On the Meaning of Krautrock and Kosmische Musik

After spending a great deal of time listening to a large variety of bands labeled "Krautrock" while reading and reviewing Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler, I started thinking about the term and what it really means. Cope, like many others, criticizes the term as being a lazy British invention that collected together a disparate set of unrelated bands under one label. Nonetheless, Cope uses the term extensively to the point of naming his book after it. He and others have claimed that the term was derived from Amon Düül's first album, Psychedelic Underground (1969), which contained a track titled "Mama Düül und ihre Sauerkrautband spielt auf". By the time Faust titled a song "Krautrock" on Faust IV in 1973, it was already done in a spirit of jest and parody.

Plenty of other terms were used in and outside of Germany for the various forms of "new" music coming out of German-speaking countries around the late 60s and early 70s, but the most common one (in Germany, at least) was "Kosmische Musik", i.e. "cosmic music". Cope cites Amon Düül II's debut album, Phallus Dei, and Can's debut album, Monster Movie, both released in 1969, as the first rumblings of this movement. Whether those two albums really represent that term well is questionable, but the core of the idea was music that was progressive, forward-looking, future-oriented, and perhaps psychedelic and drug-induced. Then and now, Kosmische could mean proto-ambient music or it could mean trippy guitar jams.

[The first pressing of "The" Can's Monster Movie.]

Part of the problem is that these two terms, Krautrock and Kosmische Musik, are not necessarily the same thing. Krautrock is often used as an umbrella term for all German rock bands of the era, and Kosmische sometimes is as well, but this is rather confusing and ignores the nuances of both terms. It would seem that originally they did mean two different things, albeit with substantial shared ground. In fact, if I may indulge in the art of organization and categorization, I would say that there are at least six distinct styles or trends or genres of music that came out of Germany in the Krautrock era. Here's how I might break it down:

1. Space Jams, Psychedelia and Acid Blues Rock: This may be the largest grouping, but what unites it is a predilection for long guitar-based jams. Bass and drums go without saying, and keyboards are often included as well. Vocals are optional. These songs usually "rock" in some sense, perhaps owe something to jazz or the blues, and often have a psychedelic, trippy, "far out, man" aesthetic. Examples include Guru Guru, The Cosmic Jokers, Kraan, the first side of most Ash Ra Tempel albums, many early Amon Düül II songs, much of Agitation Free, and maybe even Annexus Quam. Xhol Caravan is perhaps a soul-derived variant of this, and Embryo might be a particular jazzy version. These bands excel in energy and virtuosity and usually have good grooves. The downside is that they are sometimes lacking in substance and prone to self-indulgence.

2. Progressive Rock: I'm using this category for bands that sound like they may as well have come from the British prog rock scene – except that the vocals are distinctly accented and sometimes even deliberately bizarrely intoned. I'm talking about "progressive" in the sense of bands like Yes, Genesis, and King Crimson: complicated song structures, intricate arrangements, bombastic sound, exploratory vision, and so on. The German bands in this vein aren't necessary derivative, but this is perhaps the closest grouping to any segment of mainstream Anglo-American music. I would include bands like Jane, Birth Control, Grobschnitt, and later Amon Düül II. This music is usually full of surprises and a good mix of intellect and fun, but can also be over-the-top and excessive.

3. Experimental, Academic, and Sound Collage: This might be the earliest variety, arguably descending from Karlheinz Stockhausen's compositions such as Telemusik in 1966 and Hymnen in 1967. Most of these bands come from an art school background and liked experimenting with sound and unusual methods of sound production. The "studio as instrument" cliché could easily be applied here. Much of this music is arrhythmic, and all of it is instrumental. This is pre-synthesizer, but in the heyday of tape loops and studio ingenuity. Unconventional instrumentation (for rock music, at least) such as flutes, violin, bells, and glockenspiel are common. Good examples are Kluster, early Cluster, early Tangerine Dream, Organisation, and early Kraftwerk. Autobahn is right on the line and perhaps the last prominent example. This is music that can easily be derided as overly "academic" in the sense of not being particularly listener-friendly. There is a lot of creativity and a wealth of ideas, but only a minimal attempt to address these traits to the interests of a conventional listener.

4. Ambient and Cosmic Soundscapes: Although Brian Eno might be credited (correctly or otherwise) with spurring the genrification of ambient music, I would argue that Komische bands were the initial instigators. (Note that Eno did not disagree and in fact recorded albums with Cluster and Harmonia in the 70s.) These bands preferred long, slow moving, spaced out sonic explorations. Most of these bands are instrumental, most used synthesizers and electronics, and only occasionally did they dabble in rhythm. The best of the bunch include Tangerine Dream, Cluster, the second side of most Ash Ra Tempel albums, Klaus Schulze, Cluster, and Harmonia. Popol Vuh also fit here, although they also ventured into more "world music" directions. Note that most of the major players of the third category migrated to this style in a matter of a couple years. Much like later, more widely accepted variants of ambient, this music is too easily regulated to "background" status, and often suffers under the strain of focused listening. Nonetheless, as "mood music" they usually succeed in establishing a nuanced, textural playground.

