst created, and its relation to the natural world in which they worked.

Tangled in the Landscape

First, I want to look at ‘Rosa’ from Zuckerzeit, Cluster’s third album and the first to be recorded after the band took up residence in Forst. The duo’s way of working was by this stage very well established, but the tracks on Zuckerzeit demonstrate a more considered, more structured approach to music. The compositions were short by the standard of other Krautrock bands; ‘Rote Riki’ (Red Riki), the longest, was six minutes long; the shortest, ‘Heiße Lippen’ (Hot Lips), under two and a half. Their titles were also playful, some of them suggesting the sweetness implied in the album title (‘Caramel’, ‘Marzipan’). ‘Rosa’ is a typical example of the music Moebius and Roedelius found themselves creating. As Ulrich Adelt notes, the track and the album as a whole seem to be cut from the same cloth as the music of Neu!:Footnote ¹¹ It is minimalist, and is built on the secure foundation of a rhythm track that stays constant throughout. However, this beat cannot really be termed motorik. Motorik as a style is uncomplicated. ‘Rosa’, however, has a definite rhythm, but on the bassline, rather than on the rhythm track. The other rhythmic elements on the track play against the insistent bassline rhythm; none of them stick to a particular pattern. The effect, as is often the case on Zuckerzeit, is of a track with a rhythm that doubles back on itself, never achieving the propulsive forward momentum of motorik.

Over this, Roedelius plays a repeated descending pattern in A minor against a repeated chord pattern. This starts simply, suggesting a definite melody. However, as the track progresses, the melodic elements stated at the beginning form the basis for two extemporised keyboard lines; these lines periodically return to the descending melody stated at the beginning, but they never do so completely, and they never do so in sync. At 2:01, after what sounds like an edit, the main theme recurs for a moment. Beneath it, however, the chords and bass are accompanied by a repetitious, processed sound, which recalls nothing so much as the end of the Roxy Music track ‘For Your Pleasure’. On that track, Eno processed the tape, blending all the instruments together into an indistinct blur. Cluster’s track never quite reaches that point, but musically the last two minutes of ‘Rosa’ sound as though the music is deliquescing, and that if the track continued for much longer it would melt away entirely.

The idea of motorik is of an endless journey into the future, with nothing to impede the relentless forward motion. It calls to mind man-made forms of transport (the car, the train) and the man-made landscapes they travel through. ‘Rosa’ suggests, on the other hand, not so much a forward journey as a progressive entanglement in a landscape whose elements evolve together in a mesh of musical ideas that grow together as the track progresses. The term ‘organic’ is used, sometimes very loosely, to describe various types of music, usually those that are produced on acoustic instruments and that fall within the broad parameters of folk music. What ‘Rosa’ suggests is another way of using the term; in this case, it describes a track and a type of music that progresses by filling in the spaces in the soundscape, as melodic lines develop and divide, and as the musical texture of the track works to blend separate elements together into one, much in the same way as plants colonise and cover areas of soil.

Next, I want to examine ‘Sonnenschein’ (Sunshine) on Musik von Harmonia. Michael Rother first came to Forst in 1973, initially to ask whether Moebius and Roedelius would be prepared to act as backing musicians when his current group, Neu!, played live. He stayed at Forst, in the first instance, largely because he found the experience of playing with Moebius and Roedelius instantly congenial. Rother was aware of Cluster’s music; in particular, he liked ‘Im Süden’ from Cluster II (perhaps the piece that came closest to the kind of music he had released as part of Neu!). Given this, it is no surprise that the music he made with Roedelius and Moebius represented something of a compromise, between the straight-ahead rhythms of his previous band and entangled, interwoven compositions such as ‘Rosa’. ‘Sonnenschein’ is a good example of the music the trio produced, and the compromises that emerged as they improvised together. For one thing, compared to the tracks on Zuckerzeit (which was recorded in the same year, and released after the first Harmonia album), the rhythm is far closer to motorik: an invariant 4/4, with an emphasis on the second and fourth beats.

The track also contains a low but persistent drone effect, the volume of which rises and falls as the music develops. In other words, the track uses some of the same musical components as ‘Hallogallo’, ‘Für immer’, or any of the longform motorik instrumentals on Neu! or Neu! 2. Over the top of this motorik structure, however, we find musical elements that derive from the work Moebius and Roedelius had already done as Cluster. The production, in comparison to the smoothly blended sound of a Neu! album, is lo-fi, characterised by timbres that suggest the instruments and amplification have been pushed almost to the point of distortion. As the track fades up (in common with ‘Rosa’, the music does not have a definite starting point), we hear an insistent, repeated six-note melodic pattern, played against a lower keyboard line that develops into a set of syncopated arpeggios. Neither of these elements is exactly rhythmically fixed, however – both drift in and out of sync with the insistent driving rhythm of the track.

One of the things that makes motorik such a compelling, driving musical force is the fact that the other musical elements either match and complement its rhythm, or seem to have no connection to rhythm at all (compare ‘Für immer’ (Forever), the first track on Neu! 2 (1973)). ‘Sonnenschein’ does not work like this; the various musical elements never lock together with the rhythm. Rather, although the beat insistently drives forward, the other components of the track either impede the smooth forward progress of the music, or threaten to take the music in a different, less rhythmically sure direction. In other words, just as with ‘Rosa’, the soundscape is completely different to those created by the kosmische musicians; and in this case it is also different to the clean, technological landscapes conjured up by motorik. Even though the beat is more insistent, the soundscape is the same; closed in, entangled, organic, in the sense used earlier. ‘Sonnenschein’ maps a journey: but in this case, we are not driving down an autobahn. We are on a track through the landscape, one that is close to being entirely overgrown.

Conclusion: ‘Sowiesoso’ by the Weser

‘Sowiesoso’ (Anyways) is the title track of Cluster’s fourth album. The front cover of the album catches the duo leaning against trees, silhouetted against the sky and the Weser. The album bears the imprint both of Rother and Eno. It is more rhythmically exact than previous work, and it has the same carefully worked out, evocative musical textures that one might find on Eno’s work of the period (the sonic template of the album can be thought of as a mixture of two Eno albums, both from roughly the same time – Another Green World (1975) and Music for Films (1978: recorded 1975–78). ‘Sowiesoso’ however, even though it has a secure rhythm, does not have the same sense of forward momentum as ‘Sonnenschein’. The pace is slower, the musical timbres are softer, and although the track develops in the way as ‘Rosa’ and ‘Sonnenschein’ it does so by accruing those elements far more gradually than in the earlier tracks. ‘Sonnenschein’ suggests a journey down an overgrown track; ‘Sowiesoso’, in contrast, is a gentle drift downriver, through a landscape constantly various and at the same time unchanging.

The landscapes implied in ‘By This River’, ‘Sowiesoso’, ‘Rosa’, ‘Sonnenschein’, and the other tracks produced at Forst are, therefore, very close to each other. They exist at some distance, both to the idealised landscape of German cultural memory, and to the implied landscapes (variously haunted, exotic, technological, or unearthly) created by other Krautrock musicians. Even before Eno came to influence their work, the music produced by Cluster and Harmonia fulfilled two of the criteria that Eno came to use in creating his own music. First of all, it made use of the technologies available, even if (as was the case), those technologies were homemade or dated. Secondly, it was immanent in that it was founded on an immediate response to the situation within which it was recorded. In terms that Eno would later come to use, Cluster/Harmonia composed by, in effect, setting themselves a series of musical heuristics (or simple instructions that, taken together, lead to complex outcomes).Footnote ¹² Those heuristics were embedded both in the technologies the musicians had available; and, for each of them, in Forst as a location and a source of musical inspiration. What resulted from the interaction of these elements was a unique response to the German landscape, and to the idea of the pastoral in music. Cluster and Harmonia created music that did not hymn the archetypal German countryside; rather, they created sonic landscapes formed from the organic entanglement of blurred, imprecise musical elements; landscapes formed as an immanent response, not to the cultural representation of landscape, but to the complex, entangled, immanent environment in which they lived and worked.

Essential Listening

• Cluster, Zuckerzeit (Brain, 1974)

• Cluster, Sowiesoso (Sky, 1976)

• Harmonia, Musik von Harmonia (Brain, 1974)

• Harmonia & Eno ’76, Tracks and Traces (Grönland, 2007)

Discussing one of Krautrock’s most remarkable and spiritual acts, Frank Fiedler, long-time creative partner of Popol Vuh mastermind Florian Fricke, states:

Florian Fricke, who like many Krautrockers came from an affluent background, was the sole creative force behind the musical project he named Popol Vuh. While he gratefully accepted the moniker of kosmische Musik being applied to his mostly instrumental compositions, Fricke from very early on regarded his music as fundamentally different from the drug-induced space sounds that many of his contemporaries favoured. Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, founder of labels Ohr Records and its subsidiary Pilz, was a key figure in the Krautrock scene which he also helped to define as the author of countercultural books such as Das Buch der Neuen Pop-Musik (1969). In Rock-Zeit (1972) he wrote on Popol Vuh:

Fricke developed a far more spiritual approach to music than most of his kosmische Musik colleagues due to his intensive studies of the five world religions as well as spiritual cults, which had led him on his quest for meaning from the Marxist world view he cultivated in the late 1960s to a highly religious understanding of spirituality, with music as its highest form of expression.

In Krautrocksampler, Julian Cope mentions as many as four albums by Popol Vuh in his list of ‘the 50 indispensable Krautrock records’: Affenstunde (The Hour of the Ape, 1970), In den Gärten Pharaos (In the Pharaoh’s Gardens, 1972), Einsjäger und Siebenjäger (Onehunter and Sevenhunter,Footnote ³ 1975), as well as Hosianna Mantra (1972) – though surprisingly he omits the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1975).

A Spiritual Journey with the Moog

While debut album Affenstunde is a pure Moog album, Popol Vuh’s second offering, In den Gärten Pharaos, begins to digress from sole use of the technically complex synthesiser. While being perfectly able to produce what might be regarded as ‘cosmic sounds’, synthesisers sounded too artificial and were therefore counter-productive in creating a spiritual atmosphere. Fricke began to understand that his vision of a transcendental, celestial sound could only be achieved with analogue instruments. He therefore made greater use of them on his albums following Affenstunde. In addition to the records listed by Cope, Seligpreisung (Beatitude, 1973) and the soundtrack to Aguirre should also be considered to constitute what might be called Popol Vuh’s classic phase.

The band name derives from the holy book of the Quiché-Maya, the Popol Vuh, which also contains the Mayan creation myth, studied by Fricke in detail in the 1960s. His first album’s title, Affenstunde, was taken from a chapter of the Popol Vuh that deals with the creation of mankind. This chapter describes how the ‘Creator, Heart-From-Heaven’, attempts to bring man into being as a perfect creature but in the end is only able to create a monkey-like animal. One day, Fricke commented, all the men who have evolved from this ape would mature into true human beings who would bear no resemblance to it anymore.Footnote ⁴

Through the Popol Vuh, Fricke was introduced to other writings from different cultures that helped him on his quest for the very essence of religion and spirituality, as he recalled in one of his earliest interviews.Footnote ⁵ In fact, the quest for a connection between the unconscious and spirituality, which he thought to have first found in the Popol Vuh, was to exclude every type of cultural imperialism. He did not, as a Westerner, intend to appropriate Indigenous culture and spirituality. Rather, he was looking for his own form of meditation that could relate to these cultural influences and at the same time be rooted in Fricke’s own cultural environment. It is hence only consistent that the photograph inside the gatefold cover of Affen-stunde shows a Bavarian alpine panorama, which stands in harsh contrast to the music played on the album, carefully augmented by Indian tablas and tympanums.

A former Marxist, Fricke also claimed that, strangely enough, he had come to religion partly through synthesisers and partly through the physical theory of oscillations. He believed in touching people emotionally with the help of electronic devices in order to set free their hidden energies in a way that political activism – at least from his own point of view – could not.Footnote ⁶ With this approach he tried to find personal inspiration in Western as well as eastern spirituality and its sacral traditions. At first, Fricke firmly believed in being able to document his own spiritual journey by using the Moog as a means of musical communication, to combine sound and spirituality through this very instrument – an instrument that he thought would enable him to find access to his own subconscious to finally unfold his full spiritual potential. This way Fricke would arrive at his utopia in a way that he did not consider possible with Marxism.Footnote ⁷

Such assessment of the Moog was not unusual at the end of the 1960s. In fact, Herbert Deutsch, who alongside Robert Moog invented the synthesiser, saw it as the result of a long search for the expansion of consciousness; a cultural quest that had started with the use of LSD together with the mainstream success of mysticism that developed in the second half of the 1960s. There was only one more step to take, announced Deutsch, to reach the next level, although this could only be done with the help of technology.Footnote ⁸ At the beginning of the 1970s Fricke explained:

Furthermore, the machine offered Fricke ways to ‘experience myself in all my possibilities’, and so he took to calling the sounds he got ‘mind-expanding music’.Footnote ¹⁰ For him, spirituality meant being one with earth. Fricke believed that, if we live in unison with Mother Earth, heaven would automatically open above us as well as inside us. But if we live in dissonance with Mother Earth, heaven will close upon us and inside us: ‘When heart and head have lost their way, it’s good to return to our roots at the base, surrendering our despair, aware of Earth’s despair, as our first step to reconciliation.’Footnote ¹¹

Fricke was only the second German to own a Moog synthesiser, the first one being the avant-garde composer Eberhard Schoener, who lived just 300 feet away from Fricke’s house in the small Bavarian town of Miesbach. Incidentally, Schoener had acquired his instrument from none other than John Lennon. In 1970, Fricke, then in his early twenties, was working as a film critic for the national paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and news magazine Der Spiegel, among others, when he heard about his neighbour’s miracle music machine. He was a major talent on the piano, having studied it at the conservatory in Munich, but soon realised classical music was not for him. After testing it at Schoener’s house, Fricke was fascinated by the surreal soundscapes and the endless possibilities the Moog had to offer. Thanks to his wife’s wealthy family,Footnote ¹² he was able to buy one of the expensive instruments – he paid 60,000 deutsche marks for the Moog III, which was the equivalent of a small property at the time – after Schoener had used his contacts with Robert Moog himself.

