Agitation Free - Live 2025.12.01 Kesselhaus, Berlin, Germany

Agitation Free were one of the premier kosmische or “krautrock” bands of the early 70s, but they never quite reached the same levels of acclaim as some of their contemporaneous peers. (I’ve complained about their absence from the canon more than once.) They were creative, explorative, and skilled such that they made three classic albums with varying levels of experimentation. They might not have pioneered entirely new genres like Can, Neu!, or Kraftwerk, but they reached beyond the standard progressive rock of their time and made a series of mostly instrumental, psychedelic jams of the highest class. They also launched the careers of Christoph Franke (who left for Tangerine Dream), Ax Genrich (who left for Guru Guru), composer Michael Hoenig, and Lutz “Lüül” Graf-Ulbrich, who subsequently played with Ash Ra Tempel, Nico, and 17 Hippies. After breaking up in 1974, they reformed sporadically, releasing two new studio albums in 1999 and 2023, neither of which quite reached their original heights.

After missing some prior opportunities, I wasn’t gonna miss this one. The remaining original-era band members are not young. Guitarist Lüül and drummer Burghard Rausch are the only two left after Gustl Lütjens died, Michael Günther departed, and Michael Hoenig opted to stop touring. Lütjens and Hoenig still contributed to the last album, Momentum, but the live band now features guitarist Axel Heilhecker (from the Food Band) and jazz keyboardist Tim Sund. Bassist Daniel Cordes (who also played with 17 Hippies) has been with the band since 2013.

Although Lüül was positioned in the center of the stage, was the only one to address the crowd, and is the closest thing to a leader of the band, I was surprised how many of the guitar solos and melodies he left to Heilhecker, even on the older songs. Lüül often stuck to purely rhythmic parts, although he also played some joint lead parts and used an ebow on a few songs. Heilhecker played quite well, but his style is quite flashy and lacked some of the subtlety and expressiveness that graced their best work. Sund and Cordes both filled their roles with skill, but neither stood out as much as I might’ve hoped. Sund preferred the digital synth sound of his Korg Kronos rack, which I found a bit too mechanical. I rather enjoyed the warmth of his analog setup when he deigned to use it.

The weakest link was unfortunately Rausch. He might’ve been the one to drum on all their albums, but he had a bit of trouble keeping up. To be fair, he played at a fairly high intensity for the whole set. I can easily forgive losing a stick once or twice, but I was disappointed when they didn’t all hit the big drop of “Rücksturz”, which I attributed to Rausch. That took away a lot of the energy from one of their strongest, heaviest jams.

They played the entirety of Momentum, two cuts from 1999’s River of Return, three tracks from their debut Malesch (1972), and their signature song “Laila” from 2nd (1973). All of the early songs were excellent, and most of the newer ones were good, even if some of them didn’t capture the same psychedelic charm. I liked that all of the songs, old and new, were not set in stone, but rather served as springboards for exploration and discovery. I could see the members regularly exchanging looks and signals with one another. I loved the communication I could both see and hear in how they traded parts.

Agitation Free might not be at the top of their game, but they’re still quite good. They’re all still talented musicians, and I appreciate that they’re still going and putting out new music. I even preferred the live experience to the studio versions of the new songs, and they did justice to their old songs. Their lights and projections helped keep things interesting, too. I wish they varied their setlists more, but I don’t blame them for sticking to a standard they can use as a springboard.

Here’s what I remember of the setlist:
01. Nouveau son
02. Lilac
03. Levant
04. You Play for Us Today
05. In Da Jungl
06. Ala Tul
07. Nightwatch
08. Nomads
09. Shibuya Nights
10. Laila
11. Momentum
12. Rücksturz

Encore:
13. 2 Part 2

Score: B

Thanks to Mirah!

