Krautrock Post-75: Part 1

2009-4-30 by Roger Tellier-Craig

It seems every time I hear or read about "krautrock", the same names pretty much get thrown around; bands like Neu!, Can, Faust, Cluster, Kraftwerk or Amon Düül I & II, and for a long time that’s all I thought there was to the 1970s “out” music scene in Germany, until I discovered there was a whole world after Neu ‘75 or Harmonia’s Deluxe. There was life after 1975, and here’s a quick look at some of my favorites from that era.

1 Günter Schickert / Überfällig (1979)

Absolutely mental release from 1979!

Sounds like nothing else, not even from its time: long & trancey drums + arpeggiated fx guitar epics, weird autistic vocals, ambient found sounds ... Imagine a darker and weirder, almost creepy, polyrhythmical Can/Neu!/Achim Reichel cross, but way more far-out...

A masterpiece. Point final.

Apricot Brandy / Wanderer listen

2 Conrad Schnitzler / Con (1978)

Ok, what to say about this gem?

About Conrad Schnitzler himself? It seems to me that out of all the true "krautrock" originators, he's the one who most successfully reinvented his aesthetic and went along with developments and "trends" in electronic music, at least until the mid 80s (I am not familiar with his music after that). From the free improv-conceptual madness of Eruption and Kluster to his full-on/psych-out electronic industrial "colors" records, to the cleaner and colder synthscapes of his late 70s output, not to mention the weird DAF-like fragmented electro "Con 3" from '81, you can say he had a pretty broad approach to the possibilities of what electronic music could be.

And as for this mindmelting chef-d'oeuvre, recorded at Peter Baumann's Paragon studios sometime in '78, it's quite simply one of the oddest ice-cold synth records of all time. With evocative titles like "Electric garden", you know what your in for: forests of cold dripping electronic tones and reverberating distant oscillations, phased-out waves of neon lights and bizarre fragmented rhythmusmaschines: this is sci-fi psychedelia at its best! The sounds of an impossibly past future...

Electric Garden listen

3 Can / Landed (1975)

So Can are obviously one of the more famous “krautrock” bands, but this LP is often overlooked, and it’s a shame ‘cuz it actually stands up to their earlier output.

When I first heard "I want more" from "Flow Motion" 2 years ago, I was happy to hear that Can had not died after "Soon over Babaluma" as I had initially thought; it was exciting to hear how the band had transformed their sound to keep up with the times while sticking to a sense of experimentalism in production and tone. Then I actually got a hold of the rest of "Flow Motion", and I was terribly disappointed...

Then my friend played me "Hunters & Collectors" from "Landed" without telling me who it was and I was immediately drawn in. At first listen, it sounded like a really warped long-lost Syd Barrett track, though the production and arrangements were nowhere close to anything Barrett has ever done. I was confused to find out it was actually Can.

This is a strange record. It definitely sounds like Can but it's much more oddly produced, with nice electroacoustic touches here and there transforming them into a futuristic rock n' roll band, maybe less psychedelic but still forward-looking. The tracks have so much going on all the time that it's hard to grasp the whole record in one listen; it's a dense, rich and involving listen. You may have to give this baby a few spins before "getting it", but trust me, if you have the patience, it will reveal many marvels! And the last track, "Unfinished", is a total masterpiece. Much more focused than earlier tape experimentations like Tago Mago's "Aumgn", it's a beautiful electroacoustic rock tape-piece with truly psychedelic guitar playing from Karoli, electronic tones & drones, and moody percussion. Kinda similar in spirit to the "Faust Tapes" and what This Heat and Brise-Glace would end up exploring on their own later on...

Hunters and Collectors listen

4 Wolfgang Riechmann / Wunderbar (1978)

A record definitely of its time!

You can hear Riechmann was coming from an early 70s Düsseldorf frame of mind, but was veering closer to the post-75 Sky Records electronic approach, full of warm psychedelic phased-out Arp synths, yet very cold and dark in other places, almost new-agey but too artsy to be relaxation music. A good example of this is the track "Himmelblau", where a motorik Dinger-like rhythmusmaschine (or is it drums?) drives the phased-out synths on a freeway to a somewhat far-out sci-fi land, with Riechmann chanting naïvely in his la-la-land: fucking brilliant! It is surely not a coincidence then that Riechmann used to play in a band called Spirits of Sound with Micheal Rother and Wolgang Flur back in the 60s...

This record stands on its own, nothing like it before, and unfortunately, nothing after, as Riechmann was murdered a few days prior to the release of this gem...

Himmelblau listen

5 Tyndall / Reflexionen (1982)

Crazy vocoder business.

The melodies have that almost over-the-top sweet Zuckerzeit je-ne-sais-quoi vibe, but almost all the pieces have vocodered vocals, making for a very odd and fascinating mélange.

An essential electronic record.

Transit West Berlin listen

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