Sadly, Schoener and Fricke never co-operated musically. ‘Since no user’s manual came with the instrument,’ Jan Reetze writes in Times & Sounds, ‘Schoener as well as Robby Wedel tried to explain to Fricke how this thing worked. This was not an easy job; Fricke’s understanding of technology was limited.’Footnote ¹³ After Fricke and his wife had relocated to a ‘picturesque former parsonage at Peterskirchen near Wasserburg’Footnote ¹⁴ to enjoy the communal living typical at the time with fellow Popol Vuh musician Holger Trülzsch, his girlfriend, and a changing cast of artists, filmmakers, and musicians, Fricke was approached by Gerhard Augustin of Liberty Records (which later became part of United Artists). The label manager was looking for a German artist able to record an album of electronic music based on the Moog. The ‘Moog-based act’ Augustin was looking for was intended to be a German version of Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos), who had been very successful with her otherworldly interpretations of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach on the album Switched-On Bach (1968).

Fricke, along with his now wife, Trülzsch, and Frank Fiedler on ‘Synthesizer-Mixdown’ recorded Affenstunde at the Bavaria Studios in Munich. The back of the record sleeve later very fittingly would show ‘Fricke in a sleeveless sheepskin top, attending to his Moog like a radio ham, as percussionist Holger Trülzsch sits swaddled in Afghan coating astride his drumskins, while Bettina Fricke, Florian’s wife, who coproduced the album and designed the cover, attends to her tabla’.Footnote ¹⁵ However, when Augustin played the final mix to the record company executives, they first opted not to release the album, claiming it was ‘terrible’.Footnote ¹⁶ It took a lot of convincing on Augustin’s side to change their minds, although the company immediately decided not to release a second Popol Vuh album.Footnote ¹⁷

‘The idea of Affenstunde’, recalls Trülzsch, ‘was to imagine a marketplace where people meet, talk, and make music.’Footnote ¹⁸ Mutual friends in the music scene made sure that copies of the record found their way into the hands of John Lennon and Bob Dylan and – according to Trülzsch – the superstars were amazed.Footnote ¹⁹ The photographer Jim Avignon was said to have played the album in his studio continuously for six months.Footnote ²⁰ Still, despite the pioneering spirit of this album and the positive reviews it received (the most important German music magazine of the time, Sounds, calling it ‘the best and most satisfying LP with German pop music yet’Footnote ²¹), it only sold around 3,000 copies at the time. Reetze partly blames this poor performance on what he conceives as being the sound of an artist still on the ‘search for something’, the compositions sounding unfinished and somehow erratic.Footnote ²² In spite of Reetze’s concerns about an artist well aware of his spirituality but still unsure how to transform it into music, Cope calls Fricke a musician, who ‘was never so much ahead of time as out of time: that is, he appeared as an avant-gardist but was really a traditionalist-hearted visionary’.Footnote ²³

This might also be the reason why Affenstunde ended up being such a hermetic, strange album that is difficult to appreciate on an intellectual level. The friction caused by the avant-garde sound aesthetics stands at the centre of the listening experience, not least because at the same time it was marketed as ‘pop music’ by the record company. In between these two different labels – avant-garde and pop – was Florian Fricke’s longing to strive for what Mark Goodall characterises as ‘Heavy Consciousness’,Footnote ²⁴ but what in his own words he delineates as ‘sacral’. As a result, Peter Bebergal sees Popol Vuh as outsiders even within a heterogeneous musical genre such as Krautrock, particularly because Fricke was primarily led by his religious vision.Footnote ²⁵

The cosmic sounds produced by the Moog would be paired with the tribal percussion played by Holger Trülzsch, which caused further friction within the sound structures Popol Vuh created. While the album’s A-side includes three fragments improvised on the Moog and referred to as ‘Dream Parts’ that make up a composition called ‘Ich mache einen Spiegel’ (I Am Making a Mirror), the B-side consists of the title track, running to nearly twenty minutes – the Moog sounds and Trülzsch’s tribal percussion being augmented with distant voices, real as well as synthetically produced, that attempt to take the lead amid a billowing mass of sound. Suddenly a ‘low tone begins, a hanging bouncing pulse behind it, the hell-tone dips and melodically forms into a Keltic mantra of some great beauty’Footnote ²⁶ – only for it to disappear again quite suddenly and make way for atonal sonic experimentations and pulsating rhythms. In his essay that accompanied the re-release of the album in 2019, music critic Mike Barnes claims that this track consists of ‘a strange eerie tone and there was an undulating serpentine flow to the melodies pitched somewhere between signalling and singing, its rhythmic complexity enhanced by the use of sequence and echo and delay’.Footnote ²⁷ Fricke was said to have used an electronic soprano part, then tried to eliminate the electronic element with the help of filter effects in order to make the music sound more human though electronically generated. In hindsight, these ideas made Trülzsch recognise the enormous complexity of the project, not least because it took a lot of time simply to permanently filter the sound to achieve the result the musicians had in mind.Footnote ²⁸

A New Path

Affenstunde represented a possible avenue to approach kosmische Musik, but strangely, Fricke himself was far from convinced. He understood something had to change and that the best way to achieve this would be to slowly move away from the dominance of the Moog. Popol Vuh‘s second album In den Gärten Pharaos – which quite fittingly appeared on Kaiser’s Pilz label – only consists of two long pieces, each of them taking up one side of the original vinyl record. The title track recalls the electronic experiments on Affenstunde, but according to Trülzsch, the musical possibilities offered by the Moog to create the envisioned sacral sounds were exhausted at that point, not least because Fricke was none too tech-savvy and therefore had problems with electronic devices.Footnote ²⁹

Fricke’s new objective was further emulation of the human voice by technical means, only to realise he had failed this task while still in the middle of recording the title track. He therefore decided to embark on an altogether new direction with the second track on the album simply called ‘Vuh’, which makes up the whole of B-side: ‘It is all too obvious that one of the great meditational holy works has been captured on tape’,Footnote ³⁰ Cope boldly states. In fact, Fricke opted for an unconventional method: he recorded ‘Vuh’ with a church organ located in a former monastery in the Upper Bavarian village of Baumburg. The piece is based on a single chord, which is only slightly varied throughout the composition and augmented with restrained percussion work.

As the picture of a Bavarian alpine landscape on the gatefold sleeve of Affenstunde already indicated, Fricke certainly saw himself committed to a German cultural tradition and therefore (in the press notes to In den Gärten Pharaos) refers to the influence German poetry, classical music, and philosophy have had on him and his music, while at the same time distancing himself from his country’s recent fascist past. So it comes as no surprise that, on this album in particular, Fricke acts out the conflict between his German and his international influences by embracing the upcoming electronic music scene and German classical music he had studied at conservatory while at the same time opening up to the more organic, archaic sounds of African and Indian instruments.Footnote ³¹

At that time, Fricke already saw Popol Vuh as ‘a group of people who make music, but are not a music group’,Footnote ³² a factor that, according to Reetze, increasingly led to tensions among the musicians:

Despite Fricke playing his Moog on Tangerine Dream’s Zeit (1972), the album that comes closest to attaining the vision of a kosmische Musik on record, he was determined to follow through with his own ideas on ‘Vuh’, and thus dispensed with the instrument he increasingly saw as an electronic shackle. Fricke sold it to another leading keyboard player in the Krautrock cosmos, Klaus Schulze. Fricke radically rejected the very notion of kosmische Musik and claimed that a ‘more beautiful and honest way’ would be to free your mind without the help of technology.

For his next album Hosianna Mantra, Fricke makes use of acoustic instruments only and incorporates a true soprano with the Korean singer Djong Yun, rendering a very human element to his music. Years later, his widow Bettina von Waldthausen would explain Fricke’s repudiation of the Moog by claiming that electronic sounds were in clear opposition to the natural beat of the human heart.Footnote ³⁵ What was new for Fricke here was that he increasingly broke away from abstract structures and opened to pop music to continue his spiritual journey. He described his newfound creative process as follows:

Fricke saw himself as a representative of an anti-capitalist, universalist, and anti-consumerist variant of Christianity, which he pays homage to on Hosianna Mantra. This title already gives an indication of Fricke’s conception of a non-denominational form of Christianity by combining Christian and Hindu terminology. Music had become his very own form of prayer;Footnote ³⁷ by cutting his ties to electronic music,Footnote ³⁸ Fricke aimed to achieve immediate access to his own spirituality. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not claim to possess inner wisdom relating to Eastern religions. Rather, Fricke aimed to understand Eastern spiritual essence through his own Christian culture, as expressed through the album’s title.Footnote ³⁹

The Cinematographic View

Thanks to their rewarding co-operation with German director Werner Herzog, Popol Vuh succeeded not only in making their music known to a larger audience, but also, more importantly, in enhancing their spiritual vision through the association with Herzog’s grandiose visual aesthetics. Fricke had met Herzog in 1967 and made a short appearance as a piano player in Herzog’s debut Lebenszeichen, which was released in 1968. They stayed in contact, so Popol Vuh were approached to do the soundtrack of Herzog’s Amazonian adventure film Aguirre in 1971, starring Klaus Kinski in the leading role. The soundtrack, however, would not be released until 1975.

Herzog’s approach was to wait for the audio track to complement the visual experience, so that the full effect was only ignited by the intermedial connection of image and sound. The director once explainedFootnote ⁴⁰ that there is no such thing as ‘background music’ in any of his films as they constituted a synthesis of images and music. For a long time, Popol Vuh were responsible for soundtracking the films of the internationally acclaimed German director and one of the main protagonists of the New German Cinema movement in the 1970s (which comprised such directors as Edgar Reitz, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge). Fricke worked with Herzog on Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972), Herz aus Glas (1976), Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982) as well as on two documentaries. Later, Herzog used some of Fricke’s compositions for parts of his soundtracks. Cobra Verde (1987) was completely soundtracked again with Popol Vuh’s music.

The director described his relationship with Fricke’s music as follows:

It is particularly the fusion of sound and image in Aguirre that illustrates Fricke’s own spiritual quest. In the film’s opening scene, a long shot shows hundreds of people painfully descending a narrow mountain trail in the blurred Andes. The accompanying music is reminiscent of a religious chorale – a celestial, exhilarating aural setting, which at the same time carries a reminder of the actual agony dominating the scene. This effect is due to the way Fricke created the chorale: what we hear are not actual human voices but electronic emulations that range between the human voice and synthetic sounds. To achieve this effect, the musician used a ‘choir organ’, an instrument reminiscent of a Mellotron, in which pre-produced tape loops were played or called up via a keyboard, and thus conjured up sounds and choirs.Footnote ⁴² The camera moves closer to the people who seem to be in harmony with the music consisting of otherworldly sounds, taking on a godlike perspective of the mountain. Then, however, the camera descends from its bird’s eye position to reveal a series of shocking close-ups, showing the immense suffering on the faces of the expeditioners and their porters. The soundscape can be seen as a harbinger of the catastrophes that will haunt the expedition as its leader Aguirre gradually descends into madness and drives his companions ever deeper into the Amazonian jungle and thus into the very heart of darkness.

The overwhelming elemental force of nature that Herzog is trying to depict in his film is staged in an impressive way by merging long shots and the soundtrack. The naturalistic focus on the faces of suffering people, meanwhile, reveals an uncanny connection between man and nature that reaches its full effect only with the help of the soundtrack. Adelt points out that the circularity of the main chorale theme underscores the central character’s lack of progress and is in turn supported by the camera moving in circles around Aguirre at the end of the film.Footnote ⁴³ But the music not only reflects the disturbed psyche of the figure, but also the simultaneously sublime and oppressive soundtrack. As Herzog stated in an interview in the 1970s:

David Stubbs even sees a deliberate contradiction between Fricke’s music, which ‘aspires cleanly heavenward’,Footnote ⁴⁵ and the fate of Herzog’s hero, who embarks on a quite literal descent. This paradox will be repeated in their later co-operation on Fitzcarraldo, which features yet another anti-hero played by Klaus Kinski, once more fighting his fate accompanied by the spiritual sounds of Popol Vuh.

Many of the celestial sounds on Popol Vuh’s recordings, especially on the soundtracks for Herzog, were accomplished with the ‘choir organ’, a custom-made instrument Fricke commissioned in the 1970s, based on the then popular Mellotron but able to produce sounds that came closer to Fricke’s spiritual vision. It is not clear where exactly this instrument was made and where it ended up, although it can be heard on several other Krautrock albums such as Tanz der Lemminge (Dance of the Lemmings, 1971) by Amon Düül II. In 2019, Frank Fiedler describes this extraordinary instrument:

Though Aguirre, their first collaboration, might at the same time be seen as the pinnacle of their work together, Herzog and Fricke collaborated on most of the films made with Klaus Kinski in the leading role, namely Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. The soundtrack to Nosferatu was even released as a regular Popol Vuh album entitled Brüder des Schattens – Söhne des Lichts (Brothers of Shadow – Sons of Light, 1978).

But Herzog and Fricke fell out after their last collaboration, for reasons the director cited years later as follows: ‘He was always too much into drugs, which I never liked … Secondly, he drifted away into his idiotic, new-age-pseudo-philosophy babble, and I could not really communicate with him.’Footnote ⁴⁷ These complaints, however, did not come only from Herzog. It can be argued that Popol Vuh’s reputation has long suffered from Fricke’s later musical attempts.

The Later Years: Celestial Music and New Age

Nevertheless, Popol Vuh’s collaboration with Werner Herzog for his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, now regarded a cinematic classic, marks a turning point in Fricke’s work because the experience saw him turn into a filmmaker himself. Fricke understood his films made with long-term creative partner turned cameraman Frank Fiedler as a continuation and an extension of his spiritual search. They created the films during their travels that took both men to different regions of the world, with Fricke eagerly enriching Fiedler’s images with his music as he had learned from his work with Herzog. This can be most impressively seen in the CD/DVD-Edition of Kailash – Pilgrimage to the Throne of the Gods (2015), released fourteen years after Fricke’s death and showing their journey to Tibet. Equally impressive was Messa di Orfeo, a multimedia performance premiered in the labyrinth of Molfetta/Italy in 1998, the music being issued on CD in 1999.