Uwe Schütte (ed.) - The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock (2023)

About nine years ago, I reviewed Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler (1995), and I complained quite a bit about it and suggested finding a different guide. Despite my own recommendation, I never did so myself. I suppose I’d already made the plunge, so reading another book about Krautrock and kosmische Musik felt unnecessary. Nonetheless, I was always curious if the perfect primer would eventually come around. David Stubbs’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014) got good reviews, and Ulrich Adelt’s Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies (2016) also looked promising, and maybe someday I’ll try one or the other. But after enjoying the honesty and depth of Uwe Schütte’s Godstar: Die fünf Tode des Genesis P-Orridge (2022), I decided to check out The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock, which he edited and wrote the introduction and Kraftwerk section for.

 

[The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock.]

Schütte assembled a superb team of writers to fill out the text, including both Stubbs (on Neu!) and Adelt (on “Definitions, Concepts, [and] Context”). That each section is somewhat independent means that there is unfortunately some overlap, but that’s a minor inconvenience. The benefit is a wide variety of perspectives with unique specializations and interests. The book provides a great overview of the social, political, musical, and geographic background that gave rise to the genre (or “discursive formation”, as Adelt prefers to call it, since the movement isn’t really a cohesive unit), thorough deep-dives into some of the primary artists, and a well-considered selection of the subsequent genres and artists that have been influenced by Krautrock.

The tone is academic but approachable, which I preferred quite a bit to Cope’s excited mess, even if I missed some of the passion. The book is in English, despite that several authors (and the music itself) hail from Germany, which occasionally means there are some awkward phrases, like describing music as “spherical”. (In German, “sphärisch” can mean something like “atmospheric”, “celestial”, or “spacey”.) Thankfully, this is rarely distracting. I also appreciated the attention paid to detail and accuracy, again unlike Cope’s wild exaggerations and reliance on oft-repeated rumors. The only mistake I encountered was the claim that Klaus Dinger never appeared on a Kraftwerk album. (He is credited with playing drums on “Vom Himmel hoch” on their debut album.)

The breadth is quite wide and generally quite balanced, with practically none of the idiosyncratic bias of Cope’s tastes. I was initially surprised how little mention the folk, prog, and jazz sides of the genre received, but since those are the factions that were most similar to contemporaneous Anglo-American acts, it’s an understandable choice. (I also tend to be less interested in those bands.) I would’ve loved a section on Agitation Free, but otherwise the choice of highlighted bands is probably the same set that I would’ve picked, both in terms of notoriety and quality. However, my favorite chapter was Jens Balzer’s “The Flip Side of Krautrock”, which was full of pleasant surprises. He openly acknowledges some of the conservative or even counter-revolutionary aspects of the movement, such as the relative lack of women and immigrant voices in the canon, and discusses some notable acts from adjacent genres, like Die Dominas, Inga Rumpf of Frumpy, and Turkish-German bağlama player Ozan Ata Canani.

I also particularly enjoyed the third part on Krautrock’s legacy, which includes chapters on punk and Neue Deutsche Welle, post-punk, and electronic dance music. Several of my favorite artists from the late 70s and 80s are cited in their connection to Krautrock, including Einstürzende Neubauten, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bauhaus, and of course David Bowie. The discussion and comparison with German punk is quite insightful, particularly in exploring the shared desire to reject oppressive, received, Anglo-American norms. The final chapter on “Krautrock Today” also covers a great selection of younger bands in the kosmische mold, including of course Stereolab.

This is the book I wish I could’ve read ten years ago. We can safely forget about Cope now. (Well, not his music!) It’s telling how far the movement has gone in public perception that it can now grace the prestiged printing presses of Cambridge. It’s no longer just the domain of obscure fanatics. The internet has thrown open the doors, and academia has finally caught up.

Score: A-

P.S.: Two links buried in the footnotes deserve calling out. First is a Detroit TV show clip featuring a bunch of people in 1991 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Nummern” (“Numbers”). Second is a Facebook post by Adelt in the Krautrock group in which he spawns the most absurd debate about the boundaries of the genre I’ve ever seen, only to be hijacked by The Crack in the Cosmic Egg coauthor (and group moderator) Alan Freeman pressing Amon Düül II vocalist Renate Knaup for Melody Maker scans from the 70s!