The history on Kosmische Musik aKA krautrock

See some examples of experimental electronic musicians here

Written by Massimiliano Galli

When you win a war, you have the power to re-write history. You get to name things, decide who is good or bad, who deserves to pay international sanctions, and who doesn't. The English, French, Americans, and Russians won World War II and, in one way or another, have run the world for the last 70 years. Today, the powers of China, Saudi Arabia, and India are becoming more and more influential in the dynamics of our world and society. 

This, however, isn't a geopolitical article. Here on hiphopelectronic.com, we talk about music. But, it's worth considering how much of what we know today is a derivation of what happened in the final months of the greatest tragedy of modern times? 

Germany woke up on the morning of September 2nd of 1945 completely devastated, without a future, and ready to be punished for the degenerated ideas of a dictator known today for the atrocities committed by his troops. After the end of the war, nobody knew what to do or even where to start building new lives, entirely blocked by a sense of shame, failure, and misery.

It took a few years for Germans to fully recover and start living with a sense of normalcy again. When they did, Germany regained its economic leading role, especially after being reunited in 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was a massive symbol of change just one year before.

In the 1970s, German arts and music were already ahead of their time. Especially the music scene. The radical student movements of 1968 were a spark in Germany, too, as the youth rebelled against their country's legacy they'd inherited after World War II. They sought popular music distinctly different from the traditional German Schlager music and American pop. 

They didn't want to be Germans, but they didn't want to become an imitation of American or English music either. The youth movements started to show interest in alternative forms of music such as psychedelic rock, avant-garde forms of electronic music, funk rhythm, jazz improvisation, and "ethnic" music styles, that moves away from the patterns of song structure and melody residing in the vast majority of rock music. Some in the movement were also drawn to a more mechanical and electronic sound for the same reason. These different abstract forms of music became the ideal soundtrack for a generation that didn't have anything to relate to or imitate.

Avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley became the primary reference for this new generation of young German musicians, alongside Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and The Velvet Underground.

Where do you go when you are trapped in an occupied country split into two parts, one under American influence and the other one under the Soviet Union? For more than twenty years, young Germans lived in a sort of prison, which is why they started creating forms of music that could help them escape. Instead, they opted to head upwards, exploring new musical heights rather than moving towards the east or west influences. 

Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Boris Schaak found the perfect place for this incredible artistic escape. In the spring of 1968, they founded what quickly became the epicenter for every musician in West Berlin to gather around and experiment with new music gear and styles: the Zodiak Free Arts Lab.

The Zodiak, which today is just a Coffee Shop, became a 24-hour live venue where every traditional kind of music was banned. The Lab lasted only a few months, closing in early 1969, but earned an important place in German rock history, fondly remembered by all associated with it. Among the many artists and bands who passed through the club in their early days were Ash Ra Tempel and, most significantly, Tangerine Dream. 

Founded by Edgar Froese, the band has always been a sort of musical collective. Many of their members recorded Tangerine Dream's albums and then pursued solo careers. The group has seen many personnel changes over the years, with Froese having been the only continuous member until his death in January 2015. The group's best-known lineup was the mid-1970s trio of Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann.

In 1970, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser founded the electronic/experimental record label Ohr. After the first Tangerine Dream album Electronic Meditation, a mix of free jazz, electronic art music, and instrumental rock, the new music scene in Germany started to grow exponentially and attract interest. In 1971, Tangerine Dream released their second album Alpha Centauri, which focused on dark, spacey soundscapes. For the first time, Kaiser and (or) Froese used the term Kosmische Musik in the liner notes to describe the album's style.

We can say that this event marked the beginning of the German Cosmic Rock Era.

While the Berlin music scene was developing around the Zodiak Lab and Ohr records, something very similar was happening a few miles away in the city of Düsseldorf and, more precisely, at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. 

Professor Joseph Beuys, also inspired by John Cage's work, began experimenting with numerous media forms of art expression, including experimental music, using tonal and atonal compositions and noise collages, adding microphones, tape recorders, feedback, various musical instruments, and his voice. Beuys then began to organize performances with psychedelic music and experimental films at the Ratinger Hof and the avant-garde club Creamcheese, clubs comparable to the Zodiak Lab in Berlin for their role in the development of the music scene of Düsseldorf.

Drummer Klaus Dinger and producer Conny Plank were two of the most critical figures visiting the two clubs. Dinger played in the first lineup of Kraftwerk and, together with Plank and guitarist Michael Rother, founded Neu!, a band that became one of the main acts of West Germany's 1970s music scene.