Fricke continued to record albums under the Popol Vuh moniker until his untimely death in 2001, albeit at considerable intervals and sometimes, as Herzog pointed out, dangerously close to the popular New Age movement in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Reetze, he had turned into an alcoholic, and following his divorce from Bettina von Waldthausen had begun the life of a recluse.Footnote ⁴⁸ A large-scale reissue campaign of his work on CD, started in 2004 by SPV Recordings, brought Popol Vuh’s albums not only back into record stores but also into the public eye. A vinyl boxset released in 2019 called The Essential Album Collection Vol. 1, containing five albums from the early days, was not only enthusiastically received by music critics but also led to a series of feature stories on the band’s history. A second box set with four LPs was released in November 2021 under the name Vol. 2: Acoustic and Ambient Spheres.

In his liner notes to The Essential Album Collection Vol. 1, Dolf Mulder praises Fricke’s music as visionary, consisting of ‘many styles and influences such as electronica, ambient, progressive rock and music of the eastern tradition. They were musical pre-cursors in many ways: ambient, trance, electronica, ethno-fusion, psychedelic-rock, raga-rock.’Footnote ⁴⁹ His role within the Krautrock community – if one can speak of this at all – was always that of an outsider who wanted to go his own, spiritual way. Still, Popol Vuh is a musical project that – also in an intermedial context – can be seen as symptomatic of a certain strand of development in the 1970s and 1980s. Born out of the electronic pioneering spirit of Krautrock, Fricke soon sought new paths and broke away from what he saw as technological shackles.

The connection to Werner Herzog is by no means a coincidence, as the filmmakers of the ‘New German Cinema’ were looking for new forms of subjective expression. Although this was based on the ideals of the 1968 movement, it said goodbye to the idealisation of the collective that both Krautrock bands like Amon Düül and political rock groups like Ton Steine Scherben claimed for themselves. For Fricke, the path to the inwardness he envisaged led via his own, individually composed form of global spirituality. This connects him not only with Herzog, but also with authors such as Peter Handke or Hubert Fichte, as well as with that literary movement that is somewhat generalised under the term Neue Innerlichkeit (new inwardness). The music that emerged from this was quite hermetic in its approach but opened to the listener when he or she was ready to engage in the spiritual journey that Fricke envisaged.

It is therefore possible that Fricke’s development towards New Age realms in the 1980s can be explained by disillusionment with the perception of his work, since New Age can generally be seen as a commercial decline of the spiritual. For although Popol Vuh’s music sounds unique even in a Krautrock context, it never – even retrospectively – gained the recognition of a wider audience. And without the collaborations with Herzog, Fricke and his music would possibly only be a footnote in German rock history.

Essential Listening

• Popol Vuh, Affenstunde (Liberty, 1970)

• Popol Vuh, In den Gärten Pharaos (Pilz, 1972)

• Popol Vuh, Hosianna Mantra (Pilz, 1973)

• Popol Vuh, Aguirre (PDU, 1975)

Ash Ra Tempel represent an archetypal kosmische Musik and psychedelic rock group, an ensemble who became strongly associated with the desire for musical experimentation and detachment from the Anglo-American rock of the 1960s. The original band and later solo projects have gained a cult following over five decades. Their music has inspired musicians in space rock as well as electronic ambient, techno, and trance. This chapter focuses on the original line-up of the band Ash Ra Tempel (1970–73), and Ashra, who have continued their legacy. In addition, the essay offers an overview of the solo production and collaborations of two founding members of the band, Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze (1947–2022).

Manuel Göttsching, who studied classical guitar for years as a youngster,Footnote ¹ grew up with rock music in the late 1960s, listening to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. With his friend Hartmut Enke (1952–2005), Göttsching played in various school bands, later the Steeple Chase Blues Band, which was inspired by blues but played more ‘free’ self-expression and psychedelic rock.Footnote ²

In 1969–70, a Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, who had his own electronic music studio in Berlin, mentored Göttsching. Beat Studio was located on Pfalzburger Strasse, in the premises of a publicly funded music school. From Kessler, Göttsching received both a spark for electronic music and the basic skills of improvising and composing.

Another musician who wished to escape from Anglo-American formulas was Klaus Schulze, who had played drums in several rock bands in the late 1960s. The most notable of these was Tangerine Dream, in whose early line-up Schulze played until summer 1970, then joining Ash Ra Tempel. Like Göttsching, Schulze was also interested in electronics, sound manipulation, and recording.Footnote ³

Kessler’s guidance strongly affected the emergence of the ‘Berlin School’.Footnote ⁴ Although Kessler was not so enthusiastic about the bands’ aspirations to abandon the idea of composition, he continued channelling the musicians’ youthful energies. By autumn 1970, Ash Ra Tempel had already existed for three months, and Göttsching and Schulze joined the live sessions of Eruption, formed by Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Freudig-mann. The experience gave them extra confidence since Eruption’s goal was to create music completely free of the hierarchies and conventions of existing styles.Footnote ⁵

Already in summer 1970, Enke had travelled to London to look for inexpensive used music equipment that was hard to find in Germany. He returned to Berlin with four large WEM amplifiers, which had been touring with Pink Floyd. Only the wealthiest bands and biggest festivals in Britain used similar cabinets. Schulze, who had just parted from Tangerine Dream, saw the towering amplifier set in the Beat Studio and suggested to Enke and Göttsching that they should form a band with him. Two weeks later, the band played their first gig.Footnote ⁶ Enke and Göttsching were only seventeen at the time.

Göttsching (guitar), Schulze (drums), and Enke (bass) formed a trio with the outlandish name Ash Ra Tempel, which translates as ‘the remnants of the temple of Ra’ (the sun god in ancient Egyptian mythology). The group positioned themselves in the emerging scene of new German rock as a band of psychedelia and experimental music. According to Göttsching, the activities of the band were intensive, creative, and free, but rather unprofessional.Footnote ⁷

In the latter half of the 1970s, Ash Ra Tempel performed regularly in Berlin, two or three times a week. The band gained a reputation as musicians who were able to improvise in front of an audience for several hours, communicating with each other only through their instruments.Footnote ⁸ In addition, they played at exceptionally high volume. According to Göttsching, the performances of Ash Ra Tempel were always long – from forty-five minutes to three hours – and purely improvisational. The only thing the members agreed on in advance was who would start playing. The band performed in restaurants as well as at community centres, galleries, and the Academy of Arts: ‘The audience liked that. We didn’t have any big advertisements, word got around. Perhaps the actual music was not that important at our first concerts. There were a lot of people and something happened, that’s why you went there.’Footnote ⁹

Illustration 13.1 Hartmut Enke, Manuel Göttsching, and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, 1971.

© MG.ART Archive.

Entering the Empire of Kaiser

Overall, the music circles in Berlin were remarkably informal; jazz and rock musicians as well as experimental sound artists met and formed short-lived gig ensembles.Footnote ¹⁰ In his subsequent interviews, Göttsching has emphasised that from the beginning, Ash Ra Tempel were one of the bands who tried to get rid of the influence of Anglo-American blues structures and create new sounds and music.Footnote ¹¹

With the help of label manager Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, who was seeking out new bands in Berlin, Ash Ra Tempel were able to record their debut album for the Ohr label, founded in 1970 by Kaiser.Footnote ¹² In early 1971, after overcoming many obstacles, sound engineer Konrad ‘Conny’ Plank helped Ash Ra Tempel in a recording studio in Hamburg. Göttsching remembers that Plank was very excited and proposed all sorts of technical experiments.Footnote ¹³

The self-titled Ash Ra Tempel album, released in June 1971, consisted of two improvised instrumental tracks.Footnote ¹⁴ Both ‘Amboss’ (Anvil) and ‘Traummaschine’ (Dream Machine) are intense but distinct works that transport the listener into the post-rock world. ‘Amboss’ progresses with Schulze’s hectic rhythm and Göttsching’s guitar playing, which distances the listener from rock and blues conventions. ‘Traummaschine’ is a twenty-five-minute jam that initially pulsates very softly, soothing the listener with gentle sounds and the ethereal vocals of Göttsching. After that, the trio cautiously wake up the listener while the rhythm becomes stronger. Supported by bongos and bass, the rhythm finally reaches a timeless cosmic sphere. Plank managed to create a strong sense of space for the whole album. Inspired by ancient Egyptian culture, the cover art of the LP’s very special folded front cover attracted attention.

Ash Ra Tempel continued playing to full venues in Berlin and elsewhere. The band also toured in Switzerland.Footnote ¹⁵ Their performances were much more intense than the studio sessions, as can be heard in a few surviving concert recordings from summer 1971, which Göttsching released in the 1990s. They used to immerse themselves in extended improvisations, based on Schulze’s fast drumming and Enke’s distorted bass-playing. On top of those, Göttsching played solos, roaring feedback, and rhythmic parts with the help of delay effects.Footnote ¹⁶ Schulze left Ash Ra Tempel right after the Swiss Tour in September 1971 and was replaced by drummer Wolfgang Müller. In interviews, Schulze stated that he would rather create music than play as a member of a band. However, his relationship with the other members remained close.Footnote ¹⁷

Ash Ra Tempel’s second album Schwingungen (1972) was recorded with a different line-up. Wolfgang Müller, a partner of Göttsching and Enke from the Steeple Chase Blues Band, joined the core group on drums and percussion. The change is particularly noticeable in the album’s first track, ‘Light: Look at Your Sun’, which introduced Manfred Peter Brück (a.k.a. John L.) as a guest vocalist. He was a former member of Agitation Free and a famous figure in the rock circles of Berlin. ‘Darkness: Flowers Must Die’ takes the listener into psychedelic despair and aggression, where both Göttsching’s guitar and John L.’s roaring vocals are processed with a heavy phaser effect. Additional guest musicians Matthias Wehler (saxophones) and Uli Popp (bongos) bring fresh overtones to an increasingly chaotic song.

The B-side of the album is very different. The seamlessly segued songs ‘Suche’ (Search) and ‘Liebe’ (Love) fill the entire side with cosmic ambiance. ‘Suche’ begins with Müller’s low-key vibraphone. Gradually rising from the background, Göttsching’s organ and guitar complement the band’s gauze-like weaving, slightly reminiscent of ‘Traummaschine’. The ethereal atmosphere is broken by Müller‘s drum beat, which rises from the distance in the front, restlessly wandering and then fading again. Göttsching’s occasional glissandos on guitar and his whining organ, as well as Müller’s cymbals, suggest an ascent such as in ‘Traummaschine’, but the album ends with a melodic ballad flavoured by Göttsching’s wordless singing and Müller’s cymbals. Kaiser’s trusted engineer Dieter DierksFootnote ¹⁸ recorded the album.

Psychedelic Encounters and Collaborations

In 1972, Kaiser and his partner Gerlinde ‘Gille’ Lettmann commercialised the concept of kosmische Musik and associated it with German electronic rock. The concept smoothly mixed the escapism and esotericism of psychedelic rock with the dreams of the space age, science fiction, and the soundscapes of electronic music. In particular, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and Popul Vuh, Wallenstein, and Mythos were labelled as cosmic music, through the marketing efforts of Ohr.Footnote ¹⁹

According to Harald Grosskopf, a drummer from Wallenstein who later played with both Göttsching and Schulze, the musicians involved in Kaiser‘s projects were people who, instead of radical political activism, chose to withdraw from society and focus instead on philosophy, drugs, and esotericism.Footnote ²⁰ Hence, it was not a big surprise that in 1972, Ash Ra Tempel ended up in one of the most peculiar ventures in the history of German rock.

The band had dreamed of collaborating with Allen Ginsberg, but their attempts at establishing contact had not succeeded.Footnote ²¹ In 1972, Timothy Leary, a former professor of psychology at Harvard University and an evangelist for LSD, had ended up in Switzerland after escaping from prison in the United States. He had to hide and change his whereabouts to remain free, but he received help from the Swiss author and esotericist Sergius Golowin. Leary’s travelling companion included the British writer Brian Barritt, who considered himself a forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture.Footnote ²²

Enke travelled to Switzerland to give Leary and Barritt the album Schwingungen. Neither of them knew of the band before, but they considered the music appropriate to advance their agenda and outlined the concept of the release with Enke. The goal was an album built on Leary’s theory of the seven steps of consciousness. Leary felt that Ash Ra Tempel could produce an appropriate soundtrack for his lyrics. Klaus D. Müller, the road manager of Ash Ra Tempel and a later collaborator with Göttsching, recalled that throughout the recording project, everything but the music was chaotic. A wide variety of people gathered around Leary and Barritt, and drug-driven parties and general unrest disrupted the project. Neither Leary nor Kaiser knew how the album would be structured and produced. At some point, Edgar Froese made an offer to Kaiser to step in for Ash Ra Tempel.Footnote ²³

However, Göttsching and Enke had ideas about the music and their own role. With the help of Dierks, they managed to finish the recordings in three days at the Sinus Studio in Bern. Appropriately titled Seven-Up, the album featured various guest musicians. Micki Duwe took the lead vocals. Göttsching and Enke created the songs on A-side (‘Space’) in response to Leary’s recitations, but gradually the players got a grip, and the B-side of the album (‘Time’) sounds like the more familiar Ash Ra Tempel.Footnote ²⁴ According to Göttsching, Leary was initially only supposed to write the text and recite a little on tape, but eventually he emerged as the leading vocalist.Footnote ²⁵

At his studio near Cologne, Dierks mixed in some new instrument and vocal parts with various session musicians and singers and added electronic effects. Göttsching and Enke, along with lead vocalist Duwe, finalised the album with the help of several session musicians. In the end, as many as thirteen musicians and singers appeared on the album.Footnote ²⁶ Released in 1973 under the Kosmische Kuriere sub-label, Seven-Up gained a reputation as a somewhat failed project the ideas of which looked better on paper than the music actually sounded. Furthermore, Leary’s desire to harness rock music as a vehicle of the LSD revolution, as was to be expected, did not lead to a societal breakthrough.Footnote ²⁷

Reunion, the End of the Original Line-Up, and Schulze Solo

In 1972, Göttsching, Schulze, and Enke also became involved in Kaiser’s second collaborative project, where they, along with other musicians including Schulze, made music for Walter Wegmüller’s Tarot (1973) album. The Swiss-born artist drew inspiration from Tarot cards, and the album contained plenty of spoken words.Footnote ²⁸ Released in 1973, Tarot remains Wegmüller’s only album, and many commentators, such as Julian Cope and David Stubbs, have valued its jam sessions.Footnote ²⁹

Ash Ra Tempel’s fourth album, Join Inn, was released in 1973 and grew out of the hazy sessions of Tarot. Schulze played not only the drums but brought also his Farfisa organ and EMS Synthi A synthesiser to the studio. The album again consisted of a pair of long tracks. ‘Freak and Roll’ begins with wild jamming. Schulze’s hyperactive drumbeat is both dynamic and precise. Göttsching’s guitar moves seamlessly from blues solos to ethereal moods. Enke’s bass mourns mostly in the lowest register. Electronic glissandos and noises from the synthesiser pop up here and there.

