Musiccargo’s album Harmonie may be the most fully realised album of the year, but it can be daunting delving into a genre, Krautrock, that may, at first glance, seem so unfamiliar. Neil Weaver plays tour guide as he acknowledges the influence Krautrock has and is having worldwide (and particularly the sounds of ATB readers love) and explores the history of the widely and highly regarded genre. All this in service of Musiccargo (and the dozens of names we hope you’ll discover from and after this article) gracing our ears.
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There has always been something innately cool about Krautrock. The clean lines, the relentless motorik beat, the entirely unpretentious wig-outs that put their British counterparts to shame. It also helps that it’s called Krautrock, when it could just as comfortably be labelled prog-rock and subsequently denied its deserved cool status.
But the term itself is a contentious one. “Kraut” is an ethnic slur – a mild one in honesty, but an ethnic slur nonetheless. We don’t call Giorgio Moroder ‘Guinea-disco’, or Blur ‘Limeypop’, so the acceptability of the term ‘Krautrock’ is quite rightly questionable. The fact that the term has become so ubiquitous in describing post-WWII experimental German popular music makes having the argument about the label’s validity even more difficult, given that pointing out that the term ‘Krautrock’ might well be racist means that those of us who use it have an extremely awkward question to answer about our own attitudes towards other cultures (specifically, in this case, the Germans). And, given that most of us who use the word are likely fauxhemian types with at least a few hundred megabytes of Miles Davis outtakes, a pile of back copies of the New Statesman lying somewhere in the house and a desire to dissociate completely from the Kasabian fans of this world, we probably won’t take too kindly to being asked this particular awkward question, even by ourselves. We’d perhaps consider telling ourselves that we “have German friends” or something, before realising that we’re no better than the xenophobes we routinely mock, possibly even suffering a crippling nervous breakdown as a consequence of this realisation.
And so we don’t question the acceptability of the term ‘Krautrock’. It’s simply too much for us to handle. That the term is as embarrassing and tragically outdated as most Anglo-American rock artists were made to seem in the wake of the emergence of Can, Neu!, Faust, Amon Düül II, Cluster and, of course, the mighty Kraftwerk is of little consequence. The potential psychological damage that could be inflicted upon Guardian readers by pointing out the connotations of the term ‘Krautrock’ does not bear thinking about. If the Tories got hold of this information, they could send the semi-detached left into a state of utter disarray, an existential crisis from which they might never recover. And so, despite my misgivings (and because there’s no viable alternative), I shall continue to use the word Krautrock.
2013 has seen, if not a full-blown Krautrock revival, then at least some of its Teutonic tenets popping up in some of its very best albums. In fairness, Krautrock never really went away. Eno was famously enchanted by it, and helped David Bowie reappropriate many of its traits on what is quite possibly his finest hour, Low. Post-punk acts like Public Image Ltd. and The Fall turned to Germany in search of inspiration, whilst a raft of electronic acts throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s were obviously incredibly indebted to the nation’s synth pioneers. Post-rock bands like Tortoise and Ganger bore its marks openly. Radiohead’s In Rainbows owed its darker, more rhythmically charged moments to the Krautrockers, whilst Portishead head honcho Geoff Barrow’s recent work with both his own band BEAK> and the über-cool German chanteuse Anika (whose 2013 self-titled EP came out on the awesome Stone’s Throw Records and, in her cover of Shocking Blue’s ‘Love Buzz’, features one of the best songs of the year) has harked back unashamedly to early-1970s Düsseldorf.
But, despite the fact that artists have been paying homage to their German heroes for years, it feels as though 2013 in particular has been awash with music of a distinctly German flavour. Back in January, Sacred Bones (NYC’s alt. rock label du jour, home to blog darlings Pharmakon, The Men and Zola Jesus, among others) released Chilean band Föllakzoid’s second LP, a set of hypnotic jams that immediately called to mind the Neu! of ‘Hallogallo’ and the Faust of ‘Just a Second’. The record is uncompromising in its search for a pure trance-state, its ritualistic, incanted vocals and muddied dub textures lending the whole album a warm sense of claustrophilia and back-to-nature belonging. It pulses and throbs, feeling at once ancient and organic, yet metallic, industrial, of the future (but, perhaps most importantly, never cold or sterile). Nearly ten months on, it remains one of the year’s best releases.
