How did Krautrock happen?

I was one of those people

-- N_RQ (bl0cke...) (webmail), June 14th, 2005 11:19 AM. (later) (link)

Kraftwerk invented hip hop.

i might've mentioned this before, but my dad was present in a building when baader-meinhoff bombed it.

My connection to extremism: the guy whose computer science research I followed up on was a Unibomber victim.

germany kept it weird... some were deep underground like Hirscht Nicht Aufs Sofa, but I heard Krautrock in early Mouse On Mars

Conny Plank's Studio

Didn't a lot of the original success of the Krautrock scene have to do with the fact that it was a UK phenomenon? I guess that sounds very circular, but weren't some of the bands (Faust for example) popular in England and unknown or hated at home?

I always wondered if

2000 Light Years from Home by the Rolling Stones

was a secret influence on krautrock

the rhythm chugs in kraut ways kinda...and the swirls, the swirls

(lol, me saying SPK = krautrock.)

One word I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet in this thread: MINIMALISM. A lot of the main riffs of krautrock, if you're a musician, are really hard to avoid if you are consciously playing minimally. I guess this is what the VU contributed, and that's obvious. The Dream Syndicate bootleg recordings, which I'm not sure the krautrockers would have had access to, have a lot of similarities with a lot of this stuff, having shared an ideological foundation -- minimalism being a hot new current in influential classical musics at the time and LaMonte Young's fluxism being very much influenced by Dada and surrealism, which were much closer to home for the Germans.

And, yeah, I bet the Rolling Stones sounded really awesome to some stoned out Germans at the time! Their rhythm section had some almost-motorik moments before they went all hillbilly. The Stones, the Stooges and the Velvets were actually the only rock & roll bands (pre-kraut, i suppose i mean) who weren't dumb as rocks, but the Velvets get all the credit because they were the only ones pompous enough not to hide it. (they were probably the dumbest of the three, too)

The Stones, the Stooges and the Velvets were actually the only rock & roll bands (pre-kraut, i suppose i mean) who weren't dumb as rocks

!! Oh come on -- the Yardbirds and Beatles and Doors and Animals and Byrds and Beach Boys were as smart as your more primitive plants, at least.

So, nobody here has put forward the "trying to do Miles Davis but getting all the notes wrong" theory?

And how do the Godz fit into this? And Hapsash and the Coloured Coat? And Yoko Ono? And James Brown?

expanding on Andrew L.'s first dead-on thumbnail post

There's enough truth to the stereotype of Germans as hyper-efficient engineers to explain how their musicians weren't afraid of using technology to directly express themselves, unlike other countries where the electronics were usually deployed self-consciously, cerebrally or with an element of kitsch -- Germans had no problem identifying with the new machines & heard the cosmic music. Stockhausen was a huge public figure in the 60's, giving concerts & seminars everywhere (& had two members of Can for students, the earliest & most mainstream Krautrock group). German teenagers had an extra dose of revulsion & hatred for their parents' generation that gave the music even more of an edge. And though all major record labels were indiscriminately releasing weird things at that time, the German record labels were hungrily searching for a German correllative to the Beatles or the Beach Boys -- so things like Kraftwerk / Neu! / Faust were getting signed to majors to release bizarre debuts entirely on the basis of sounding different, no one knew what was going on

Faust is my favorite example of all of these threads -- most of the group were anarchic madmen, but with a journalist / record exec advocate, & most importantly a live-in engineer hired from Deutche Grammofon who built them a studio and captured every last freakout in high fidelity -- so they had not only the ability to space but the mentality to engineer the document

I posted this to another thread I can't find, but in 1996 I was chatting with Dieter Moebius and after the second beer I asked him 'What was it about Germany that allowed Krautrock to happen' and his instant response was 'You have to understand, we hated our fathers'

Dieter Morbius

xp

Also, certain memebers of Jefferson Airplane were rumored to have IQs approaching those of tree shews!

Seriously, though -- "Don't Worry Kyoko" Live Peace In Toronto came out in 1969; certainly some future German rockers must have heard those, right? Also wondering if "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly (a very repetitive 17 minutes, 1978) might have been an inspiration; I'm guessing there's a pretty good chance it may have been an actual hit in Krautland, given that at least two German disco acts (Disco Circus and 16 Bit) covered it in later days.

And speaking of German disco (which I swear somehow evolved out of Kraut-rock -- the liner notes to the first Silver Convention album offered clues* to that effect), Boney M actually put out an album and song called 10,000 Light Years in 1984 which I've always thought might be inspired by the Stones song.

* -- says the group "belongs to a new generation of artists who have broken with the established image of German music."

(Oops, Iron Butterfly 1968 not 1978, obviously)

First Silver convention LP 1975, btw (so it's unlikely that the new German "generation" they were claiming to be a part of contained other disco acts, since hardly any other disco acts existed it yet)

(And Airplane IQs = tree SHREWS, not shews.)

also posting this archival release, probably of interest to anyone reading this thread

http://www.nepenthe-music.com/catalog/humanbeing.html

xpost Czukay was a record geek and loved the J.B.'s & almost certainly heard those Yoko records, & Yoko's albums from "Kyoko" to Plastic Ono Band to Fly might as well be Krautrock albums.

also Can pretty much went disco themselves in their singles 1975 and after, so there's a case to be made

my car's right speaker is broken. on the radio the other week they played the vinyl stereo version of "In A Gadda Da Vida" & it was trippy as fuck because the drums were panned hard right except for part of the drum solo. It was one of those great musical moments for me.

MINIMALISM: OTM

along that line of thinking, with Germany's history of orchestral music, it may have easier for the members of the ensembles to stay minimal; more natural to play as though contributing to a score, rather than trying to fill out a song. I especially hear that in Neu!.

so no mention of Pink Floyd on this thread?

Weissensee predates Us and Them

xpost - i've got only a basic working knowledge of krautrock, but weren't there german bands doing stuff as/further out there than floyd's pyschedelic stuff around the same time? i'm trying to think what years "saucerful of secrets" or "set the controls" were made vs. the years can/popol vuh/TD etc starting putting stuff out

yeah, it's not like germany was that far behind the u.k. as far as acid rock and psych is concerned. the 60's german legacy of faroutness is pretty solid. BUT, the full flowering of german psych certainly occurred in the 70's. at a time when the u.k. and the u.s. had pretty much given up the acidic ghost. or at least any vast audience for the stuff had disappeared by the 70's. people didn't stop making the music. in germany it just seemed to flourish and mutate and become so many different tantalizing variations of sound and hybrids of sound just as other places were starting to get burnt out and decide to put on cowboy boots and relax.

which is why the old lie about hippie and acidrock being dead by 1968 has always been one of the fattest of lies ever told or sold. 1969 to 1973 is when things started to get REALLY good and REALLY weird all over the world. ANYTHING was possible and inspired invention was par for the course. until the sex pistols ruined everything.

you could say the same thing about a lot of south american countries and even the country of japan. the best stuff came later. maybe it just took them a little longer to get the drugs.

Not implying they were far behind, but I'd always though of Floyd as a pretty key influence on that stuff, always read Can referring to the Velvets and Floyd (and Stockhausen). Go back to Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive if you want.

My question: Where did krautrock go? What did it morph into and why? Just techno? Why did they lose interest in the rock part? Was krautrock as we know it, the bands we cite today, the german mainstream of the time? Or were neu, can, amon duul, popol vuh, faust, harmonia etc etc all one big underground thing? If so what was the mainstream? what were these bands relationships to each other? Besides the ones that shared members, did they all tour together?

ps

if CCR didnt invent the motorik beat noone did

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