The contrast with the song ‘Jenseits’ (Beyond) on the first side is enormous. The band take listeners into a dream space filled with vibrating guitar, organ, and synthesiser sounds, all coloured with tremolo, wah-wah, phaser, and delay effects. Enke joins the sonic landscaping with very slow bass patterns. On top of it all, Rosi Müller, Göttsching’s partner and muse at the time, slowly recites her text: ‘Let us dance on the wet grass. Look at me, please. Do you believe in peace? Sometimes it is so incredibly beautiful. Take me with you. Far away, you hear? The road is so long. Do you know the way – a little?’Footnote ³⁰ Join Inn epitomises both sides of Ash Ra Tempel, with psychedelic visions and distressing bursts of energy, as well as serene sound spaces that invite the listener’s own imagination and emotions.

In February 1973, Ash Ra Tempel performed three concerts in West Germany and France. At these concerts, Schulze’s synthesisers seasoned the overall sound of the band and Göttsching’s playing was more sophisticated than earlier.Footnote ³¹ However, these concerts also marked the end of the original line-up. In the middle of the last concert in Cologne, Enke gave up his bass guitar and sat down on the edge of the stage. Afterwards, Enke stated: ‘Yeah, the music you played was just so beautiful I didn’t know what to play. I preferred listen to it.’Footnote ³² Troubled by many personal problems, Enke resigned from Ash Ra Tempel and never played again. He died in 2005 at the age of fifty-three.Footnote ³³

Klaus Schulze embarked on a solo career at about the same time. His solo works allowed him to transcend the role of a drummer in a way that set free his creativity, which was not quite possible in his former bands.Footnote ³⁴ Irrlicht: Quadrophonische Symphonie für Orchester und E-Maschinen (Will-o’-the-Wisp: Quadrophonic Symphony for Orchestra and E-Machines, 1972) is a dark pseudo-classical album, populated by treated orchestral recordings, organ sounds, and electronic droning. His music is both restless and static and manages to escape the conventions of musical time. Irrlicht somewhat approaches to Tangerine Dream’s Zeit (1972) but is even more alienating. Cyborg (1973) is perhaps his most radical work. It introduces the EMS VCS 3 synthesiser, which Schulze elaborates on intensively, creating soundscapes and pulses. Cyborg, which takes up the man-machine trope later to be developed by Kraftwerk, consists of four tracks, all exceeding twenty minutes in length. As in Irrlicht, the strongly meditative organ parts and the orchestral sections create a strong sense of murky cosmic ambience.Footnote ³⁵

In these two albums, Schulze’s distinctive musical qualities began to take shape. Both build on soundscapes and moods created at the mixing desk. Obtrusive electronic sounds and a mysterious atmosphere distinguish Schulze’s early releases from the later ambient. Carefully created panning, delays, and echoes build Schulze’s space in an exceptionally vivid manner for the time. However, his early records still strongly divide opinions among his fans; some see them as experimental masterpieces, while others find them too extreme and challenging.

Cosmic Superfluity and the Departure from Ohr

In spring 1973, Schulze and Göttsching took part in recording sessions organised by Kaiser and Lettmann. The all-night, drug-driven jam sessions produced about sixty hours of recorded music for the future releases of the Kosmische Kuriere sub-label.Footnote ³⁶ In 1972, Kaiser had run into trouble with his early Ohr partners, Bruno Wendel and Günter Körber, who, after leaving the company, had formed a competing record label, Brain Records. Kaiser and Lettmann sought to raise the profile of their releases with glaring slogans and marketing, merging psychedelia and LSD culture into music. Schulze and Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese especially disliked Kaiser’s marketing style.Footnote ³⁷

Despite that, Schulze and Göttsching, and a few other musicians, such as Wallenstein’s Grosskopf and Jürgen Dollase, surrendered their jam sessions to Ohr. In 1974, Kaiser and Lettmann released some parts of the sessions on a series of albums entitled Cosmic Jokers, Galactic Supermarket, Planeten Sit In, and Sci-Fi Party.Footnote ³⁸ After Kaiser edited the session tapes to a proper length, Lettmann added her own vocal parts to some of the songs. Despite receiving monetary compensation for the sales, many of the musicians, and Schulze in particular, protested against Kaiser and Lettmann’s arbitrary actions.Footnote ³⁹ Flamboyant words and sci-fi tropes became a routine in the marketing. For example: ‘The time ship floats through the Galaxy of Joy. In the sounds of electronics. In the flashes of light. Here you will discover Science Fiction, the planet of COSMIC JOKERS, the GALACTIC SUPERMARKET and the SCI FI PARTY: That is the new sound, Space. Telepathy. Melodies, Joy.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Such verbally overbearing marketing of Ash Ra Tempel’s music put the band in a strange light. Even their musician friends began to worry. For example, Froese thought Ash Ra Tempel lived ‘in a dream world’: ‘They think that everything will turn out okay, that the explosion of consciousness will conquer the world and all the problems will solve themselves.’Footnote ⁴¹ Göttsching had no problems with Kaiser, but he did not appreciate the idea about the mind-expanding effect of musical awareness, while Enke kept tirelessly explaining the matter to outsiders. Later, Göttsching associated the talk about a higher consciousness as part of the West German music culture of the early 1970s, where all rock music had to have some political content or social purpose. Göttsching himself just wanted to play his guitar.Footnote ⁴² Eventually, he also began to disassociate himself from the influence of Kaiser and Lettmann.

Illustration 13.2 Manuel Göttsching, 1973.

© MG.ART, Photo: Marcel Fugère.

The Final Band Album and Innovations with Tape Machines

The last Ash Ra Tempel album on Ohr was Starring Rosi (1973). Featuring Göttsching on vocals, guitars, bass, mellotron, synthesiser, electric piano, and congas and Rosi Müller on vocals, speech, vibraphone, and concert harp, the album also featured Grosskopf on drums. In addition, Dierks played bass and percussion on a few tracks. This relaxed-sounding album is closer to New Age-inspired folk rock and light progressive rock than the band’s previous recordings.Footnote ⁴³

In 1974, Kaiser’s cosmic empire was collapsing because of debts, lawsuits, and the departure of bands. Göttsching’s first solo album, Inventions for Electric Guitar (1975), remains one of the last releases by Ohr, which initially marketed the album as Ash Ra Tempel’s sixth album.Footnote ⁴⁴ Later, it was re-released as Göttsching’s solo album. He recorded the album at home using only his electric guitar, a few pedals, and two open-reel tape recorders. The tape machine became a revolutionary musical instrument for Göttsching; with a two-track recorder and a guitar, he could create rhythmic delays, while a four-tracker captured his playing one track at a time.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is how Göttsching made use of the skills of tape manipulation that he had learned from Kessler. Pulsating guitar playing and harmonious interaction of melodies layered on top of the rhythmic parts revealed the inspiration Göttsching took from minimalist composers, especially Steve Reich and Terry Riley.Footnote ⁴⁶

Filling the entire A-side of the album, the track ‘Echo Waves’ is quite experimental with its rhythmic patterns and panning guitars. Still, it is unobtrusively captivating. The only guitar part that is classifiable as a proper solo only emerges at the end of a nearly eighteen-minute piece. The second track, ‘Quasarsphere’, is a subtle, melodic recollection of the early years of Ash Ra Tempel. On the B-side, ‘Pluralis’ weaves a swinging, discreetly evolving pattern of delayed rhythm guitars. The album features many of the elements upon which Göttsching has created music, especially in his solo career. These elements include repetitive patterns and theme variations, as well as melodic and rhythmic loops.Footnote ⁴⁷

In December 1974, Göttsching and guitarist-keyboardist Lutz ‘Lüül’ Ulbrich from Agitation Free began to perform together as Ash Ra Tempel. In 1975, the duo played in West Germany, France, and Britain to audiences of up to several thousand people.Footnote ⁴⁸ Especially in France, the band was still very popular. Contrary to Starring Rosi, the music of these concerts sprouted from the band’s earlier style. This especially applies to the songs that Göttsching and Ulbrich composed for the soundtrack of Philippe Garrel’s Le berceau de Cristal (The Crystal Cradle, 1976), a French experimental film that featured Nico, Dominique Sanda, and Anita Pallenberg.Footnote ⁴⁹

The base of the soundtrack consisted of ethereal guitar patterns that cruise between organ and synthesiser sounds, sometimes merging into a harmonic aural environment. The overall sound is rather electronic, as the duo also played guitar synthesiser and a programmable rhythm machine. The film music remarkably resembles the style that Göttsching, Ulbrich, and Grosskopf adopted later in Ashra. The recording was issued only in 1993 as an Ash Ra Tempel release.

The Electronic Minimalism of Ashra

From 1974 onwards, the music of both Göttsching and Schulze is impossible to associate with the Krautrock of the early 1970s. Both artists moved further away from psychedelic rock and found inspiration in synthesisers and various genres of music. However, if we understand Krautrock not as a style category but rather as a quest for new means of expression, the same desire to experiment and discover still drove both musicians in the latter part of the decade.

Göttsching continued making music at his Berlin-based Studio Roma and began collecting ARP, Moog, and EMS synthesisers and sequencers. His first distinctively electronic album was New Age of Earth, released by French label Isadora in 1976. For this album, Göttsching played all synthesiser parts by hand.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, at his 1976 solo concerts in France, he performed with pre-programmed sequencers and synthesisers.Footnote ⁵¹ The initial release was credited to Ash Ra Tempel, but after Göttsching obtained a record deal with Virgin in 1977, he shortened the band name to Ashra to avoid confusion. The new moniker was intended to serve all future projects, both solo and band efforts.

New Age of Earth and the following Blackouts (1977) were both solo albums, but for Correlations (1979) and Belle Alliance (1980), Göttsching invited his former partners Ulbrich (guitar and synthesiser) and Grosskopf (drums and synthesiser) to form a trio. Initially, the Ashra trio only assembled for a concert in London in August 1977. However, they would remain the heart of the band until the first decade of the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁵² New Age of Earth combined Göttsching’s interest in minimalism and the use of synthesisers. His arpeggios, chord progression, shimmering chords, and propulsive rhythms created an uplifting atmosphere. Songs such as ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Deep Distance’ push the listener forward. In ‘Ocean of Tenderness’, he created an ethereal sphere upon which the sound of guitar was able to float freely. The difference from Inventions for Electric Guitar is significant, as the guitars now played only a minor role. The album received a lot of praise from the music reviewers.Footnote ⁵³

Göttsching has said that he wanted to get rid of the limitations of guitars.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, in Blackouts, his guitar returned to the forefront and the synthesisers were to create a base for Göttsching’s long solos and other guitar parts. His playing not only echoed the Krautrock era, but it had also elements of jazz and funk. The side-long ‘Lotus Parts 1–4’ initially resembles the slowly evolving melodies and hypnotic groove of Inventions for Electric Guitar, but in the middle of the piece, electronic sounds are set free and tonal harmonies become supressed by sudden distortions and dissonance. Many reviewers also welcomed Blackouts.Footnote ⁵⁵ These two albums started Göttsching’s intense home studio period. In addition, he toured with Schulze and Ashra and made music with Michael Hoenig (Agitation Free).Footnote ⁵⁶ With the help of sequencers, Göttsching began to play long improvisations at concerts as well as at fashion shows.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ashra fused pop elements into Correlations and Belle Alliance yet did not forget their psychedelic roots. Electronic instruments still played an important role in Ashra’s music, but in balance with the band’s playing. Many of the songs relied on funk and disco rhythms and bass lines, which Göttsching became mesmerised with while visiting the United States in the late seventies. Good examples of this are the tracks ‘Club Cannibal’ and ‘Phantasus’ from Correlations. The tracks ‘Screamer’ and ‘Aerogen’ from Belle Alliance are faster and more rocking. Not surprisingly, Virgin requested more material that could attract the pop audiences.Footnote ⁵⁸

An Ambassador from the Synthetic Spheres: Klaus Schulze

In the mid-1970s, Klaus Schulze released many albums such as Blackdance (1974), Timewind (1974), Picture Music (1974), and Moondawn (1976). His music evolved to be more rhythmic and structured than his earlier output, and to some extent, it also began to resemble Tangerine Dream’s style in their early Virgin era. In the media, his music – along with Ashra’s and Tangerine Dream’s production – became labelled the Berlin School, which also referred to their common background as the apprentices of Thomas Kessler’s Beat Studio. From 1974 onwards, Brain and Virgin started to release Schulze’s works.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gradually, his sound palette expanded to include acoustic instruments, such as flute, trumpet, acoustic guitar, drums, piano, and percussion, as well as the human voice.

For Blackdance, Schulze used a rhythm machine and a guest singer for the first time. On Timewind, he introduced a Synthanorma sequencer, an ELKA string machine, and EMS Synthi A and ARP 2600 synthesisers. Picture Music and Moondawn were coloured by the then-famous Minimoog synthesiser. As a live performer, Schulze was very conscious about the power of electronic instruments as visual and material attractors and used them extensively; he became famous for piling the stage set with synthesisers, string machines, and sequencers.Footnote ⁶⁰

Schulze dedicated Timewind to his favourite composer, Richard Wagner. Later, Schulze returned many times to Wagner’s music with his electronic interpretations and compositions inspired by Wagner. The role of melodies, harmonies, and rhythm in Schulze’s music grew larger. However, a certain structural inertia and rhythmic immobilism remained his musical hallmarks through the seventies. The casting of vast sonic layers and building tensions without surrendering to a cathartic climax was typical of his musical language.

