Atlantis - Krautrock In Metal Outfit?

Atlantis was a German prog rock band, most famous for their line up with singer Inga Rumpf and drummer Udo Lindenberg. Today there's another Atlantis: een Dutch post-rock band that are about to release their new album Omens.

The 10-minute song Rapture has been released as a teaser. It starts noisy with dramatic keyboard accents and guitars that are bigger than life, but becomes more subtle after a while and almost melodic. And it never manages to lose your attention. Like krautrock in a metal outfit. Promising.

Omens will be released on Burning World Records, a label named after a Swans album. It gives an idea of what to expect.

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser Saw Music As A Revolutionary Force

I finished the Dutch edition of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's book De Nieuwe Popmuziek (original German title: Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik). Written in 1969, it gives a pretty accurate description of musical developments since the early 1960s, seen through the eyes of the man who helped so many krautrock bands release their first albums.

Kaiser started his career in the world of music as a journalist. He wrote a number of books on this topic which are all hard to find now, but luckily, I  managed to get hold of a copy.

In his book, Kaiser regarded pop music not just as art or entertainment, but as a revolutionary force that would help create an entirely new society based on anarchist ideas. His biggest hope was Frank Zappa, the most intelligent and politically conscious musician around according to Kaiser.

When reading his work, you get the impression that he almost despised artists that did not sing about relevant social topics or did not make "psychedelic" music, a kind of music he felt you could only understand if you had a revolutionary soul.

For this reason, Kaiser saw musicians like Leonard Cohen or supergroups like Led Zeppelin as marionettes of the record industry, a business that he felt had no other objective than to manipulate and silence "progressive" young people in order to save the political establishment.

No Krautrock Without The Pink Floyd?

Read an interview with first generation krautrockers and many will mention the first Pink Floyd (then still The Pink Floyd) album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn as an influence. And it's not difficult to hear.

It's kinda ironic that these German artists who didn't want to reproduce anglo-saxon examples fell in love with a British band that was named after two American blues musicians. But listen to this legendary debut album and you understand the appeal of The Pink Floyd.

It was the sole album that the band recorded with their founder, Syd Barrett, who was not only the singer and guitarist but also the main songwriter.

Tangerine Dream - Zeit

 

For a long time I thought Tangerine Dream was one of the most boring bands in the world. Until I heard the stuff the Berlin-based band did before they specialized in endless sequencer symphonies.

Their albums Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973) are different. Both contain dark and menacing, ambient drone music, created with electronics but also with organs, cellos, guitars and other instruments. Haunting, unpredictable and only describable as undescribable.

These albums are actually much more powerful than the esoteric soundscape of Phaedra which followed Atem and became the blueprint of their later work.

Einstürzende Krautrock?

 

Some will claim that Einstürzende Neubauten play industrial music or avant-garde. But if you know a bit about krautrockers from the late 1960s, early 1970s, you will recognize much of what they did in the works of the Berlin band. 

Einstürzende Neubauten are unique: no one comes even close to their sound. And their music has also evolved a lot, from the apocalyptic noise at the start of their career to the poetic tension and sense of space in their current work. The masters of noise are now masters in silence - or dynamics, if you wish.

Sure, they are a product of their time and place: a band that could only have started in the split city of Berlin as it was in the sombre early 1980s. But that doesn't mean their work came out of the blue.

In an interview with The Quietus, Neubauten leader Blixa Bargeld admitted that Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can were his main influences.

"My English was rudimentary, and my Germanic tradition did not have much to do with how to write songs, which you can very much see in the Deutschrock groups, they didn't know how to write songs", Bargeld told The Quietus.

"They always tried to find a way around the singing - first Can had Malcolm Mooney, then he left and they picked up this street musician Damo Suzuki who hardly spoke English and found his way around the actual singing in a way that was ingenious and fantastic."

Read the full interview here.

Kosmischer Läufer A Cosmic Hoax?

One of the most discussed "new" krautrock releases this year was supposed to be an old one: Volume One of Kosmischer Läufer. It is said to be the music composed by one Martin Zeichnete to be used in the training of East German athletes in the 1970s.

In an "interview" released by the record company Unknown Capability Recordings, Zeichnete says he was inspired by the krautrock music which he heard secretly listening to West German radio. The idea was that similar hypnotic music would help the DDR runners stay focused during training and improve their performance.

Don't believe the hype. The story's great, but there is every reason to believe this is a hoax.

Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik

I mentioned him before: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. For some he was the guru of krautrock, for others a crook. Whatever, without him cosmic music would not have been so cosmic.

Before he got known as a record label boss and producer, Kaiser worked as a journalist. At the end of the 1960s he published a range of books about rock music. They're all out of print and it's unlikely they will ever be reprinted, if the rumours about Kaiser's mental state are true.

You can imagine I just felt lucky when I bumped into a Dutch translation of the originally German Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik (De nieuwe popmuziek in Dutch).

I don't believe it has ever been translated to English. Kaiser was German but a regular contributor to the Dutch Aloha magazine.

See the pic of my copy - which clearly has remained unread since its publication in 1970.

Gila - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

 

One of the lesser known early krautrock bands was Gila. Their leader and guitarist Conny Veit doubled in Popol Vuh for a while and this left its marks. In fact, the second Gila album Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (released 1973) features nearly the same line up as Popol Vuh in those days, with Veit, Florian Fricke on piano and Daniel Fichelscher on drums and bass. The fourth member was Veit's singing girl friend Sabine Merbach.

You can listen to the full album above. 

Serpentina Satélite - Space Rock From Peru

South America is certainly not the most likely place to produce any krautrock. But listen to Serpentina Satélite from Peru and your opinion changes immediately. They describe their music as freak 'n' roll and that's what it is: space rock in the best Ash Ra Tempel tradition.

In case you don't know: Freak 'n' Roll is also a song by Ash Ra Tempel. Well, I'm not sure if the early Ash Ra Tempel really had songs: they were cleverly built up 20-minute improvisations that were more psychedelic than almost anything else that ever got the label psychedelic.

Ton Steine Scherben Singer Destroys Table

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was a journalist, producer and multiple record label owner (Ohr, Pilz, Kosmische Kuriere) before his love for LSD ended his business. It's likely that without him many krautrock musicians would have never had a chance to release an album.

Political rock band Ton Steine Scherben however, didn't like the fact that Kaiser had his activities with Ohr financed by publisher and business man Peter Meisel. After all, Meisel worked for the major label Hansa and had made himself a name in the horrific world of German schlager music.

Krautrock 21 - A Different Blog

What, another krautrock blog? Yes, sir! But this one is a little different.

A lot has been written about krautrock and I'm not pretending I can add much to the history of the German movement that inspired so many artists. But blogs that connect the sound of the late 1960s-early 1970s with stuff that came afterwards or music that is made today, are rare. Most blogs cover either old material or new releases.