A Brief Introduction To Krautrock Calum Marsh

The term "krautrock" gets thrown around a lot in relation to indie music; bloggers looking to show off their knowledge of music history often label experimental indie rock groups as having "krautrock sensibilities", "a distinct krautrock sound", and so on. But the meaning of the term is worth exploring beyond its connotations as an adjective, so I'd like to spend a little time talking about its original meaning. "I was there in 1968", James Murphy brags on 'Losing My Edge', "I was there at the first Can show in Cologne". The line refers to the emergence of a series of bands in Germany in the late sixties and early seventies, many of which went on to record groundbreaking albums that are now among some of the most important ever made. Though Cologne was generally recognized as the locality of the scene, the 1968 concert series James is probably nodding his hat to actually took place in nearby Essen; there, numerous experimental rock bands came together to perform at the first major German rock festival, which was a incredible success with German youth. Two music producers from Cologne, Dieter Dierks and Conny Plank, became wildly popular all across Germany. Many of the bands who became instant successes as a result of the Essen concerts worked closely with Dierks and Plank, producing albums which sounded like nothing before. A great deal of American and British groups were experimenting with their sound, too, but where the hippie culture of the sixties revolved largely around hallucinogenic drugs and strictly psychedelic sounds, the artists of the German experimental scene were more interested in serious artistic expression and creative freedom. The people of Germany, especially the youth who were the primary audience for this music, were in dire need of recreating their own tired post-war image, typically meaning a movement away from American pop culture. The radical sound of the Cologne groups happened to be the perfect venue for such a culture revolution - the people embraced the work and the scene was thereby established. The American and British music critics, though, didn't care for the Cologne crowd, dismissing it as worthless; the press dubbed the new genre "krautrock", a play on the slang term for a German, a "kraut". Though the term "krautrock" is usually talked about as a particular genre, it is more accurately a heading for a specific group of bands from a specific time and place: 1968-1978 in Cologne. Krautrock bands share ideological and artistic values, but stylistically they're not so much the same. Consider two major groups from the movement: the Murphy-mentioned Can, who were among the first of the krautrock groups (who remain one of the most influential), and Faust, a seven-member band formed in 1971. The latter have become one of the most widely appreciated krautrock groups, and were, at the time, considered the most radical and challenging of the movement. Both groups were experimenting primarily with tape edits and electronic noise, but where Can were known for their Jazz-like improvisations and wild tantrums (the vocal tracks are largely comprised of chaotic yelling and screaming), Faust was more interested in bending genre conventions with experimental editing and electronics now heard in Noise music. Other Krautrock groups of importance are Neu! and Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk were the most commercially successful group, breaking into the mainstream both in their native Germany and abroad. Their music was more explicitly electronic than other krautrock groups, and as a result had a more lasting impact on music in the digital age. Neu!, on the other hand, achieved very little notoriety when active, even in their homeland of Germany. Still, their work is very highly regarded - their debut self-titled LP is frequently cited as one of the most influential albums of the past few decades - and recent artists as famous as Thom Yorke and David Bowie have declared Neu! as a major influence. Perhaps krautrock's most consistent stylistic convention is the use of repetition, usually for excessive lengths of time. Most krautrock songs clock in it at over fifteen minutes, and are rumoured to have been edited down from much longer demos (Can recorded a six hour improvisation, which later was cut down to the 20 minute 'Yoo Doo Right'). The problem with using "krautrock" as a description or as genre is the degree to which its most common conventions are a part of other contemporary genres; tape edits and distorted sound are commonplace in most electronica and all noise music, and the extended repetitions can be found in most ambient work and even post-rock. The mistake many music critics make is associating the sound of a specific krautrock group with the sound of krautrock as a whole. Though there are some abstract notions tying the bands together, they just don't share enough aesthetically to form a genre, with its implication of overarching convention commonality. By defining "krautrock" as the use of repetition and sporadic editing instead of as a musical movement in Germany in the 60s, it becomes all too easy to let the meaning of the word slip away. In the same way that "alternative" stopped meaning "music outside the norm" in the 90s and "indie" stopped meaning "independent" recently, "krautrock" fell into the trap of becoming an empty descriptor that hardly means anything at all. Download: Can - Mushroom Faust - It's A Bit Of A Pain Neu! - Sonderangerbot Kraftwerk - Mitternacht Buy: Can - Tago Mago Faust - Faust IV Neu! - Neu! Kraftwerk - Computer World