However, it is not simply guitar-toting space-rockers who have been invoking the spirit of Kraut. Danish downtempo producer Trentemøller’s latest effort, Lost, may have been a misguided mixed bag, but its finest moments are among some of the most interesting music released this year. ‘Trails’, for example, covers almost the entire Krautrock spectrum, starting out all balls-out crashing drums and fuzzed-up guitars (calling to mind Amon Düül II’s classic ‘Archangel Thunderbird’), before transforming seamlessly into a sea of layered, Harald Grosskopf-esque synth arpeggios. Elsewhere, the aptly-titled ‘Morphine’ sounds like one of those tripped-out, spontaneous experiments that were occurring at the West German art communes that spawned much of Germany’s most memorable and influential music. But where Lost largely aims for a maximalist take on Krautrock, other producers have been far more subtle in their approach.
The ever-prolific Machinefabriek (Dutchman Rutger Zuydervelt) already has a few releases to his name this year, but the one that particularly caught my ear was his fantastic collaboration album with guitarist Sergio Sorrentino, Vignettes. Zuydervelt takes samples of Sorrentino’s guitar playing and transforms them into haunting, erm, vignettes, of droning ambience and sparse, tastefully processed clipped electric guitar notes that take on a shimmering quality reminiscent of one of 2013’s other great experimental electronic releases, Pantha du Prince’s Elements of Light. While both albums are indebted to the work of neo-classical minimalists (Pantha du Prince’s experiments with assorted bells recall Steve Reich’s work with marimbas, whilst you can hear the influence of Morton Feldman’s score for Rothko Chapel in the way Zuyderveltbuilds a sense of atmosphere), Vignettes also calls to mind the repetitive patterns of Cluster’s ‘Im Süden’, if everything was stripped away until only the bare minimum was left. It’s skeletal Krautrock that gives precedence to the beauty of simple, recurring motifs, as opposed to relying on rhythm. (This is a somewhat strange idea given the importance of rhythm in Krautrock – the metronomic, 4/4 motorik beat is Krautrock’s single most famous defining feature. The motorik beat’s best-known exponent, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, also released an album this year, the fifth volume of his and Burnt
Friedman’s Secret Rhythms series, a very nice addition to the great man’s oeuvre.)
But, even with all of these fantastic releases, one album in particular stands out. Hailing from Düsseldorf, home to Krautrock legends Kraftwerk and Neu! (and splinter group La Düsseldorf), Musiccargo “create a pure sound they term ‘Adult Kraut’”, according to their label’s press release (though if I were writing a press release about Germans producing work that is inherently, undeniably German, I’d probably avoid the term “pure” at all costs), and their album Harmonie is one of the most fully realised I’ve heard all year in any genre. Opener ‘Domino’ is nine minutes of a repeated guitar line which, consciously or not, harks back to New Order’s ‘Ceremony’, with some breathy, whispered vocals added on top and, well, very little else actually. What’s so impressive about the song is that it’s almost like being trapped in a time vacuum – while it’s playing you feel as though it’s been going on forever, but when it stops you wonder why it had to end so soon. It’s the musical equivalent of some bizarre, beautiful trick of the light, and the first time I listened to the album it took me a good couple of hours to get through all of it, simply because every time ‘Domino’ finished I would just put it right back to the start again.
That isn’t to downplay the strength of the rest of the album, though. ‘Tip Top’ and closer ‘Adieu und Adios’ both lurch along at a steady pace, again giving off an early New Order vibe. They aren’t reliant on instantly recognisable melodies, preferring instead to focus on the atmosphere brought about by endless repetition, a sort of war of attrition with themselves, songs that slowly build up and quietly fade away again. ‘Das Buch’ is one such slow builder, overlapping layer after layer of processed strings and tense, wiry guitar lines, creating something ostensibly peaceful but imbuing it with a strange, ominous feeling that something horrible is about to happen, some screech of white noise or a sudden, violent upturn in volume. That it never comes is beside the point – like all the best horror movies, the most primal, honest reactions are caused by the tension itself, not the release, and the unease brought on by ‘Das Buch’ as it chugs along towards its end is a refreshingly human response. It’s sometimes easy to get too bogged down in analysing music while listening, subconsciously signposting certain sounds that make our ears prick up and coming up with reasons for why we enjoy things. It is much rarer that music provokes an indescribable feeling that can’t just be explained away by pointing to the nearest familiar home comfort (“dat guitar”, “dat snare”, “dat voice”, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam), and when music of that ilk comes along it is something to be cherished and marvelled at.
So, what is Krautrock? Well, it’s a somewhat racist trashcan term used to group together a bunch of German musicians whose work was so widely varied that crowbarring them into the same category makes the label itself almost entirely redundant. But, beyond that, the word has come to embody an experimental spirit. Krautrock can be characterised by a canvas of groovy monotony, onto which artists paint pieces filled with pleasant textures or stabs of uncomfortable confrontation (and often both, side-by-side). It’s not a perfect term, but until somebody suggests something better it’s all we have. And, most importantly, in 2013 it has once again become a term to signify and describe some of the best and most interesting new music around. Long live Krautrock.
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