Krautrock is a form of rock and electronic music that originated in Germany in the late
1960s, with a tendency towards improvisation around minimalistic arrangements.
The term was popularized in the English-speaking press.
Later, German media started to use it as a term for all German rock bands from the late
1960s and 1970s, while abroad the term specifically referred to more experimental artists who
often but not always used synthesizers and other electronic instruments.
The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time
and not a reference to any one particular scene, style, or movement, as many krautrock
artists were not familiar with one another.
BBC DJ John Peel in particular is largely credited with spreading the reputation of
krautrock outside of the German-speaking world.
Largely divorced from the traditional blues and rock and roll influences of British and
American rock music up to that time, the period contributed to the evolution of electronic
music and ambient music as well as the birth of post-punk, alternative rock and new-age
music.
Key artists associated with the tag include Can, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust,
Popol Vuh, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Neu!, and Kraftwerk.
Etymology The word "krautrock" was applied to the experimental
German rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s by the British music press, and
ironically was retained by its practitioners.
The term krautrock was originally a humorous one coined by the UK music press, where "krautrock"
found an early and enthusiastic underground following.
The term derives from the ethnic slur "kraut", and its use by the music press was inspired
by a track from Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground titled "Mama Düül und Ihre Sauerkrautband
Spielt Auf".
As is often the case with musical genre labels, few of the bands wished to see themselves
pigeon-holed, and tended to eschew the term.
The term is also a problematic category due to the considerable differences between the
artists so labelled.
Musicologist Julian Cope, in his book Krautrocksampler, says "Krautrock is a subjective British phenomenon,"
based on the way the music was received in the UK rather than on the actual West German
music scene out of which it grew.
For instance, while one of the main groups originally tagged as krautrock, Faust, recorded
a seminal 12-minute track they titled "Krautrock", they would later distance themselves from
the term, saying: "When the English people started talking about Krautrock, we thought
they were just taking the piss... and when you hear the so-called 'Krautrock renaissance,'
it makes me think everything we did was for nothing."
Characteristics Krautrock is an eclectic and often very original
mix of post-psychedelic jamming and moody progressive rock mixed with ideas from contemporary
experimental classical music and from the new experimental directions that emerged in
jazz during the 1960s and 1970s.
Moving away from the patterns of song structure and melody of much rock music in America and
Britain, some in the movement also drove the music to a more mechanical and electronic
sound.
The key component characterizing the groups gathered under the term is the synthesis of
rock and roll rhythm and energy with a decided will to distance themselves from specifically
American blues origins, but to draw on German or other sources instead.
Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust says: "We were trying to put aside everything we had heard
in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics.
We had the urge of saying something completely different."
Typical bands dubbed "krautrock" in the 1970s included Tangerine Dream, Faust, Can, Amon
Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel and others associated with the celebrated Cologne-based producers
and engineers Dieter Dierks and Conny Plank, such as Neu!, Kraftwerk and Cluster.
Bands such as these were reacting against the post-World War II cultural vacuum in Germany
and tending to reject Anglo-American popular culture in favour of creating their own more
radical and experimental new German culture and identity, and to develop a radically new
musical aesthetic.
Many of these groups began their musical careers with little or no awareness of rock and roll:
exposure to the increasingly radical and innovative music of the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd,
Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, for example, led members of groups like Can and Kraftwerk
to embrace popular music for the first time.
The signature sound of krautrock mixed rock music and "rock band" instrumentation with
electronic instrumentation and textures, often with what would now be described as an ambient
music sensibility.
A common rhythm featured in the music was a steady 4/4 beat, often called "motorik"
in the anglophone music press.
Krautrock was heavily influential on black hip-hop artists from the 1980s onwards, who
frequently sampled bands such as Can and Kraftwerk because of their inherent funkiness.
An example of this is Afrika Bombaataa and Soulsonic Force's 'Planet Rock', which conspicuously
samples Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express.'
History of initial movement West Germany
By the end of the 1960s, the American and British counterculture and hippie movement
had moved rock towards psychedelia, heavy metal, progressive rock and other styles that
incorporated socially and politically incisive lyrics.
The 1968 German student movement, French protests and Italian student movement had created a
class of young, intellectual continental listeners, while nuclear weapons, pollution, and war
inspired protests and activism.
Avant-garde music had taken a turn towards the electronic in the mid-1950s.
The avant-garde minimalist music current which emerged in the beginning of the 1960s with
the works of Americans La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich using drones and loops
in a kind of psychedelic and space-oriented music.
These factors all laid the scene for the explosion in what came to be termed krautrock, which
arose at the first major German rock festival in 1968 in Essen.
Like their American, British and international counterparts, German rock musicians played
a kind of psychedelic music.
In contrast, however, there was no attempt to reproduce the effects of drugs, but rather
an innovative fusion of jazz, free-jazz and the electronic avant-garde, and strikingly
innovative as a fusion of psychedelia and the electronic avant-garde.
That same year, 1968, saw the foundation of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin by Hans-Joachim
Roedelius, and Conrad Schnitzler, which further popularized the psychedelic-rock sound in
the German mainstream.
Originally krautrock was a form of Free art, which meant that krautrock bands gave their
records away for free at Free Art Fairs.
The next few years saw a wave of pioneering groups.