In the late seventies, Schulze expanded his repertoire to soundtracks in erotic films (Body Love, vols. 1 and 2 (1977)), historical figures (X (1978)), and works drawing on scientific fiction and fantasy (Dune (1979)). Mirage (1978) strongly manifested the liberating force of electronic music. For Schulze, the synthesiser represented a universal music machine that could overcome all restrictions of time, place, and social limitations. Schulze assured that electronic music could bridge the mind and the universe in a way that is neither a dream nor a hallucination. In the late seventies, Schulze achieved fame as a proponent of both electronic music and New Age music, which allowed him to build a relatively large and enduring fan base. In 1979, Schulze began releasing albums under the pseudonym Richard Wahnfried. With Time Actor (1979), he joined forces with the eccentric singer-musician Arthur Brown. In the 1990s, Wahnfried’s style began to resemble the electronic ambient and trance music of the time, and since then Schulze has gained recognition as one of the pioneers of trance.

From a New Opening to the Second Coming of Ashra

Göttsching’s first solo offering New Age Of Earth (1976) proved commercially successful upon initial release in France. This led Virgin to offer a lucrative nine-album deal and release the album worldwide in 1977. Blackouts (1978), too, sold very well. It was only with Correlations (1979) that sales figures stagnated, causing Virgin to release Belle Alliance (1979) in Germany only.

Göttsching’s home sessions did lead to an unpredictable and far-reaching acclaim. In December 1981, he recorded a piece in which a couple of synthesiser sequences revolved around two chords and a drum computer set the pace for the other machines. On top of that, Göttsching played guitar solos and riffs. He recorded a nearly hour-long piece directly on a tape without any doubling, mixing, or editing. A few years later, Göttsching offered the recording to Schulze’s Inteam label, which released E2–E4 in 1984.Footnote ⁶¹ Named after a typical opening move in chess and the droid R2–D2 of the Star Wars franchise, the release anticipated the rise of electronic dance music and influenced its evolution.

In 1984, German newspapers downplayed the release as an example of the inability of the vintage Krautrockers to regenerate.Footnote ⁶² Coincidentally or not, E2–E4 became a small hit on a radio, trendy stores, and DJs playlists in Europe and the United States. Surprised by the success, Göttsching assured that he had never thought of it as a dance piece.Footnote ⁶³ Ultimately, Sueño Latino (1989), an album two Italian producers built upon the ‘E2–E4’ sample, established the song’s status as one of the early cornerstones of house and trance. Despite that, Göttsching, like many other Krautrockers, found himself on the margins, playing as a guest on other artists’ records and making soundtracks for fashion shows and television. Only in the late 1990s did the legacy and influence of the German electronic musicians of the 1970s became widely acknowledged.Footnote ⁶⁴

In the 1980s, Ashra recorded only two albums. On Walkin’ the Desert (1989), Göttsching and Ulbrich revived their minimalist ambitions. The release of the exotica-style pop album Tropical Heat (1991) was delayed for five years. In the mid-1990s, a handful of companies began to reissue Krautrock albums, which by then had become rarities but increasingly attracted young fans of techno, ambient, and progressive rock. Interestingly, it was a French label that showed interest in the branch of the Berlin School under discussion here, with Spalax re-releasing the majority of the albums by Ash Ra Tempel, Ashra, and Manuel Göttsching.

Ashra’s second coming began in 1996, when Steve Baltes joined the line-up and helped to update the band’s sounds and live performances. Ashra updated their rhythms with electronic dance beats that brought plenty of new fans, for example in Japan where the quartet toured in 1997. Concerts in Germany and the Netherlands re-mobilised thousands of Ashra’s older fans.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ashra released three concert albums between 1998 and 2002, as well as a compilation in 1996.

Göttsching has been active throughout the last three decades. In 1991, he released a previously unreleased solo album, Dream & Desire, recorded in 1977. Since the early 2000s, samplers and music software have allowed Göttsching to perform solo concerts with a guitar, portable computer, and keyboards.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 2000, Schulze and Göttsching reunited to play in London at the Cornucopia Festival. The duo performed as Ash Ra Tempel and released a live recording, Gin Rosé (2000). In addition, they made even more music together and released an album entitled Friendship (2000). Also worth noting is the live DVD Ashra: Correlations in Concert from 2013. Göttsching remains very much active today, with several albums released in 2019 and 2021.

Conclusion

Ash Ra Tempel have gained their place in the history of rock music as a group of three musicians who did not compromise their vision but challenged many of the rock conventions of their time. Since the break-up of the original line-up, both Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze have proved that the most intense and chaotic years of Krautrock in 1970–73 were eventually a fertile breeding ground for experimental and ambitious musicians – despite the volatility of the rock music trends, conflicting ideas, and disappointments in the music business.

In the music of Ash Ra Tempel, the influence of electronic music has especially manifested itself as an innovative mind-set and experimentalism. Exploration of new sounds and musical structures started even before actual synthesisers entered the studios and stage. Göttsching’s and Schulze’s solo careers have also introduced their earliest musical output to new generations of fans. Ash Ra Tempel’s fame as acclaimed pioneers of psychedelic and experimental rock has remained among musicians, rock journalists, and reviewers.

Essential Listening

• Ash Ra Tempel, Ash Ra Tempel (Ohr, 1971)

• Ashra, New Age of Earth (Isadora, 1976)

• Manuel Göttsching, Inventions for Electric Guitar (Kosmische Musik, 1975)

• Manuel Göttsching, E2–E4 (Inteam, 1984)

• Klaus Schulze, Irrlicht (Ohr, 1972)

• Klaus Schulze, Mirage (Brain, 1978)

Within the realm of Krautrock, a number of notable artists – Can, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Tangerine Dream, and a few others – are frequently heralded for providing ‘a sonic template for younger musicians’Footnote ¹ with their ground-breaking approaches to music-making that have proven influential to successive generations of both avant-garde and mainstream musicians. Somewhat outside of this sphere of musical futurists are two interconnected bands – Amon Düül and Amon Düül II – whose stature and influence within Krautrock derive more from their conceptual underpinnings as a commune-based musical project and their recontextualization of rock music as a mechanism for examining a German cultural identity than from any particular musical innovation. Julian Cope, who used the artwork of their album Yeti for the cover of his Krautrocksampler, identifies Amon Düül II as ‘the group whose music continued to feel the pain of post-war Europe’,Footnote ² while Ulrich Adelt describes their music as ‘a deterritorialized musical hybrid, challenging essentialized Germanness through its cosmopolitanism’.Footnote ³

Amon Düül II were also one of the Krautrock groups most able to transmit their ideals to an international audience – Lester Bangs declared their album Yeti ‘one of the finest recordings of psychedelic music in all of human history’Footnote ⁴ at a time when the prevailing critical attitude in the Anglosphere towards Krautrock was one of mild condescension. Yet Amon Düül (both I and II) were not significant merely for their reception abroad, for they were also highly public representatives of trends and legitimate social movements of the post-1968 West German counterculture, particularly the commune movement, while also engaging in alternative lifestyle practices collectively described as ‘the alternative concept of the politics of the self’.Footnote ⁵

Illustration 14.1 Cover of Krautrocksampler by Julian Cope.

© Julian Cope.

Simultaneously, they engaged with their German cultural identity in ways both clever and problematic, embodying ‘both [the] promise and failure of the communal as a counter-model to the nationalist’.Footnote ⁶ Throughout the initial run of their career, from 1967 to 1981, Amon Düül and Amon Düül II typified each phase of the Krautrock movement, starting with the highly conceptual avant-gardism of the early days, the innovative and influential ‘classic’ period of 1969 to 1972, and the genre’s slow subsumption into the mainstream of modern rock music from 1972 onwards.

The Founding of a Musical Commune: 1967

Amon Düül was formed in a flat on Munich’s Klopstockstraße in 1967. The core founding members included brothers Peter and Uli Leopold, Chris Karrer, Falk Rogner, and Christian ‘Shrat’ Thiele, all of whom came from affluent families and were acquainted from their boarding school days. They also shared an interest in the popular rock and beat music of the day as well as avant-garde jazz and traditional music from various cultures. By the end of 1967, this core group of flatmates moved into a stately house on Prinzregentenstraße, a location that would provide an expanded sense of communal possibilities. By April of 1968, the loose collection of amateur musicians living in the house had begun performing under the name ‘Amon Düül’.

Munich in the late 1960’s was not particularly receptive to radical musical happenings, and the members of the Prinzregentenstraße commune frequently found themselves at odds with the suffocating conservatism of the region. Band members were disturbed by the hostility they faced in their home city, with Shrat recalling people screaming ‘you ought to be gassed!’ from open windows.Footnote ⁷ Guitarist John Weinzierl explains how this stark cultural divide informed the politics of a musical commune: ‘In those days, there were bloody Nazis around all over the place. … We didn’t have guns or the tools to chase them away, but we could make music, and we could draw audiences, we could draw people, with the same understanding, with the same desires.’Footnote ⁸ These desires corresponded to ‘a violent catharsis’ in the musical expression of the German counterculture, ‘a sometimes unacknowledged sense of wanting to purge the past and to establish a new youth cultural formation through experimental music’.Footnote ⁹

Amon Düül was not conceived as a rock band as such, but as an alternative lifestyle in and of itself, with the earliest Amon Düül performances taking the form of multimedia exhibitions involving all members of the commune, even the handful of children living there. Peter Leopold recalls, not entirely fondly, the concept’s genesis: ‘The ideologues [in the commune] came and said “now everyone has to make music”. … That was at first a social requirement. … Then we tried to transpose it to the stage.’Footnote ¹⁰ The concept of a commune of like-minded individuals who lived and made art together proved an attractive alternative for young people seeking to escape a staid traditionalism. Even the name Amon Düül demonstrates the group’s desire to shatter conventions: ‘Amon’ derives from the ancient Egyptian deity, while the band had this to say about ‘Düül’ in a 1969 interview with Underground magazine: ‘“Düül”, well, that’s a word that’s never existed before, with two ü’s – not in German, nor English or Japanese or anywhere else.’Footnote ¹¹

Amon Düül’s riotous and shockingly loud early performances immediately brought them notoriety in their home city of Munich. The presence of supermodel and underground sex symbol Uschi Obermaier, who sang and played maracas in the group’s early days, also boosted their fame, and established perhaps the first link between Amon Düül and some of the more politically engaged communes in West Germany. Obermaier and her boyfriend Rainer Langhans were the public faces of Kommune 1, originally founded in Berlin, which engaged in both serious-minded political actions as well as provocative pranks. Kommune 1 shared some members as well as a certain political impetus with the Amon Düül commune.

Kommune 1 favoured attention-grabbing demonstrations and performances over direct armed engagement with the establishment. Similarly, Amon Düül commune member and occasional band manager Peter Kaiser describes the political leanings of the band as ‘anarchists, but only verbally’.Footnote ¹² Kaiser, a member of the left-wing Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union, or SDS), also claims that Amon Düül’s first public performance took place at a demonstration in which the SDS occupied Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, and that the band’s performance in particular served as a catalysing moment for the nascent commune movement.

Sabine von Dirke’s analysis of the unified personal-political approach that characterized the West German counterculture at this time proves apt in explaining Amon Düül’s appeal as a uniquely multifaceted musical, political, and cultural entity: The counterculture

Peter Kaiser’s comment about Amon Düül’s ‘verbal’ anarchism overlooks the band’s desire and ability to transmit a political ideology, albeit a vague one, through their music itself. Alexander Simmeth describes this as ‘a political self-conception, expressed through the breaking of established musical structures’,Footnote ¹⁴ while the band members themselves explain in a 1971 press release: ‘We were able to achieve an articulation of a fundamental critique of the existing system because we had set out a model of the counterculture with the music.’Footnote ¹⁵ While this model overlaps with that of Kommune 1 or the SDS, who similarly promoted alternative lifestyles, the arts, and engagement in political demonstrations as the most pragmatic and effective courses for effecting social change, Amon Düül’s standing as Germany’s most famous commune band (perhaps barring Berlin’s Ton Steine Scherben) and their wide network of occasional members and fellow travellers sometimes brought the band into contact with the armed terrorists at the extremist end of the West German counterculture.

Like Kommune 1, whose co-founder Dieter Kunzelmann eventually tired of non-violent pranks and actions and joined the militant Tupamaros West-Berlin,Footnote ¹⁶ members of Amon Düül held political beliefs spanning the spectrum of radicalisation. Chris Karrer was once arrested for something as innocent as throwing bonbons during a university demonstration, while producer Olaf Kübler once remarked of Peter Leopold, ‘If he hadn’t been a drummer, he probably would have become a terrorist.’Footnote ¹⁷ It is unclear to what extent any members of Amon Düül held militant views or sympathised with the ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ (Red Army Faction, or RAF), a radical left-wing terrorist faction also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, but the band was, at the very least, acquainted with the leaders of the RAF. Singer Renate Knaup recalls an incident from 1969, when RAF leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof attempted to hide out with the band while on the run following an arson conviction.Footnote ¹⁸ She angrily ejected them from the property, suggesting that the band’s radicalism stopped short of abetting accused terrorists.

Two Bands, Two Concepts: 1968

Band logistics and varying levels of musical proficiency determined that most of the members of the early incarnations of Amon Düül wound up playing some kind of percussion instrument, and it is a distorted wave of crashing, clattering percussion that dominates the early Düül sound. The consistently jagged and abrasive nature of the music reflected the chaos of the band members’ lifestyles and personal relationships, and by the time the group was ready to enter the recording studio, it had split into two acrimonious factions. Uli Leopold became the de facto leader of Amon Düül, while Karrer, Rogner, Shrat, and a handful of other members were ejected from the commune just before the group was set to record the jam session that would provide the material for four of the five albums released under the Amon Düül name. Those members also missed out on the group’s performance at the Internationale Essener Songtage, a landmark festival that served as a major catalyst for Krautrock and the West German counterculture in general. Peter Leopold, one of the most tempestuous personalities in a group filled with them, was the only member to keep one foot in both camps.