The British press began referring to the new German music scene as Krautrock. Perhaps it was a joke, but this has never really been clarified. Britain in the 1970s was still obsessed with World War II, and this could be the reason why the name came about. The term derives from the ethnic slur "kraut," which can refer to herbs, weeds, and drugs in German. German musicians hated it, convinced that the term was a way for the British press to minimize them, and always preferred to use the terms Kosmische Musik or to be referred to as Berlin School and Düsseldorf School. Once all the German bands succeeded in Britain, the term finally lost its stigma.

Every emerging music scene needs a producer, an architect behind the scenes helping the creativity of the musicians and nurturing their developing sound. Conny Plank was the actual musical link between the Berlin and Düsseldorf scenes. In 1969, he served as an engineer for the first Cluster album, Klopfzeichen, and his long association with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius endured until his death. He produced albums with Neu! (1972), Kraftwerk (1974), and Harmonia (1975) and became a sort of German George Martin (the famous Beatles producer).

Everything was set and ready for the musical revolution awaited by German students. Quickly, the scene expanded throughout Germany, and Kosmische Musik and Krautrock developed in various styles. More Cosmic bands and musicians like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, and Popol Vuh focused on ambient and spacey compositions. 

Darker, more philosophical bands like Amon Duul II, Can, Faust, and Neu! were more focused on concrete music and instrumental rock. Then, in between, there were more electronic and industrial bands like Kraftwerk, LA Dusseldorf, and Cluster.

Other bands like Embryo, Xhol, Brainstorm, Between, and Dzyan were more Jazz/Prog rock-oriented. Other less known names were the political satire music band Floh de Cologne, free jazz Guru Guru, and psychedelic, experimental Agitation Free.

Despite the vast amount of incredible music produced in their homeland, Germans were still more attracted to British and American bands with their reassuring melodies and choruses. This is perhaps why German label Polydor started looking for some sort of a German electronic version of The Beatles and invested in Faust. The band had a studio and music engineers at their disposal, but the music produced was highly challenging for a broader audience to grasp. This weird commercial experiment failed because concrete music doesn't have structures and choruses like pop. 

German Rock moved its primary focus in musical compositions to atonal melodies, electronic keyboards, synth, and extended instrumental improvisations of 20 minutes, starting from psychedelia and gradually losing contact with all conventional rock forms. This evolution generated one of the biggest electronic music acts of all time: Kraftwerk.

A fascinating thing about Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream is that many of their original members left the bands to start solo careers. Most of the time, they had less success, not caring too much about the consequences of their choices. This is another distinctive element of the German music scene of the 1970s compared to the Anglo-American scenes. Germans seemed fearless to change and followed their artistic needs, valuing that freedom over commercial safety.

These different attitudes met for the first time when Roxy Music's Brian Eno started showing interest in the Krautrock scene. Eno was a fan of both Cluster and Harmonia, a super group formed by Hans-Joachim Roedelius,  Dieter Moebius and Michael Rother, who was also a former member of Kraftwerk and Neu! guitarist.

Eno attended a Harmonia gig in Hamburg in 1974 and became friends with the band. They had already moved from Berlin to their new studio in the small German city of Forst in the Western German countryside. Harmonia invited Eno to their studio to jam together, and the English musician joined them two years later. The new music and ideas he heard brought him to join Roedelius, Moebius, and Rother, and not the opposite. 

This is another intriguing part of the story that explains how the different attitudes of German musicians compared to that of their musical peers. They knew Eno was a rockstar, and, according to a Moebius BBC interview, they didn't really like him before becoming friends. The musician searching for inspiration was, in fact, Eno.

 During their time together, they recorded a vast amount of material and two albums, Cluster & Eno and After the Heat, which were released in 1977 and 1978, respectively. The association with Eno brought Cluster a much wider audience and international attention. Eno left intending to keep working together, but things changed when he started to work as a producer for David Bowie's albums Low and Heroes.

The influence of Krautrock was one of the main reasons why a considerable artist like Bowie, who was already a friend of Brian Eno, felt this attraction for the city of Berlin and for the music scene it represented. His intention was even to record the album Heroes with Krautrock musicians, but for unknown reasons, that never happened.

With different results, another significant "musical collision" between two worlds, the Anglo-American stardom, and the Krautrock attitude, happened when Brian Eno suggested Conny Plank as the producer for the U2 album The Joshua Tree. As René Tinner and Stephan Plank claimed in a documentary of the German Radio NDR, Conny Plank – eine Produzentenlegende, after being introduced to the band, Plank turned down the job saying, "I cannot work with this singer." 

In the end, unlike many of their Anglo-American peers, Krautrock musicians refused to be drawn into becoming establishment figures. Likely, they chose this path because there's no space for stardom when you are exploring the unknown. Instead, you're searching for something different, something that doesn't exist yet, and a sound that can represent you, where you come from, and, perhaps, where you're trying to go.