1970 was a milestone year for German experimental, psychedelic, avant-garde, electronic and other forms of rock music, collectively known as Krautrock. The year saw the release of key albums for all bands in this review, including debut efforts for groups that would later branch out of the Krautrock category and find success with more accessible music. We begin the review with a group of musicians who started out as a commune.
Amon Düül II – Yeti
The story of Amon Düül II is an interesting and unique one, with the roots of the band beginning with Amon Düül, a radical commune that was just the thing to join during the student movement of the late 1960s. Their motto was, “We are eleven adults and two children and have decided to do everything, as well as our music, together.” The group named itself after Amon – the Egyptian sun god, and Düül – the Turkish god of music. It earned money by playing in sit-ins and protest gatherings with minimal music knowledge and released an album in 1969, ‘Psychedelic Underground’. At some point the more musically inclined members of the commune decided to split and form a new group, Amon Düül II.
Like other underground rock music groups in Germany at the time, they had to make do with very little. Gig money, after paying for roadies, their manager and travel expenses, did not leave much beyond their basic needs.
The group took their influences from American and British psychedelic music. Director Wim Wenders, a friend of the band, even called them “Germany’s Jefferson Airplane”. In April 1970 the band released their second album Yeti, considered to this day as a milestone Krautrock album. The tz Munich-based paper wrote this about the double album: “One is almost bowled over by the fullness of sounds, by themes that move mechanically through various musical levels and, to top it all, vocals like washed-up Wagnerian singers. It’s refreshing to hear something new in the currently extremely overcrowded pop market.” The German mainstream publications were clearly not ready for this type of music, considering it a part of the pop market. The album was as far removed from pop esthetics as it possibly could. A year later, though, Musik Express magazine voted the band as the ‘Most popular underground band’ and Yeti as ‘Album of the year.’ British music magazine Melody Maker wrote: “Amon Düül II is the first German group whose music can be regarded as a contribution on its own to international pop culture.” Lester Bangs summed it well, naming the album “One of the finest recordings of psychedelic music in all human history.”
The scary album cover was a collaboration between the band members. Organist Falk Rogner designed a collage around a photograph of the Grim Reaper, featuring sound man Wolfgang Krischke.
A favorite track from this album is Archangel Thunderbird. The drums, bass and guitar riff on this song are addictive and must be listened to at high volume for the full effect. Excellent vocals by singer Renate Knaup, who said about her experience with the band: “This was always a man’s band and if any of them could have sung properly they would never have chosen me, a girl, to be their vocalist. The problem I had in the beginning was self-confidence. It was difficult to be the only woman involved inside this macho musical mafia. I wanted to be a soul singer, in the same way that Hendrix was a soul singer.” Knaup composed the song based on a German hymn she used to sing in her local church choir.
Bass player Dave Anderson left after this album to join Hawkwind.
Renate Knaup – vocals, tambourine
John Weinzierl – guitar, 12 string guitar, vocals
Chris Karrer – violin, guitar, 12 string guitar, vocals
Falk Rogner – organ
Dave Anderson – bass
Peter Leopold – drums
Christian “Shrat” Thierfeld – bongos, vocals
Can – Soundtracks
Another German band to release a second album in 1970 is perhaps the most associated with Krautrock. After releasing their debut album Monster Movie in 1969, Can lost their erratic American singer Malcolm Mooney, who was replaced by Kenji “Damo” Suzuki. The Japanese singer brought a whole new vocal dimension to Can’s music. Bass player Holger Czukay said that, “Damo was more abstract. He made melodies, so (guitarist) Michael Karoli became more important to him. But … the words could be anything.” Irmin Schmidt, who called Mooney a ‘vocalizing drum kit’, said that, “Damo often sang in a sort of Dada-speak – a mixture of English, German, Russian, Japanese or utterances that belonged to no language. That was great – there was no message, only sound. Lyrics were completely uninteresting.”
Suzuki first contributed his voice to the album Soundtracks, a collection of musical pieces the band recorded for various films. The album was released in September 1970 and marked a shift from the psychedelic jams the band recorded on their debut. Soundtracks consists of repetitive groove-based experimental music that the band kept exploring later on their classic albums Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.
Keyboard player Irmin Schmidt was the only band member who actually viewed the films for which the band provided the music. He described the movie plots to the group and collectively they improvised and composed the music. The album stands alone easily without the visuals, and has aged better than the films.