Rather than embarking on a different musical project altogether, the cast-off Düüls decided to continue to expand and refine the concept of commune-based rock music. Though the names Amon Düül and Amon Düül II suggest two distinct eras of a single group, the two formations actually recorded and performed concurrently, and pursued two different conceptual goals. The original Amon Düül was conceived of first and foremost as a commune, and to prohibit certain unmusical communards from participating in the music-making would have violated the commune ethos: as biographer and friend of the band, Ingeborg Schober explains, ‘That was the story of Amon Düül – that the people who made music there really couldn’t [make music] at all, but they had the desire to do so.’Footnote ¹⁹ It is questionable whether one can even definitively categorise Amon Düül as rock music, given that typical verse–chorus–verse song structures are entirely absent, the largely wordless vocals are shrieking and wailing, and the rhythms are pounding and monotonous.

Amon Düül’s first album, Psychedelic Underground, was released in 1969, though the recordings date from 1968, just after the departure of the future members of Amon Düül II. The album’s rhythmic monotony and loose-yet-controlled sense of propulsive energy puts it in contention for the title of first true Krautrock album. Schober asserts that the very term ‘Krautrock’ originated in the German rock scene and derived from the album’s track ‘Mama Düül und ihre Sauerkrautband spielt auf’ (Mama Düül and her Sauerkraut-Band Start to Play),Footnote ²⁰ though surviving band members like John Weinzierl vigorously reject the notion that the band’s music ought to be included under this label.Footnote ²¹ The recordings from that single 1968 jam would later be edited and spliced together for three more Amon Düül albums – Collapsing Singvögel Rückwärts & Co. (1969), Disaster (1972), and Experimente (1982). This musique concrète-like reassembly of disparate bits of music aligns Amon Düül with other significant studio tinkerers of the era, such as Can and Faust.

The Amon Düül commune continued to exist in varying configurations until the mid-1970s, but the group would record only once more, in 1970, and this session would form the basis of Paradieswärts Düül, released in 1971 by Ohr. This album finds the band in a somewhat more subdued mood than on the 1968 session, with a largely acoustic psychedelic folk sound. Shrat and Weinzierl of Amon Düül II are credited as guest musicians on the album, while Leopold appears as a guest on Amon Düül II’s album Yeti from the same year, suggesting that the initial prickliness between the two Düüls following their split did not take long to soften. By 1973, the original Amon Düül had splintered even further, and only Amon Düül II remained to carry forwards the musical impetus engendered in the flat on Klopstockstraße in 1967.

Emblemising the Counterculture: 1969–1972

While the original Amon Düül was a resolutely avant-garde musical project and would never have been likely to attain much mainstream attention or credibility in any music scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amon Düül II’s sheer countercultural force of personality and visceral ‘acid rock’ sound engaged a record-buying public far outside the worlds of political communes and academic avant-gardism. The release of their first LP, Phallus Dei, in 1969 immediately established them as one of the forerunners in the wave of young German musicians exploring ‘a new legacy in sound that reconnected with older German traditions’Footnote ²² – a sound that would soon come to be known as Krautrock.

Phallus Dei, with its incendiary title (God’s Penis in Latin) seeming especially galling for a band from the heart of Catholic Bavaria, was an act of musical provocation that thrilled increasingly agitated countercultural types throughout Germany. That the album was warmly received in these circles speaks to a growing pessimism and paranoia in the German counterculture – the lyrics, album artwork, and overall tone of the album are decidedly violent and forbidding. Though by 1969 many rock artists had moved on from the simple pleasures and lysergic silliness of the Summer of Love’s first wave of psychedelic rock and begun to plumb darker sounds and lyrical themes, Amon Düül II’s complete indulgence of these trends in their lyrics sets them apart from their peers. From ‘Phallus Dei’: ‘The raper he is raping / The victim is crying still / The priest he is escaping / He’s creeping ‘round the mill.’

That these lyrics appear on the title track of the first album ever released under the Amon Düül II name is no fluke. The band’s fascination with scenes of violence and the macabre prevails throughout their discography, though it is rarely articulated as audaciously as on Phallus Dei. Another track on the album, ‘Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren’ (Dedicated to the Good, the Beautiful, the True) is narrated from the perspective of a child rapist and murderer, and pointedly features German lyrics, ‘recalling traditions of German murder ballads’.Footnote ²³

It is not only the lyrics that mark Phallus Dei as a conspicuously sinister outing for a late 1960s rock group. The music itself is ferocious, challenging, and much like the sound of Amon Düül, vaguely ritualistic. Percussion still figures heavily in shaping the Düül sound, with frantic tablas and bongos augmenting Peter Leopold’s propulsive fills, with which he shapes lengthy cycles of riffing and improvisation into something raga-like. Meanwhile, melodies are carried by an array of electric and acoustic guitars, violins, twelve-string bass, and organ, sometimes all played in unison in moments of stormy intensity. The album’s occult mood and sense of mystery is taken further by producer Olaf Kübler’s studio manipulations – isolated vocal and instrumental tracks echo and slice through the mix, inducing a feeling of creeping paranoia.

By the recording of Phallus Dei, Peter Leopold, Chris Karrer, Shrat, and Falk Rogner had been joined by a number of additional members who would be influential parts of Amon Düül II’s creative nucleus on-and-off throughout the band’s career. Guitarist John Weinzierl would prove a stalwart, if occasionally combative, contributor across most of the band’s albums, while Olaf Kübler, a more polished and professional musician than most of the other members, would make his presence felt as a producer and occasional saxophonist for years to come. However, it was the introduction of Renate Knaup, vocalist and the closest thing Amon Düül II ever had to a frontperson, that would perhaps most distinctively shape the future Düül sound.

Her ability to marry her operatic tendencies to rock’s power lent the band a grandiosity that the former Amon Düül never could have, nor would have, attained. Knaup’s influence also had a hand in gradually pushing the band closer to the rock mainstream during the 1970s: ‘I had really beautiful songs in my head, but “beautiful” in the sense of normal, not this freak stuff we produced in the beginning.’Footnote ²⁴ Her talents are under-utilized on the band’s early, more experimental albums, where she is largely constrained to wordless whooping and shrieking, though on later albums she stands out as a commanding vocalist in the context of a somewhat less avant-garde rock group.

Since the split between the two Düüls had occurred, most of the core members of Amon Düül II had been half-heartedly pursuing another attempt at a communal coexistence in a run-down villa in Herrsching am Ammersee, a posh lake resort town outside Munich. Visitors to Herrsching noted that any pretence of unity and oneness had gone out of the band, and explosive arguments became more and more frequent as garbage and filth accumulated in the villa. Eventually, the band decided to abandon Herrsching for the tiny village of Kronwinkl near Landshut, also on the outskirts of Munich, a pastoral setting that would acquire an almost legendary reputation as the location where Amon Düül II would ensconce themselves to produce some of their finest work, including their second album, Yeti, released in March 1970.

Yeti opens with the thundering riffs of ‘Soap Shop Rock’, one of Amon Düül II’s most iconic tracks, and an encapsulation of the band’s cataclysmic energy during this period. Once again, the listener is treated/subjected to a scene of disarming violence: ‘Down on the football place / I saw my sister burning / They tied her on a railroad track / And made her blue eyes burning.’

‘Soap Shop Rock’ runs to nearly fourteen minutes, spans several movements and codas, and could well function as a primer on everything that characterises Amon Düül II: phantasmagorical lyrical scenes, a blend of passages of free improvisation and operatic structure, a richly textured and varied auditory experience, and simply rocking out. Yeti showcases a guitar-driven hard rock sound akin to that of British space rock pioneers Hawkwind, with whom Amon Düül II shared a bassist – Englishman Dave Anderson played on both Phallus Dei and Yeti – as well as Black Sabbath and some of the lesser-known groups in the nascent heavy metal scene, who also toyed with similarly macabre lyrical themes. Indeed, while various Krautrock groups are regularly cited as influences on electronica and indie rock, Amon Düül II is one of the few that also left a significant mark on heavy metal. Weinzierl recalls his pleasant surprise at a festival with Slayer in Sweden in recent years, when ‘all these metal guys … just wanted to say, “You inspired me!”’Footnote ²⁵

‘Soap Shop Rock’ is an imposing set piece, but the rest of Yeti is no less impressive – it contains all of the same components as Phallus Dei, but they are tighter, more coherent, and more accomplished than before. The album also gave the band their first single, ‘Archangels Thunderbird’, the most conventional rock track on the album, but a masterful piece of expressionistic hard rock nonetheless, thanks to Renate Knaup’s commanding vocals (comparing Knaup’s vocals with the bizarrely electronically processed vocals on ‘Eye-Shaking King’ three tracks later, the two polarities of Amon Düül II become apparent). Tracks like ‘Archangels Thunderbird’ also helped the band garner attention outside of West Germany – write-ups about the band had already appeared in Melody Maker by 1970,Footnote ²⁶ and American rock critic Lester Bangs wrote about them as early as 1971.Footnote ²⁷ Though Amon Düül II were one of the first groups pasted with the faintly condescending ‘Krautrock’ label in Britain, they drew a devoted following there and shared a fanbase with similarly avant-garde-leaning progressive rock groups such as Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator.

Over the next two years, Amon Düül II would release three studio albums in quick succession – Tanz der Lemminge (Dance of the Lem-mings) in 1971, and Carnival in Babylon as well as Wolf City in 1972. This run of albums would solidify the band’s reputation as one of the premier progressive rock groups in continental Europe. Meanwhile, chaos continued to reign behind the scenes, as interpersonal conflicts at the Kronwinkl house led to yet another series of personnel changes – producer and DJ Gerhard Augustin estimates that over 120 different members passed through the two Amon Düüls over the yearsFootnote ²⁸ – and arguments about songwriter credits and copyrights persisted throughout those years.

A number of unsettling events further exacerbated the turmoil: in March 1971, a fire broke out during an Amon Düül II concert in the Cologne nightclub KEKS. Two concert-goers were killed, another 500 were injured, and almost all the band’s instruments and equipment were destroyed. In December of the same year, several band members were held at gunpoint by police under suspicion of being members of the RAF. Only days after the run-in with the police, Amon Düül II shared a bill with Hawkwind at the Olympia in Paris. Following Hawkwind’s set, a spontaneous political demonstration in the crowd rapidly turned into a riot, which culminated in Amon Düül II bassist Lothar Meid hurling a drum at some unruly audience members. The band then launched into one of the most well-reviewed sets of their career, prompting Ingeborg Schober to note that: ‘[O]ne is inclined to believe that as long as chaos existed around the band, they were instantaneously able to reach soaring heights, and as long as order and calm reigned around them, the chaos broke out amongst themselves.’Footnote ²⁹

Schober’s assertion is proven correct by the excellent run of albums Amon Düül II put out around this time. Tanz der Lemminge is more varied, more proficient, and more representative of trends in progressive rock than the two albums that preceded it. The double album features three extended suites, which are further divided into seventeen movements ranging in length from under one minute to over eighteen minutes. The suite taking up the first side, ‘Syntelman’s March of the Roaring Seventies’, was composed primarily by Karrer, and his appreciation for folk music shines through more buoyantly than on previous recordings. The B-side, ‘Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child’, composed mainly by Weinzierl, finds the band exploring new territory, as electronically processed organs and a Mellotron – listed in the album notes simply as ‘electronics’ – introduces a new layer of the Amon Düül II sound that they would embrace more fully on future albums. This side also blends hard rock guitars, sitar, and droning violins into the heady mix, marking the nearly twenty-minute suite as one of the most creative and inspired moments of the band’s career. The C- and D-sides are taken up by ‘Chamsin Soundtrack’, a largely improvised thirty-three-minute feast of psychedelic indulgence that serves as a signpost moment for the band: this is essentially the band’s last dalliance with ‘acid rock’. That is to say, the raw, untutored, largely improvisational sound of the first two albums would now come to be replaced by more polished, progressive and compositionally bound structures, as heard on the band’s next two albums, Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City.

Due to one of the band’s countless personnel shakeups, Renate Knaup is credited only as a guest vocalist on one brief track on Tanz der Lemminge, but she would return as a full member on Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City and become an essential part of the band’s sound and identity from then on. So too would bassist and vocalist Lothar Meid, who first appeared as a full member on Tanz der Lemminge, though he had previously toured with the band. Meid was an experienced musician who had played with jazz musician Klaus Doldinger and co-founded Embryo, the jazz- and world music-inspired Krautrock ensemble from Munich. Meid’s compositions tended to be somewhat more pop-oriented than those of the founding members, as evidenced by his later work with mainstream German classic rockers Peter Maffay and Marius Müller-Westernhagen.

Carnival in Babylon, released in January 1972, is a transitional album with some satisfying moments, though it feels like a relatively minor entry in the Amon Düül II catalogue. It does, however, set the stage for the shimmering progressive elegance of Wolf City, an inspired synthesis of the laissez-faire experimentation of earlier albums and the tighter, more song-oriented path the band was starting to tread. ‘Wie der Wind am Ende einer Straße’ (Like the Wind at the End of a Street), an instrumental from the second side, is a mellifluously layered blend of proto–New Age kosmische Musik and Indian influences, and, according to Falk Rogner, represents the only time that the band actually recorded while under the influence of LSD.Footnote ³⁰ The album closes with the serene ‘Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge’, a minor masterpiece of progressive rock, spanning several movements within just five minutes, with Mellotron textures that single this out as one of Amon Düül II’s gentlest and most forward-looking compositions.

Exploring National and International Identities: 1973 until Today

Wolf City is not the last notable Amon Düül II album – their next three studio albums, Vive la Trance (1973), Hijack (1974), and Made in Germany (1975), all have strong moments. Vive la Trance gloomily predicts a sci-fi apocalypse and describes horrific bloodshed in the Mozambican War of Independence on the fearsome ‘Mozambique’, perhaps the band’s most obviously political track, with lyrical depictions of ‘the white beast … in the villages, dealing only in death’, and an exhortation to ‘unite and fight’. Hijack, on the other hand, is upbeat and accessible for an Amon Düül II record and is clearly inspired by Roxy Music and Ziggy Stardust–era David Bowie. Meid’s influence is apparent throughout the album, which bears similarities with his side projects Utopia and 18 Karat Gold from 1973, both of which also feature a number of other Amon Düül II members.

