Brass Trax

Krautrock is a useful fiction. The term is used to lump together a handful of German rock bands from the late sixties and early seventies that fused the long-form compositions of progressive rock with practices from avant garde music like free jazz, minimalism, and electronic music. The term was imposed from without, by a derisive British music press that was looking for a way to describe the weird German records that showed up in Britain’s bargain bins. There was no Krautrock scene—Krautrock bands came from all over Germany—but there was a Krautrock spirit: wild experimentalism.

Here’s a look at some of the most influential Krautrock bands.

Can

Among the longest-lived and most artistically successful of the Krautrock bands, Can is what many people think of when they hear the term. The band consisted of music students, two of whom had studied under the experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, with a shared interest in James Brown. Members wanted to take some of the ideas they had learned in conservatory—minimalism, tape loops, and free improvisation—and make them funky.

Can was particularly taken with Brown’s almost mystical emphasis on “the one,” the first beat in a 4/4 rhythm. By hitting “the one” and staying in the pocket, Brown reasoned, you could make anything funky. If you listen to some of Can’s most refreshing music, like the track “I’m So Green” from Ege Bamyasi, the band’s attention to “the one” just might make you get up and dance. (In fact, as the seventies wore on, Can even released a minor disco hit, “I Want More.”)

Listen to “I’m So Green” by Can

If Can’s musicians were straight out of the conservatory, the singers were just guys off the street. The original singer, an American named Malcolm Mooney, was advised by his psychiatrist to abandon the band and leave Germany—for his own mental health. His replacement, the ineffable Damo Suzuki, was a Japanese busker whom band members found performing in Munich. The choice was inspired. Suzuki has a wild, naive vocal style and little regard for conventional pitch or lyrical coherence. He doesn’t sound like a prophet ranting in a hair shirt, exactly, but his songs have an otherworldly quality that make them easy to listen to over and over again; it’s hard to remember what he is going to say next.

Can’s combination of instrumental virtuosity and vocal weirdness would produce two clear masterpieces, the psychologically exhausting album Tago Mago (1971) and its more friendly counterpart Ege Bamyasi (1972). Suzuki’s final album with the band, Future Days (1973), saw Can following Krautrock contemporaries Tangerine Dream into ambient music. The album is widely overlooked, but contains moments of pop genius in the tracks “Future Days” and “Moonshake.” After Suzuki left the band (to become a Jehovah’s Witness), its music moved in a more conventional direction, growing closer to British progressive rock than to German experimental chamber music.

Listen to “Future Days” by Can
Listen to “Moonshake” by Can

NEU!

Düsseldorf’s Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother had been members of Kraftwerk for a handful of years before they broke away to form the band NEU!. The influence of Kraftwerk’s notoriously mechanical robot music is readily apparent in NEU!’s sound.

The first thing you notice when listening to NEU! is the band’s repetitive and minimal 4/4 beat. Dubbed “motorik,” after the German word for “motor skill,” the pulsing sound of NEU! would prove inspiring to generations of musicians to follow. From contemporaries like Brian Eno to later groups like Negativland, who swiped their name from a NEU! song title, and Stereolab, who used the rhythm as a template for an entire career, the band changed music even as it posted meager record sales.

During its original run, NEU! cut three albums, each named NEU! The first and third albums are pop art masterpieces, soothing, uninterrupted trips down a highway of rhythm that seems to have no bounds. The second album was the victim of a classic mistake: NEU! used the entire production budget on the effects and recording of the record’s first side. To finish the album, the band took snippets of music that it had already recorded and slowed them down or sped them up.

Listen to “Hallogallo” by NEU!
Listen to “Negativland” by NEU!

Amon Düül II

Munich band Amon Düül II had its origins in a political art commune that named itself after the Egyptian sun god (Amon) and a character from Turkish fiction (Düül). It’s probably the best known band with a name that sounds like a movie sequel.

In fact, Amon Düül II was an inspired second act. The original Amon Düül, known in some quarters as “Amon Düül I,” sucked. It was a rock band that followed the sorts of art-by-committee practices that made the work of sixties art communes so forgettable. Amon Düül II consisted of the technically proficient core of the original band, those who had ambitions of pop stardom.

Amon Düül II’s first album, Phallus Dei (1968) was calculated to shock. From its title (the Latin for “God’s Penis”) to the ponderous length of the title track (longer than 20 minutes—more suitable to a jazz record than a rock effort in 1968), the band built intricate psychedelic jams that owed as much to German classical music as they did to horror movie soundtracks and Pink Floyd. The music is goofy at times and might remind American listeners of Frank Zappa’s late sixties period.

The follow-up record Yeti (1970), Amon Düül II’s second crucial release, was a four-sided monster of an album that included a song suite (”Soap Shop Rock”), nearly forty minutes of improvisation (”Yeti,” “Yeti Talks to Yogi,” and “Sandoz in the Rain”), and shared with British progressive bands an unabashed and seemingly limitless pretension. Unfortunately, like progressive rock itself, each record brought Amon Düül II farther away from its freaked out roots and closer to a conservative, and polished chamber rock sound.

Listen to “Luzifer’s Ghilom” by Amon Düül II
Listen to “Eye-Shaking King” by Amon Düül II

Faust

A Krautrock primer wouldn’t be complete without the band that used the term as a song title. The members of Faust were a bunch of hippies from northern Germany. They gained a bad reputation in the early seventies as a band slapped together by a record label for a quick buck. While there was some truth to the story—a music journalist convinced Polydor to sign the group— Faust was hardly the Krautrock incarnation of the Monkees or Ultimate Spinach.

The first album, Faust (also known in English translation as Fist, 1971) was a weird mixture of heady folk, organ jams, and ponderous poetry. The record doesn’t sound like pop music; it demands the acute attention of modern classical music, a style that Faust was self-consciously appropriating. (The band even made a notable recording, Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973), with American minimalist composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad.) By Faust So Far (1972), however, the band had discovered a way to marry its avant garde aesthetics with more approachable song forms. By Faust IV (1974), the band’s masterwork, Faust had discovered a way to make the avant garde positively catchy.

From the opening jam “Krautrock” through the frantic, punkily syncopated “The Sad Skinhead” and the sublimely relaxed “Jennifer,” all the way through the chilled out, Lou Reedesque ballad “It’s a Bit of a Pain,” Faust IV might be the best back-to-front album produced by the Krautrock bands. Its lingering influence was palpable in the development of British postpunk—take the fun out of Faust IV and you have a template for This Heat’s album Deceitand would later inspire a generation of American indie rockers as well. It remains evidence that, if you control the right variables, experimental art can yield sublime results.

Listen to “So Far” by Faust
Listen to “Krautrock” by Faust
Listen to “Jennifer” by Faust