It’s been a long, long time since I’ve delved my toes into
the waters of the genre that is known as Krautrock. I first became aware of the
music back when I was a student at Houston Community College in the fall of
2005 when I went to the ProgArchives website and discovered bands/artists from
the realms of NEU!, Can, Faust, Amon Duul II, and Tangerine Dream. It was like
nothing I have ever heard before. It was dark, sinister, avant-garde,
proto-punk, atmospheric, musique-concrete, and the music itself, was completely
off the wall.
I would later find out that some of the bands/artists like
Julian Cope, who wrote the Krautrocksampler
book in 1994, John Lydon of PiL, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Magazine, Ultravox,
Devo, Joy Division, and The Mars Volta admired some of the bands that were like
a tidal wave that was waiting to happen. Now in the year of our lord 2020, Jose
Zegarra Holder and Adele Schmidt, who have done incredible work on the Romantic Warriors series since 2010, are
now doing the Krautrock genre as a three-part trilogy.
Starting things off is Part 1 of the documentary from
Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg. It tackles some of the histories of the bands
with interviews that include; Irmin Schmidt, Gunther Buskies of the Bureau B
label, Damo Suzuki, members of Floh De Cologne and Faust, Michael Rother,
Stephan Plank (Conny Plank’s son), Malcolm Mooney, Wolfgang Flur, Eberhard
Kraneman, and the late Jaki Liebezeit to name a few.
There is an incredible moment in the film where Damo Suzuki’s
Network is performing in Peru doing this amazing improvisational groove as he
calls them “sound carriers”. The reason for that is that Damo himself wants to
perform with traditional musicians by working together and bringing world music
with any kind of instrument that is very different from his time with Can.
And you may never know what might happen on stage. But for
Damo, he is free from anything he wants to, but having his own philosophy with
music. Rother is perhaps one of the best interviews that Adele and Jose did.
You could tell that he was very spot on about his time as an early member of
Kraftwerk. However, there was tension between Dinger and Florian Schenider over
creative differences on where they want to take the next level. And so, Klaus
and Michael departed from the band and would later form NEU! And then with
Harmonia.
Miki Yui is an archivist on the late Klaus Dinger, knows her
stuff very well about the history of the band’s music while Rother saw that
Klaus had potential in Michael’s arrangments and the time they worked with
Conny Plank on those first three studio albums by creating an atmosphere, but
taking the risks that would be challenging. For Stephan to see his father work
on those albums, was as he mentioned when he was young, almost as if his Dad,
was working on a spaceship.
But listening to NEU, it was the beginnings of what is known
as Punk Rock. As Eberhard Kraneman described it as “Anti-Music” during that
time he was with the band performing with them with some intensity. But when
NEU’s second album came out, it got terrible reviews. Which I had no idea
about. And it must’ve been very frustrating for them to get reviews like that
and the two drummers between Hans Lampe and Thomas Dinger who would later form
La Dusseldorf worked on the second side of NEU!
75.
And you can tell that David Bowie took a lot of inspiration on
NEU’s third album on what would be known as his 12th studio album
for his Berlin trilogy, Heroes. Not to
mention watching a rare interview with Klaus Dinger I believe from 1975 in
Germany. When I think of Faust in the documentary, I think of their music as
insane, out of this world, and surreal Dadaism.
The Faust Tapes when
I first heard it in 2006, I consider it to be Faust’s answer to Captain
Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and
their nod to the Velvet Underground with the pounding tribal sections of the
opening track, It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine
Girl from their second album, So Far.
Jean-Harve Peron has a wonderful history about the origin of the band’s
name and their late producer Uwe Nettlebeck, who was German’s answer to Tony
Wilson.
They talk about the history of their time in Wumme where
they recorded So Far, The Faust Tapes, and
their collaboration with avant-garde composer Tony Conrad on Outside the Dream Syndicate from 1972 to
1973. This was for me, one of the best first parts of the documentaries
covering the big names in the Krautrock genre. It almost makes me want to go
back and take out some of those albums in my CD shelves to see what I was
missing.
And new bands like Electric Orange and Wume, are following
in the footsteps of the genre. I feel like I’ve learned a little bit more about
what I was missing from those bands and artists from that time period in the
1970s. Very much like giving the bloated sounds of Dream Theater, Nickelback, and
the boring pretentious horseshit of the top 40 hits you hear on the radio, the
big giant middle finger. Krautrock is here to stay. And I can’t wait for both
parts 2 and 3.
In the words of Julian Cope’s introduction on the
Krautrocksampler book, “Krautrock transcended all this and more. Because it had
to.”