One release from this era that satisfyingly captures some of the visceral energy of the old Düül is the band’s first live album, Live in London (1973). Consisting of spirited adaptations of fan favourites from Yeti and Tanz der Lemminge, it draws a stark contrast between the psychedelic freak-outs of the band’s earlier work and their more polished contemporary studio work. The album is also significant for its provocative cover art: a militarized, Stahlhelm-clad demon looms threateningly over Big Ben and the Tower Bridge. Such an obvious reference to the Third Reich seems uncharacteristic of a band as outspokenly opposed to Nazism as Amon Düül II, though the satirical intent of the artwork is made clearer in the context of a disagreeable incident from 1972: the band’s first ever performance in Britain was marred by an attendee who loudly shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and gave a Nazi salute during every song break.Footnote ³¹ Recent reissues of Live in London have featured different, less incendiary cover art.

It may have been this incident that started the group contemplating their identity as a German band and the stereotypes and ignorant jokes they could expect to face from international audiences. Their last notable album, Made in Germany, is an odd, amusing exercise in grappling with German national pride and shame. Originally intended as a concept album based on German history, it was aimed mainly at the American market, an audience for whom Amon Düül II and Krautrock in general were still largely unknown. Olaf Kübler claims to have previously presented the Düül side project Utopia to some American record label executives under the name Olaf & His Electric Nazis.Footnote ³² That idea was ultimately canned, but it seems that the band had fixated on a satirical embrace of German history as the way to reach a broader international audience.

Made in Germany features humorous songs about Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Fritz Lang, along with many playful references to the ‘kraut’ label – ‘the krauts are coming to the USA’ – as the band gleefully exclaims on the country-tinged ‘Emigrant Song’. The album is musically diverse, drawing heavily from glam rock and musical theatre, with a sense of whimsy that is dampened somewhat by the inclusion of a skit featuring a mock ‘interview’ with Adolf Hitler. Ironically, the edgy double concept album the band was sure would pique the interest of American audiences was trimmed to a single LP for the American release, with the Hitler skit being removed altogether.

Following Made in Germany, Amon Düül II released four more largely lacklustre albums before disbanding in 1981. The final album of the band’s original run, Vortex (1981), is somewhat of a return to the sinister Düül sound of yore, though it sounds overproduced and rather lifeless. Two years later, in 1983, the album Experimente appeared under the original Amon Düül name, featuring the last of the studio floor cuttings from the 1968 session that spawned four of their five albums. Comparing Vortex and Experimente is jarring in that the chaotic, amateurish jamming of the early Amon Düül actually sounds timelier and more ground-breaking in the context of post-punk and early industrial music in 1983 than the bloated prog pop of latter-period Amon Düül II.

After the band’s initial breakup in 1981, Weinzierl forged onward with a new incarnation of Amon Düül II, often referred to as Amon Düül UK, featuring members of Hawkwind, Van der Graaf Generator, and Ozric Tentacles, while a more complete version of the band has reunited from time to time for short tours and two new studio albums in 1995 and 2010. Karrer, Weinzierl, and Knaup all remain involved with the group and perform occasionally to this day.

As a Liberty Records press release for Phallus Dei explained in 1969: ‘Amon Düül II understands itself as a community. … The music of Amon Düül II is inseparable from the history of the group, their sociological basis, and their societal experiences.’Footnote ³³ Or, as the members themselves put it in a later press release for Tanz der Lemminge:

Judging by the successive generations of fans and musicians who continue to rediscover this music, the message has been received.

Essential Listening

• Amon Düül, Psychedelic Underground (Metronome, 1969)

• Amon Düül II, Phallus Dei (Liberty, 1969)

• Amon Düül II, Yeti (Liberty, 1970)

• Amon Düül II, Wolf City (United Artists, 1972)

This chapter will look at what I call the ‘flip side’ of Krautrock. That is to say I will focus on the political, social, economic, and cultural developments in 1970s West Germany that this music genre did not reflect, rather than those it did. The protagonists of Krautrock posed as the cultural avant-garde of their era, a stance that is often uncritically adopted by commentators.Footnote ¹ In fact, as I will show here, Krautrock was essentially a highly conservative music movement. There are three good reasons for this.

First, Krautrock was almost exclusively dominated by heterosexual men. Consequently, it had no links to the women’s rights movement of the time. In the first part of this chapter, I will show that feminist values were reflected in German pop and rock music made during the decade of Krautrock – but only in genres outside of Krautrock itself. A connection between Krautrock and women’s liberation only took place in the transition period to Neue Deutsche Welle, or NDW (German New Wave) at the beginning of the 1980s.

Second, Krautrock was almost exclusively the domain of white, German men, who often came from wealthy, upper-middle-class backgrounds. Despite this, Krautrock presented itself as an international, cosmopolitan movement. Apart from Can’s two vocalists – Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki – musicians from diverse ethnic backgrounds were rare on this scene. West Germany’s gradual transition from an ethnically homogeneous to a multicultural society in the 1970s is therefore not reflected in Krautrock. For this reason, I will mention the migrant community most prominently represented in Krautrock – the Turkish labour migrant community or Gastarbeiter (guest workers).

Third, despite its emphasis on cosmopolitanism, Krautrock also featured a group of bands that aimed to rediscover and preserve German cultural traditions. These bands took their names from famous Romantic poets, set medieval poetry to music, or sang in the regional dialects of north and south Germany. While canonised, cosmopolitan Krautrock is regarded outside Germany as the most important, formative, influential music to emerge from post-war West Germany, within Germany the impact of this traditionalist movement has been far greater: it continues in Mittelalter Rock (medieval metal) bands who have enjoyed commercial success since the early 1990s in a reunified Germany.

Feminist Approaches: Inga Rumpf, Juliane Werding, Schneewittchen, and Claudia Skoda

Krautrock, as the genre has been canonised in recent decades, remained a purely male affair. Apart from Renate Knaup, the singer from Amon Düül II and, briefly, Popol Vuh, there were no prominent women in this music genre. For this reason, its political impact was limited. Krautrock had no connections to the German feminist movement of the 1970s. Women’s sexual emancipation played no role in Krautrock – in fact, the entire subject of sexuality was strangely absent. This is even more astonishing in a decade that was essentially all about sexual liberation.

The first female rock band in Germany, The Rag Dolls, from Duisburg,Footnote ² were founded in 1965 and oriented on American rhythm and blues and British beat music. They named themselves after a song by the Four Seasons; the only single they recorded was a cover version of ‘Yakety-Yak’ by The Coasters. Despite numerous performances, The Rag Dolls failed to produce another single, let alone an entire album. They disbanded in 1969.

The most prominent German female rock singer at the beginning of the 1970s was Inga Rumpf. She started her career in 1965 in the folk band City Preachers, from which the rock band Frumpy emerged in 1970. In 1972, Rumpf founded Atlantis with former Frumpy members Jean-Jacques Kravetz and Karl-Heinz Schott. Their name and the psychedelic design of their album cover art were inspired by the burgeoning style of Krautrock, yet they remained strongly rooted in blues, jazz, and soul. Not least due to their English song lyrics, the leading German music magazine Sounds described them as ‘the “most English” of German groups’.Footnote ³ Rumpf was soon considered a female role model. On her first solo album, Second-Hand Mädchen (Second-Hand Girl, 1975), she sang in German for the first time. The title track is one of the first female empowerment songs written in German. Defying male expectations, her lyrics encouraged young women to refuse to dress in ‘glitter jackets’ or wear ‘sequins’ to get ahead in their careers, proudly stating ‘meine Nähte sitzen schief und krumm’ (the seams on my clothes are crooked).

Illustration 15.1 Inga Rumpf.

© Jacques Schumacher.

In 1975, a hit feminist anthem was also released: ‘Wenn du denkst du denkst dann denkst du nur du denkst’ (When You Think You Think, Then Only You Think You Think) by Juliane Werding, written by Gunter Gabriel. The lyrics of this hit single encouraged women to behave ‘like men’: to drink as much as they could in the pub without falling over, and to win at cards. Werding started her career as a political pop and folk singer in 1972. Her first hit ‘Am Tag, als Conny Kramer starb’ (The Day Conny Kramer Died) was a cover version of ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ by The Band, but with different, German lyrics: Werding’s version mourns a friend who has died of a drug overdose. She was also one of the first singers to focus on environmental pollution and ecological disaster in ‘Der letzte Kranich vom Angerburger Moor’ (The Last Crane on An-gerburg Moor).

In 1976, the first group formed who explicitly saw themselves as a mouthpiece for second-wave feminism, the all-female Schneewittchen. They were led by the folk singer, guitarist, and flute player Angi Domdey. She had previously played in a jazz band. Schneewittchen, however, combined German folk songs and blues ballads with feminist messages. Their debut album Zerschlag deinen gläsernen Sarg (Frauenmusik – Frauenlieder) (Smash your Glass Coffin (Female music – Female songs)) was released in 1978. For example, on ‘Der Mann ist ein Lustobjekt’ (The Male is an Object of Lust), Domdey critiques the sexualised male gaze on women by reversing it, while on the title track of the album she demands:

These are some of the few feminist voices in German pop music in the mid-to-late 1970s. However, they developed independently of Krautrock or were even – in the case of Inga Rumpf, Frumpy, and Atlantis – diametrically opposed to its musical style. There was, nevertheless, one exception: Die Dominas (The Dominatrices) emerged in West Berlin in the early 1980s, consisting of fashion designer Claudia Skoda and her model Rosi Müller. Their first and only single was produced by Ash Ra Tempel’s founder Manuel Göttsching, while the cover was designed by Kraftwerk members Ralf Hütter and Karl Bartos.

Claudia Skoda was one of the defining figures of West Berlin’s underground scene in the early 1970s and beyond. She designed avant-garde knitwear, combining wool with polyester yarn and tape from music cassettes. In 1972, Skoda moved into a factory floor in Berlin with artist friends who named their headquarters ‘fabrikneu’ (mint condition, or literally: ‘factory-new’) in an allusion to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Klaus Krüger, who experimented with homemade drums and later worked with Iggy Pop and Tangerine Dream, belonged to this community.

The fabrikneu family maintained close relations to the Krautrock scene. Amon Düül II often stayed at fabrikneu when he was in Berlin, and Göttsching wrote music for Claudia Skoda’s fashion shows in 1976. The highlight of their collaboration was the 1979 fashion show ‘Big Birds’:

Göttsching provided electronic music. ‘He began with a simple heartbeat, which immediately drew the public into his narrative, at the same time providing a foretaste of the never-ending tracks, characterised by repetition and phrase displacement, that would become so formative for the sound of the time.’Footnote ⁵ Göttsching started working with computers in 1979, first with the Apple II, then with early Commodore and Atari models. In 1981, his first solo album, E2–E4, recorded exclusively with electronic instruments, was released. It inspired Claudia Skoda to store her knitting patterns on punch cards and in the early 1980s she also began to make her knitwear with the help of Atari computers.

Together with Rosi Müller in the duo Die Dominas, Skoda sang about sadomasochism to Göttsching’s minimalist beats: ‘Schlag mich / schlag mich nicht / Schmerz, wo bist du?’ (Hit me / don’t hit me / pain, where are you?). Minimalism and sadomasochism were also echoed in the music of the first successful album by Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, Alles ist gut (Everything is Fine), released in 1981. It was not until the 1980s that Krautrock music became sexualised, and the first women performers staked their claim, but this transition occurred when Krautrock was already giving way to post-punk and Neue Deutsche Welle.

Krautrock was therefore blind to German society’s feminist awakening. Despite its avant-garde aspirations, its line-up had a highly conservative character, especially on the topic of sexual politics. Feminist expression was more likely to be found in music genres maligned by Krautrockers and their supporters, such as German Schlager or in rock based on Anglo-American models. Strong indications of feminist tendencies only featured on the West German underground scene when the era of Krautrock was over.

Migrant Voices: Türküola, Metin Türkoz, Cem Karaca, and Ozan Ata Canani

Krautrock was not only almost exclusively a male domain: the men who dominated the scene were almost all white Germans. Musicians with diverse ethnic backgrounds were few and hard to find, with the notable exceptions of Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki, vocalists with Can, and the female Korean singer Djong Yun, who featured on records by Popol Vuh. These exceptions were evidently made for the singers’ ‘exotic’ appeal. Diverse voices were not represented in Krautrock as a matter of course, which once again shows its political failings. From 1968 to 1980, the number of ethnic migrants in West Germany increased from 3.2 to 7.2 per cent, or from just under 2 million to roughly 4.5 million.Footnote ⁶ This influx profoundly changed West German society, but the increasing visibility of migrants was barely reflected in Krautrock.

In the 1960s, however, a flourishing music scene developed among Turkish migrants living in Germany. They were the largest migrant group from 1961 onwards. Following a government drive to recruit Gastarbeiter, by 1973, some 867,000 workers from Turkey alone had come to live in West Germany.Footnote ⁷ The Turkish music scene was just as strictly segregated from the German cultural scene as its people were from German society. Significantly, Germany’s best-selling independent record company in the 1960s and 1970s was one that produced Turkish-language music for migrants living in Germany.

The record label Türküola was founded in Cologne in 1964 and still exists with a catalogue that comprises more than 1,000 albums, singles, and compilations. Its vinyl records and, later, compact cassettes were not distributed through regular record shops but in corner grocery shops and other stores that were part of the German-Turkish community. Türküola’s most successful artist, Yüksel Özkasap, nicknamed Köln’ün Bülbülü (The Cologne Nightingale), sold 800,000 copies of her 1975 album Beyaz Atli (White Horseman). But that went unnoticed by German society; Özkasap did not appear on any TV shows, nor were her immense sales reflected in the official album charts because of the label’s unconventional distribution channels.Footnote ⁸

Another prominent Türküola artist was Metin Türkoz, who started his career in Germany as an assembly line worker in Cologne’s Ford factories. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, he sang about his own experiences and everyday problems, and the longings and dreams of first-generation migrants. For example, in ‘Guten Morgen, Mayestero’Footnote ⁹ (Good Morning, Mayistero), Türkoz switches back and forth between German and Turkish, in a slightly mocking conversation with his line manager. At the turn of the 1980s – because of Germany’s economic crisis and the resulting rise in unemployment – Türkoz also incorporated racist slogans such as ‘Ausländer raus!’ (Foreigners out!) into his lyrics as these were now heard more and more often in real life. He was the first singer to systematically mix German and Turkish slang words, a technique that became a key stylistic device in the next generation of German-Turkish music rappers like Microphone Mafia and Eko Fresh or, most recently, Haftbefehl.