Soundtracks opens up with the piece Deadlock from a movie of the same name. The West German Spaghetti Western is now a cult classic, perhaps because of Can’s music. The band had only three days to work on the score before mixing started, after film director Roland Klick realized that his efforts to creating the score himself are not up to par. Schmidt tells a funny story about the band’s involvement with the film: “After three days the mixing started, but of course the music wasn’t yet finished. So we did the music at night, and early in the morning each day I flew to Berlin. We mixed one roll with the music, and then I flew back and at night. We produced the next, and so on for about four or five days without any sleep except the hour back and forth in the plane with a lot of mother’s little helpers to keep me awake.”
My favorite track on this album is Mother Sky which was used in the movie Deep End, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and released a year later. The film was a British-German tragic drama about a teenager who is obsessed with a woman, played by Jane Asher. Can’s music accompanies a scene showing the teenager lost and frantically searching the streets of Soho for the object of his obsession, a perfect marriage of sound and image. The obsessive groove is played by Holger Czukay on bass and Jaki Liebezeit on drums. The cherry on top is Michael Karoli on guitar, playing a solo for the ages. Q magazine rated the track at number 48 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks.
Holger Czukay – bass, double bass
Michael Karoli – guitar, violin
Jaki Liebezeit – drums, percussion, flute
Irmin Schmidt – keyboards, synthesizers
Damo Suzuki – vocals, percussion
On to a trio of debut albums by bands that would produce some of the best meditative, ambient, electronic instrumental music in the 1970s.
Popol Vuh – Affenstunde
The first is Popol Vuh, the brainchild of keyboardist Florian Fricke who described his music as “heart to heart music, unspoiled, tender and wild at once”. Fricke, who had a strong interest in eastern culture, took the band name from the old Mayan book Popol Vuh (‘Book of the Community’).
In 1970 Popol Vuh released the album Affenstunde, the title’s meaning being the moment when a human being becomes a human being and is no longer an ape. This is definitely music for the soul. Relaxing and soothing, but nothing like elevator music. Fricke talked about the ideology behind his music: “It is difficult to understand that as humans we are individuals and yet connected as a whole. Black or white, yellow or red – we are all part of one mankind. If politics and religion continue to create separation it becomes even more the task and the – only superficially powerless – chance of art to act as a connecting and unifying agent.” Amen to that.
The album is one of the earliest recordings that demonstrate original music composed and performed solely on the Moog synthesizer (spare percussion accompaniment). Fricke, who was one of the first two musicians in Germany to own the expensive electronic instrument, said: “It was a great fascination to encounter sounds that were until those days not heard before from the outside. It was the possibility to express sounds that a composer was hearing from within himself, which in many cases are different from what a normal instrument could express. Therefore, this was a fantastic way into my inside consciousness, to express what I was hearing within myself.”
The side-long title track is an electronic music bliss. That Moog was sold several years later to Klaus Schulze. Quite the pedigree on that instrument.
Florian Fricke – Moog synthesizer
Holger Trülzsch – percussion
Frank Fiedler – Synthesizer mixdown
Bettina Fricke – cover design, production, tablas (un-credited)
We finish the article with the two most successful groups to rise out of the Krautrock movement, although in 1970 it did not seem like their music would find a large audience, as it did from the mid-1970s and on. Both bands are known to the world at large as electronic outfits relying heavily on synthesizers, but their debut albums used none of that expensive machinery.
Tangerine Dream – Electronic Meditation
Tangerine Dream‘s debut album was recorded shortly after the band members came together as a group. Edgar Froese remembers how the original lineup was formed: “In 1969, I met Klaus Schulze in Berlin. He was a very bad drummer, but he had some sort of craziness about him that I was looking for. All the people who went through the band came into the band because they had some sort of craziness about them. That’s what I think. It’s the sort of music you can’t create if you’re absolutely normal.” The third member of the band was Conrad Schnitzler who played cello, violin and flute. In June 1970 the band released their debut album Electronic Mediation.
Musical prowess was not what Tangerine Dream was about, as Edgar Froese relates: “Electronic Meditation was done by absolute amateurs. We couldn’t handle our equipment, and during that period of recording we couldn’t get any record company interested in it.” But interest did come, from Ulrich Kaiser, the man behind the newly founded record company Ohr Records. The label signed them after listening to their demo recordings made on an old 2-track Revox tape recorder. Kaiser also came up with the intriguing title of the album, although not a single electronic instrument was played on it.