In 1968, Can formed by two former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen, adding jazz to the
mix, while the following year saw Kluster begin recording keyboard-based electronic
instrumental music with an emphasis on static drones.
In 1970, Popol Vuh became the first krautrock group to use an electronic synthesizer, to
create what would be known as "kosmische Musik".
By 1971, the bands Tangerine Dream and Faust began to use electronic synthesizers and advanced
production.
The term Kosmische musik dates from that period.
The bands Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Sand and Cosmic Jokers.
Faust also made use of synthesizers and tape manipulation in a way foreshadowing the noise
rock of the future.
In 1972, two albums incorporated European rock and electronic psychedelia with Asian
sounds: Popol Vuh's In den Gärten Pharaos and Deuter's Aum.
Meanwhile, kosmische musik saw the release of two double albums, Klaus Schulze's Cyborg
and Tangerine Dream's Zeit, while a band called Neu!
began to play highly rhythmic music.
By the middle of the decade, one of the best-known German bands, Kraftwerk, had released albums
like Autobahn and Radioaktivität, which laid the foundation for the British 1980s synthpop/new
wave music, electro, techno and other styles later in the century.
The release of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra in 1974 marked a divergence of that group from
krautrock to a more melodic sequencer-driven sound that was later termed Berlin School.
In that same year Klaus Schulze delivered one more LP of pure krautrock, Blackdance,
and then began to release a more expansive version of the kind of music that TD was making.
By the mid-late 1970s onward the terms electronic rock, electronic music, new instrumental music
and new age have been used more often than Krautrock and Kosmische Musik, though the
early scene continues still today to be regarded as a style in and of itself.
East Germany By the early 1970s experimental West German
rock styles had crossed the border into East Germany, and influenced the creation of an
East German rock movement referred to as Ostrock.
On the other side of the Wall, these bands tended to be stylistically more conservative
than in the West, to have more reserved engineering, and often to include more classical and traditional
structures.
These groups sang in German, often featuring poetic lyrics loaded with indirect double-meanings
and deeply philosophical challenges to the status quo.
The best-known bands representing these styles in the GDR were The Puhdys and Karat.
Krautrock must generally be regarded, however, as a primarily West German phenomenon; the
East German musical avant-garde may be argued to have been more genuinely represented by,
for example, political singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, whose work more aptly bears comparison
to Woody Guthrie or early Bob Dylan than to any progressive rock artists.
Influence on later music Krautrock has proved to be highly influential
on a succession of other musical styles and developments.
Early contemporary enthusiasts outside Germany included Hawkwind, in particular Dave Brock
who supposedly penned the sleeve notes for the British edition of Neu!'s first album
Faust's budget release The Faust Tapes has been cited as a formative teenage influence
by several musicians growing up in the early 1970s such as Julian Cope.
The genre was also a strong influence to David Bowie's Station to Station and this kind of
experimentation led to his 'Berlin Trilogy'.
Krautrock was also highly influential on the late-'70s development of post-punk, notably
artists such as The Fall, Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, This Heat and Simple Minds.
During the 1980s, several bands involved in psychedelic rock cited Krautrock as a significant
influences: these included The Legendary Pink Dots who claimed heavy inspiration from Can,
Faust and Neu!
in particular.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the resurgence of electronic music and a new generation
rediscovering much of the early German music, krautrock came to be considered a style in
and of itself, as well as becoming a blueprint for a lot of experimental dance and ambient
music.
At Julian Cope's suggestion, The Kosmische Club was founded in London in 1996 and did
much to promote the genre on the underground music scene, including promoting gigs featuring
many of the original German musicians and running a weekly radio show on Resonance FM
since 2002.
Artists such as Stereolab, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, John Frusciante, Sonic
Youth, The Mars Volta, Deerhunter, Queens of the Stone Age, Ned Collette, Sean Filkins,
Cloudland Canyon, Laika, Mouse on Mars, Bowery Electric, Beck, I Am Spoonbender, Tortoise,
and Fujiya & Miyagi have worked under the post-rock and electronica rubrics or cited
bands in the krautrock canon as being among their more significant influences.
Radiohead has covered Can's song "Thief" and cite Can, Faust, and Neu!
among their influences, while The Secret Machines not only covered Harmonia's "(De Luxe) Immer
Wieder" on their The Road Leads Where It's Led EP, but have also played live with Michael
Rother.
Steven Wilson has demonstrated an enthusiasm for the genre in several of his projects(Porcupine
Tree] covered Neu!'s "Hallogallo" as a demo for their album Signify, and Wilson dedicated
his Incredible Expanding Mindfuck project to exploring Krautrock).
Wilco has shown a growing krautrock influence in their music, specifically on Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot and several songs on A Ghost Is Born, especially "Spiders."
In interviews Jeff Tweedy has often spoken of his admiration for Can and Neu!.
Current 93 covered Sand's "When the May Rain Comes" on their album Thunder Perfect Mind,
while even Oasis experimented with krautrock on their 2008 single, The Shock of the Lightning.
Manic Street Preachers' 2014 studio album, Futurology, was mainly influenced by krautrock.
See also Space music
Ambient music Berlin School of electronic music
Electronic art music Electronic music
Experimental music German rock
Kosmische Kuriere Space rock
References
Sources