From the end of the 1960s, the Türküola label also released albums by Cem Karaca, one of Turkey’s best-known musicians. He combined Anatolian folk style with elaborate soundscapes and elements of progressive rock and psychedelic music, coming surprisingly close to the aesthetics of Krautrock. Karaca’s lyrics took up the theme of social revolution as well as calls to resist Turkish nationalism. Yoksulluk kader olamaz (Poverty Need Not Be Fate) is the title of his 1977 album. ‘Safinaz’, released the following year, was a rock symphony inspired by Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the difficult fate of a working-class girl. When political tensions in Turkey intensified – culminating in the military coup in September 1980 when a military junta seized power, imposing martial law and banning all political parties – Karaca emigrated to Germany and remained there until 1987. He founded a German-language band called Die Kanaken (The Kanaks, a derogatory German expression for Turks) and released his first eponymous German-language album in 1984.

The songs on this album are musically far less ambitious than Karaca’s songs from the 1970s, though they too alternate between rock and folk themes, and between Western and Anatolian music styles. The opening track of the album ‘Mein deutscher Freund’ (My German Friend) is particularly succinct in showing how Turkish guest workers hope to be seen by Germans as more than just cheap labour: ‘Er glaubt so fest daran, oh, so fest daran / Freund ist jeder deutsche Mann’ (He believes so firmly, oh, so firmly / That every German is his friend). But the social barriers remain insurmountable: ‘Gastfreundschaft war zugesagt / Und jetzt heißt es: “Türken raus!”’ (They promised to welcome us / And now it’s: ‘Turks out!’). The song still ends with a euphoric verse promising reconciliation between people of future generations: ‘Da wo jetzt noch Schranken sind / Reißt sie nieder, stampft sie ein’ (Where there are now barriers / Tear them down, stamp on them).

Ozan Ata Canani, born in 1963, was one of Die Kanaken’s musicians. He came to Germany from Turkey in 1975 and taught himself to play the Turkish long-necked lute, the bağlama, while still at school. He performed at Turkish wedding parties and began to compose his own songs, soon also in German. ‘Deutsche Freunde’ (German Friends) is the name of his first German-language song. ‘Arbeitskräfte wurden gerufen / … Aber Menschen sind gekommen’ (Labourers were called for / … but human beings turned up). ‘Deutsche Freunde’ is a song about the fate of the people who eke out an existence in Germany as welders, unskilled workers, and bin collectors, as well as about the fate of their children: ‘Sie sind geteilt in zwei Welten / Ich … frage Euch / Wo wir jetzt hingehören?’ (They are divided into two worlds / I … ask you all / Where do we belong?).

It was already clear to Canani as a teenager that he would spend his life in Germany.Footnote ¹⁰ But it was just as clear to him that Germans would like him sent ‘home’, sooner rather than later. His songs about split identities tried to mend this rift through music. But despite his best efforts, success escaped him. Turkish audiences in Germany did not want to hear songs in German; and Germans were not interested in the problems or music of their fellow citizens. The same applied to fans of alternative and countercultures: at the beginning of the 1980s, these groups were open to Afro-American sounds, hip-hop, and Jamaican reggae as well as the emancipatory struggles they reflected. But the music of the large Turkish minority living in their own country was ignored in the same way as everyday racism.

After Cem Karaca went back to Turkey, for a while Canani led the follow-up project, Die Kanaken 2, but again with little success. He finished his musical career in the late 1980s and it took almost three decades before he was rediscovered when he re-recorded ‘Deutsche Freunde’ in 2013 for a compilation with the title Songs of Gastarbeiter. Now he regularly plays concerts with the Munich-based neo-Krautrock band Karaba. In spring 2021, his long-delayed debut album Warte mein Land, warte (Wait, My Country, Wait) was released. He plays his intricate, melodic bağlama over a solid machine-like rhythm section, reminiscent of Can and Neu! No less than forty years after their first performances, the sound of German-Turkish migrants joined that of Krautrock.

Krautrock and the German Nation: Hölderlin, Novalis, Ougenweide, and Achim Reichel

Krautrock is often labelled as iconoclastic, hostile to tradition and trailblazing. Krautrock’s goal to make a decisive break with the tainted musical traditions of post-war West Germany is often described as its most significant political impetus. Holger Czukay of Can put it as follows: ‘In the end, music has only two options: either to outperform music history or to start from scratch. Can decided on the latter.’Footnote ¹¹ But apart from those who sought to break with tradition, various bands also dedicated themselves to cultivating and reappropriating German cultural traditions. German Romantic literature and philosophy played a role, as did medieval poetry; historical and regional forms of German such as Old and Middle High German, as well as Low German and Frisian, were also included.

One of the first acts to be released on the Krautrock label Spiegelei was Hölderlin, named after the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Initially, the band mainly played cover versions of British folk revival bands like Fairport Convention, Traffic, and Pentangle. On their debut album Hölderlins Traum (Hölderlin’s Dream, 1972), their lyrics were political as well as ecstatically romantic. Later, Hölderlin’s arrangements were more sophisticated and featured extensive organ and guitar solos. The musicians also set texts to music by political writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Erich Fried, and H. C. Artmann. Touring with their third album Rare Birds (1977), singer Christian Noppeney appeared in costume as a giant bird, inspired by Peter Gabriel and the stage shows of early Genesis.

Another German Romantic poet, Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (alias Novalis; 1772–1801), lent his pen name to the group Novalis, which formed in Wuppertal in 1971. Their 1973 debut album Banished Bridge, released on the Krautrock label Brain, was an exercise in ‘Romantic rock music’,Footnote ¹² as they put it. Novalis dispensed with the electric guitar and opted for expansive organ solos and English lyrics. For their eponymous second LP in 1975, Novalis used German lyrics. They also set poems by their namesake to music, such as ‘Wunderschätze’ (Wondrous Treasures) or ‘Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren’ (When Numbers and Figures Are No More) from his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). These poems convey a deeply Romantic mistrust against the rationalisation of the world.Footnote ¹³ Some centuries after the poet Novalis, the twentieth-century band of the same name belatedly brought hippie mysticism to German rock music. And they did so very successfully: with sales of 300,000 albums, Novalis were one of the most successful West German rock bands of the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁴

The formation with the most long-term, decisive impact in the cultivation of German tradition was Ougenweide, founded in 1971 and named after a poem by the Middle High German minstrel Neidhart von Reuenthal (1210–45). In modern German, their name translates as Augenweide (a sight to behold). Using the xylophone, guitars, slide whistle, flute, cymbals, and other rare instruments, they set medieval German poetry to music. Lyrics included, among others, poems by the first great German minstrel from that epoch, Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1170–1230) as well as his lesser-known contemporaries like Burkhard von Hohenfels (thirteenth century) or Dietmar von Aist (1115–1171). Ougenweide singers Minne Graw and Renee Kollmorgen chanted German from centuries yore with great vigour. On their second album, All die weil ich mag (All Those Because I Like) from 1974, Ougenweide even set an Old High German poem to music, the ‘Merseburger Zaubersprüche’ (Merseburg Incantations) from the ninth century, probably the oldest surviving literary text in the German language.

Ougenweide’s producer was the Hamburg musician Achim Reichel; on their debut album, he can also be heard on timpani and bass. Reichel’s career was one of the most interesting at this time because it spanned all areas of German rock music.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1961 he was one of the co-founders of The Rattles, the first successful English-language beat band in West Germany. In 1971, under the moniker A.R. & Machines, he released Die grüne Reise (The Green Journey), which consists of looped guitar improvisations recorded on an Akai 330D tape machine, allowing Reichel to create an entire guitar orchestra by himself. He continued to pursue this concept – in parallel to his collaboration with the traditionalists of Ougenweide – until 1976 when his career took another surprising turn.

Illustration 15.2 Achim Reichel (with A.R. & Machines), Hamburg, 1971.

© Heinrich Klaffs.

He completely reinvented himself as an interpreter of sea shanties sung in Low German. His debut Dat Shanty Alb’m (The Shanty Album) from 1976 opens with the track ‘Rolling Home’ and features the chorus: ‘Rolling home, rolling home / Rolling home across the sea / Rolling home to di old Hamborg / Rolling home, mien Deern to di!’ (Rolling home to you, old Hamburg / Rolling home, my girl, to you!). Mixing English and Low German, the song tells of a sea journey from Hamburg to a foreign country and the return to the woman who is at home waiting for him. Reichel’s lyrics skilfully exploit the linguistic similarities between Low German and English while the chorus openly alludes to his role models in rock music, The Rolling Stones.

Just as Ougenweide revived obscure forms of German, Reichel rejuvenated Plattdeutsch (Low German), a dialect that had almost completely disappeared in the 1970s. In northern Germany in the 1970s, Low German was widely used by older generations in rural areas; towards the end of the twentieth century, however, it had largely disappeared first from public, then from private use. This trend of decline was a development that equally affected other dialects and minor languages. The gradual disappearance of Low German was also reinforced by the standardisation of language promoted by the media and culture industries, and therefore also by pop culture. For this reason, a recourse to Low German could be seen both as an act of resistance against standardisation and as an attempt by musicians to promote ‘the language of the people’. Reichel attempted to reach an audience who felt disowned both the political music by songwriters of the 1960s and the ‘avant-garde’ sounds of Krautrock.

Achim Reichel singing in Low German was considered by many followers of Krautrock in the 1970s to be a regression to outdated nationalist traditions. In fact, his recourse to a dialect could have been seen as an anti-nationalist reappropriation of a repressed (language) tradition. So his intention was closer to the Krautrockers’ will to radically break with tradition than it might first appear. In the same year as Dat Shanty Alb’m, 1976, the album Leeder vun mien Fresenhof (Songs from My Frisian Farm) by the northern German songwriter Knut Kiesewetter, the former producer of communist songwriter Hannes Wader, was released. It sold over 500,000 copies in a short period, featuring new compositions by Kiesewetter with lyrics in Low German and Frisian.

The opening track is called: ‘Mien Gott, he kann keen Plattdüütsch mehr un he versteiht uns nich’ (Dear God, He Can’t speak Low German Anymore and Doesn’t Understand Us’). The lyrics address a young man who can no longer speak the language of his ancestors and is therefore cut off from his traditional origins. In his song, Kiesewetter laments the young man’s cultural impoverishment and alienation from his rural, peasant, proletarian background: forgetting your own language is tantamount to forgetting your social class.

In the 1980s, lyrics in dialect underwent another astonishing revival. This time, however, the scene was not so much dominated by northern German artists: the Spider Murphy Gang from Munich wrote in Bavarian dialect while BAP from Cologne used local dialect kölsch, which until then had been mainly limited to German carnival songs. Now, it served as a tool for protest songs – for example, ‘Kristallnaach’ (Night of Broken Glass, referring to the anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938) whose subject was the resurgence of right-wing radicalism in West Germany in the 1980s. The Austrian singer Falco also mixed Austrian dialect with English into a kind of early hip-hop hybrid in hit songs like ‘Der Kommissar’ (1982).

Shanty Bands and Beyond

The interest in German language and tradition found in groups such as Ougenweide, Hölderlin, and Novalis finally waned in the 1980s only to experience a remarkable revival in the 1990s. Following German reunification, a renaissance of political and cultural nationalism took place that led to a flare-up of nationalist violence. Especially in the East German federal states, there were repeated, violent riots against migrant workers as well as arson attacks on homes of asylum seekers. The most successful German rock band of the 1990s, Rammstein, dangerously and irresponsibly toyed with symbols of nationalism and national socialism that attracted attention and provoked outrage.Footnote ¹⁶

Such recourse to patriotism and nationalism in German pop culture and politics from the 1990sFootnote ¹⁷ also found a less aggressive expression in many groups that emerged in this period. They drew their inspiration, music, lyrics, and instruments, once more, from the Middle Ages, resulting in the genre of medieval metal. Its most important proponents were bands like Corvus Corax, Schandmaul, Subway to Sally, Saltatio Mortis, and In Extremo; the latter explicitly referred in their music to the Krautrock of the 1970s as well as Ougenweide. These neo-medieval rockers combined electric guitars with bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, harps, shawms, and many other kinds of historic instruments.

The Shanty Album by Achim Reichel, in turn, inspired the most successful northern German rock band of the 2010s: Santiano saw themselves as a ‘shanty rock band’ and posed as weathered mariners at their concerts. Their songs were mostly about seafaring and pirates. They both ironically ruptured tradition and raised it to a new, non-ironic level with their masculinist rock-music performance style. With Santiano, nostalgia for one’s roots merges with a nostalgia for the perceived authenticity of ‘good old rock music’, all in the service of re-enacting a fake past that serves as an escapist fantasy from confusing, globalised culture.

Conclusion

By looking at the ‘flip-side’ of Krautrock, a counter-narrative emerges that puts into question its prevailing status as a modern movement of the 1970s. On the one hand, Krautrock was disconnected from the modernising forces of 1970s West Germany, such as feminism and Germany’s shift towards multiculturalism. On the other, the legacy of the 1970s – one that reaches well into the pop-cultural scene today – springs from music traditions connected to this ‘flip-side’ of Krautrock. And these run counter to its claims of cosmopolitanism, anti-traditionalism, and internationalism. What’s more, due to their immense commercial success, medieval rock and shanty rock were formative for German-language rock music of the 2010s. Albums by the bands mentioned consistently enter number one in the German album charts, although these genres do not feature in music-journalist discourses that critique artistically and/or politically relevant releases. So, the most powerful legacy of 1970s Krautrock is not a forward-looking, cosmopolitan music genre, but rather one that fulfils a nostalgia for old times when life seemed clearer and simpler.

Essential Listening

• Ozan Ata Canani, Warte mein Land, warte (Staatsakt, 2021)

• Die Dominas, Die Dominas (Fabrikneu, 1981)

• Cem Karaca, Die Kanaken (Pläne, 1984)

• Knut Kiesewetter, Leeder Vun Mien Fresenhof (Polydor, 1976)

• Ougenweide, Ougenweide (Polydor, 1973)