The album may have lacked the use of synthesizers, but it is rich with sounds generated by found objects and effects. Froese elaborated on the experience: “It was very exotic. Sounds were made using everyday objects — for example a sieve filled with dry peas, an old office calculating machine, two old iron bars, and hard parchment paper, all recorded with a microphone and sent through reverbs and delays to create unusual sounds. The results could not always be used musically – it was all quite different from the commercial pop sound. Technically, the studio was very sparse. As we didn’t have a lot of money, all the resulting sounds were directly mastered onto a Revox quarter-inch machine. It was pretty rough and adventurous. We never dreamed that anyone would want to press this recording onto vinyl…”
There was quite a good measure of experimentation on that album, as Klaus Schulze, then a drummer, relates: “Edgar played guitar, Schnitzler organ and me drums through loads of effects. We were experimenting with a lot of random stuff and were making up our own sounds. I remember Conrad had this metal cup full of these bits of glass in which he stuck a microphone. I played a lot of different percussive sounds that were then altered by machines. It was just great to be in a band who were open to so much experimentation.”
The liner notes tried to explain the experience of listening to this music: “In the era of electronic experimental music, everything’s possible. When you unfold this record cover, you’ll see a dissected burning brain. When you hear the record, a dissected human life will pass in front of you. One of billions.” They knew their target audience back then.
The album closer Ashes To Ashes is a favorite, a track that reminds me of late 1960s, post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd.
Edgar Froese – six- and twelve-string guitar, organ, piano, sound effects, tapes
Conrad Schnitzler – cello, violin, addiator
Klaus Schulze – drums, percussion, metal sticks
Additional personnel
Jimmy Jackson – organ (uncredited in the original release)
Thomas Keyserling – flute (uncredited in the original release)
Klaus Schulze, who left the band shortly after the album was released, summarized the importance of that first effort by Tangerine Dream: “We didn’t like the existing music at all and didn’t want to copy English/American music. What would take off later, none of us knew. To break through, it was very important, this album, and inspiring for other musicians, to go in another direction.”
The last band in this review became a staple of electronic pop later in the decade, but the esthetic emanating from their debut album puts them in good company with the rest of the bands reviewed so far.
Kraftwerk – Kraftwerk 1
Florian Schneider-Esleben met Ralf Hütter in 1968 when both of them were studying at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid and later at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf. They formed an ensemble of improvisational music called Organisation, with Schneider on flute and Hütter on Hammond organ, and two other musicians on bass and drums. Hütter later reflected on the void in the Arts in Germany after World War II: “There was really no German culture after the war. Everyone was rebuilding their homes and getting their little Volkswagens. In the clubs when we first started playing, you never heard a German record, you switched on the radio and all you heard was Anglo-American music, you went to the cinema and all the films were Italian and French. That’s okay but we needed our own cultural identity.”
In 1970 the two rented a property at the heart of Düsseldorf, not far from a power station, and built their own studio. They christened the space Kling Klang. The studio functioned as a musical lab, a space where they experimented, played, recorded and even made their own musical instruments. In a 2005 interview Hütter talked about that studio: “We were able to shut out the distractions and define our own identity. We were in our studio, with the doors closed and there was silence. Now what is our music, what is our language, what is our sound? We realized we had to start from zero. It’s an amazing opportunity. We didn’t have to reject anything. It was an empty space. The studio was really born before the group.” And the group was indeed born in that studio, aptly named Kraftwerk, German for a power plant.
Schneider and Hütter saw themselves as artists reviving a culture that thrived in the 1920s and died with the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Hütter: “The culture of Central Europe was cut off in the thirties, and many of the intellectuals went to the USA or France, or they were eliminated. Kraftwerk are picking it up again where it left off, continuing this culture of the thirties, and we are doing this spiritually.” In that spirit they chose German names not only for the band, but also for all the song names on their debut album. It opens with the track Ruckzuck (English: Quick), an energetic and rhythmic piece dominated by Schneider’s flute. The flute sound is treated by electronic effects, including tape echo, ring modulation, use of pitch-to-voltage converter, fuzz and wah-wah, allowing him to use his flute as a bass instrument.
The album also features two drummers, Andreas Hohmann and Klaus Dinger, who would later form another key krautrock band – Neu! Legendary producer Conny Plank is on board and the iconic cover art of a traffic cone was designed by Ralf Hütter. He talked about their approach in creating the music for the album: “Not only were we interested in Musique Concrete but also in playing organ tone clusters and flute feedback sounds that added variety to the repeated note sequences that we recorded and mixed on tape. Then we used several acoustic drummers as we turned our attention to more rhythmic music, and soon found that amplifying drums with contact mics was desirable for us but not readily accepted by the players.”
Sources:
Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music, by David Stubbs
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