How did Krautrock happen?

I also never heard anybody call it "Kraut-rock" then, by the way! In my heavy metal book, which came out in 1991, I call the genre "improvise freely and babble Krishna nonsense atop an obsessive bongo groove unidentified-flying-rock," and I include the Godz, Yoko, the Chambers Bros, and Hapshash and the Coloured Coat along with Can, Faust, and Amon Duul. I didn't know it had a real genre name; maybe people had long been calling it that in the UK or Germany, but if so, I had never even come across the term.

Faust and their first record were tagged krautrock by the Brit press - I think that was the initial genesis of the term

i wrote this in 1999 (for chuck's newspaper) and i think i made most of it up, but i did happen to mention vu and pink floyd there at the beginning:

"This is where the trouble starts. Because in Germany at the end of the '60s, there was a seemingly endless number of engineering students looking to break into the music biz. Taking their cue from early VU and Pink Floyd, and serious as a heart attack when it came to psychedelic gnome worship, bands like Can, Faust, Amon Düül, and Ash Ra Tempel held rock'n'roll as alleged intellectual pursuit to its highest standard. Rolling jazz, classical, raga, electronic, folk, and sheer ear-splitting cosmic sloppery into one big Teutonic ball, the Krauts made music for really pissed-off hippies.

If you could still hear an echo of Wa-Watusi backbeat in Lou Reed's VU output, the Germans made sure any such links to rock's golden years were wiped off their boots. Germany as a country was all about forgetting the past and not asking Daddy what he did during the war, so why not make noises that beforehand had only been heard in space and in Karlheinz Stockhausen's fever dreams?"

I think it was in the liner notes to a cd reissue of Tangerine Dream's first album (Electronic Meditation) where I read the story about TD forming because one of the TD dudes procured Pink Floyd's sound system and they may as well call up some bros and JAM IT OUT.

I'm just as interested in all the great swedish and dutch and finnish hippie jams, too. Why was Bo Anders Persson driven to go from Tunis to India in Fullmoon on Testosterone?

chuck is OTM re: industrial music etc (although I hear a lot more of the psych-y side of Krautrock in British industrial and post-punk bands e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Pink Dots). Also in the late '70s punk helped to fill the cultural void that the Krautrock bands were trying to fill.

Well, I was referring to how Kraut-rock evolved into later German stuff. (If you wanna get non-German, you can clearly start with Public Image Ltd. and the Fall and move on from there. But I'm pretty sure the question had to do with what the music turned into at home, or did Krauts just abandon it.)

Where did krautrock go? What did it morph into and why? Just techno? Why did they lose interest in the rock part?

I think that some of that improvising, experimental attitude carried over into the German free-jazz and non-idiomatic improv scene. People like Peter Brotzmann, Alex Von Schlippenbach, the FMP crowd, etc.

Though I guess some of that actually pre-dated or was contemporary to the Krautrock scene, so maybe it's not correct to speak of it as an outgrowth.

Who were the first krautrock revivalists? The Legendary Pink Dots? Thin White Rope was much later.

like chuck said, PIL.

and PIL were way early considering that there were still people in germany making actual krautrock in 1978. they were pre-revival-revivalists.

Wire were pretty early, too. And Swell Maps weren't far behind.

Revival might not even be the right word, no?

by the early 80's there were loadds of bands working off of krautrock though. i was just listening to that hunters & collectors album that they did with conny plank the other day. from,like, 1983. and they are a minor example. (though they did name their band after a can song which is nice)

only Tangerine Dream & Kraftwerk had continued commercial success, and mostly by abandoning everything they had in common with the other bands, Can struggled on with disco singles, Brain and all the other fringe labels dried up and stopped putting things out. Some of the other bands threatened to go mainstream, that's the way I hear the inclusion of lyrics on Neu! 75 / Harmonia Deluxe & La Dusseldorf, and the clips of them playing their singles live on German TV shows. Klaus D. Mueller's pretty dismissive 'insider' account hasn't been linked yet on this thread: http://www.furious.com/perfect/krautrock.html

I'd recommend Hirsch Nicht Aufs Sofa's Im Schatten Der Möhre as a signpost of where the ethos was by 1987 i.e. way underground. Lots of great music - Metabolismus, Asmus Tietchens (once he went industrial), Doc Wir Mirran, but it's less about the cosmic rock, more about alienated weird urban industrial, so a smaller audience

so have other folks seen that BBC4 documentary on krautrock? it's typically limited and the ending is not satisfactory at all, but there are lots of good interview segments and there is much speculation on this thread question.

one other thing i learned from the documentary = michael rother is extraordinarily well-preserved. he is a good-looking gentleman. also appealingly soft-spoken.

the guys from faust are nuts. i've always thought that band was a bit overrated compared to some of the other german bands of the time. but what do i know.

There's already a thread on it:

BBC Krautrock documentary

"Mrs Brown, you have a lovely HERO!"

― Mark G, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 10:41 (1 year ago)

haha!

if CCR didnt invent the motorik beat noone did

OTM. "Keep On Chooglin'" is the birth of Krautrock, IMO.

i had an idea once that i was tempted to expand upon about CCR (and other similarly repetitive boogie type stuff) being sort of an american krautrock, but then decided it was just the w33d talking.

huh, that's actually kind of an interesting idea.

i mean, didn't w33d have a part to play in both krautrock and american boogie?

did the w33d make y'all forget Moe Tucker?

"Keep on Chooglin" sounds more like motorik to me than anything I've heard by VU.

Some others remark on the similarity:

motorik

It all goes back to Bo Diddley imo

i dunno...have any of the kraut dudes ever talked CCR? like frankly i just don't see that as a band they would have been listening to...

They don't have to have heard it. It's kind of like calculus being independently invented by Liebniz and Newton.

By the way, Bayou Country (on which "Chooglin" appears) reached #33 on the German charts, so it's pretty likely that the Kraut guys did hear it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creedence_Clearwater_Revival_discography

chooglin' has a bluesy shuffle to it that is absent from the motorik beat. it still sounds krauty though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg44BKJhqk0

krauts tsarted rockin and a legend wasb orn

honestly there are a million sources for the motorik thing--it's really high-modernist minimalism coupled with rock instrumentation coupled with late-60s tendency for rock bands to jam out. so you are all correct.

:D

cookies for everybody!

krautrock cookies are hella experimental

allow cookies

'bootleg' fits what we're getting at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4eE3ZxlF28

whatever we decide or don't decide, we can agree that Creedence was fucking awesome. also: cookies.

also also: hawkwind

i mean, i haven't really listened to them, but aren't Endless Boogie supposed to sorta be an updated take on canned heat/creedence boogie mixed with kraut motorik/minimalism?

the little i've heard i'd say yeah

"Keep on Chooglin" sounds more like motorik to me than anything I've heard by VU.

"The Gift" is pretty motorik, if you ask me.

Motorik seems to have so infused music in this decade, I gotta wonder if the next decade will produce a Nickleback of motorik.

... we've already got one, Kasabian

Well you just got me to listen to a band I'd been ignoring. Can't wait for the North American derivative. I'm thinking the singer should sport a rat tail.

I've been ignoring them as well but I have heard it said they have Krautrock influences - maybe via Primal Scream, rather than directly. Personally I think Primal Scream aren't far off being the Nickelback of Motorik but people seem to take them seriously, for some reason.

primal scream are the pearl jam of motorik

discussing motorik and the velvets and nobody's mentioned Sister Ray?

Sorry, I can't get past the krautrock cookies. Mmmmm.

http://bigozine2.com/features06/DTkrautrock.html