5. Space Folk: This might be the smallest subset, at least as far as my knowledge goes, but I think they deserve a unique space. These acts play some version of folk music, where vocals, acoustic guitars, and various forms of hand percussion are central. This is more than just standard folk music in that there are psychedelic tendencies, extended song structures, and sometimes even a jam atmosphere. Bands that belong here include Amon Düül (in particular Paradieswärts Düül), Witthüser & Westrupp, Hoelderlin, and the second half of Amon Düül II's Yeti (which are improvisations that in part include members of Amon Düül). For fans of folk and psychedelia, these bands represent a unique variant of conventional folk music. Prog- and hard rock-oriented types may be put off by the overly hippie-like aesthetic and the relatively subtle energy.

6. Innovative Rock: This is the hardest group to pin down and typify. I think these bands are what really drove the British idea of the existence of a unique German genre of music (i.e. Krautrock). These bands could perhaps be described as progressive or psychedelic, but they don't really sound anything like Anglo-American prog and psych bands. These bands are loosely "rock" groups in some fashion, but often have jazz influences. They are usually rooted in conventional rock instrumentation, but seem to favor keyboards and electronics. The key is that the music is almost always rhythmic and driving, with a very strong propulsive energy and a certain restlessness. [Edit 2021.01.27: This describes the characteristic "motorik" beat.] It's no surprise that the punk and post-punk movements clearly owed a lot to these bands. I'll admit this category is something of a catch-all for bands that don't easily fit elsewhere, but I think that's actually the point: these are musicians that really transcended their antecedents and their surroundings and made something truly new. The difficulty of ascribing existing titles to the style is perhaps why Krautrock became such a pervasive term. The key bands here are Can, Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk (from Autobahn through Trans-Europa Express), and La Düsseldorf. I might also include some more overtly electronic acts like Wolfgang Riechmann and later-period Kraftwerk. I think the bands in this category are practically faultless and thus represent the best of German music from the 70s.

[The inner sleeve of Kraftwerk's Trans-Europa Express.]

It's hard for me to hide that I think the bands in group #6 are the best of the lot. They have been my favorites since I first started looking into these various movements, and they still are now. That's not to say I don't like bands from the other divisions, but I tend to find them a more mixed bag. There are exceptions, such as Harmonia, whose blend of ambient, experimentation, and pulsing rock I find delightful, and Paradieswärts Düül, which I find surprisingly beautiful. Conversely, Julian Cope seems to enjoy an odd mixture from each group except #2 (the straight prog groups). We mostly agree about the strengths of #6, but we disagree on many of the other details.

More important than my preferences, though, is the nature of the categorization. There is an inherent problem with making a rubric such as this in that the divisions are somewhat arbitrary and overlapping. These groupings all share plenty of attributes, such as nontraditional song length and an explicit sense of looking to the future or outside of the norm. These supposed divisions are really spectra within a multidimensional field of possibilities, and most bands don't fit perfectly under any single label. Some bands are particularly challenging: Can skirted many styles all at once, and both Cluster and Kraftwerk made several distinct changes over their careers. Then there's Ash Ra Tempel, where the two sides of their albums are consistently divergent.

[Cluster's Sowiesoso. This is the cover of the CD reissue, which was the back cover of the original pressing, but I actually prefer it to the original cover.]

So does "Krautrock" just mean "German music that rocks", i.e. groups #1, #2, and #6? Does "Kosmische Musik" equate with the proto-ambient music of group #4, or does it also include the cosmic rock of group #1? Or does it stretch to include anything vaguely cosmic, spacey, other-worldly, or "far out" (presumably groups #3 and #4, but possibly also #1, #5, and #6)? I think it is problematic to call all German music from this era "Krautrock" (why not just call it German music and drop the slur?), but at a minimum I do think the sixth category deserves some special recognition – bands like those really didn't exist anywhere else.

The problem with "Krautrock" and "Kosmische Musik" is that they've been used so many times to mean different things, sometimes overlapping and sometimes explicitly distinct. I propose that we either drop those terms or decide on specific meanings for them. In the meantime, we should group these artists by their actual styles, as I have, or perhaps by the historical associations they had with each other, be that based on record labels, geography, or some other metric. I would like it if we called all of this music "progressive German music" and perhaps restricted "Krautrock" to group #6. We could call group #1 "German cosmic rock", #2 "German prog rock", #3 "German cosmic experimental music", #4 "German cosmic ambient", #5 "German cosmic folk", and #6 "German innovative rock". Maybe then we would have terms that actually mean something consistent!

One final note: the Freemans' The Crack in the Cosmic Egg lists, in addition to all the bands I've mentioned and plenty more I haven't, a few bands from the late 70s Neue Deutsche Welle movement. [Edit 2023.01.07: link dead; see here for an archived version.] This is somewhat surprising only in that it seems hard to find fans of both Krautrock and NDW. Much like punk and post-punk in England, NDW consciously rejected much of what came before, or at least digested it into bold new forms. The problem here is that the Freemans' choice of NDW bands is rather inscrutable. They list Din A Testbild but not Einstürzende Neubauten; D.A.F., Der Plan, and Pyrolator but not Abwärts, S.Y.P.H., or Palais Schaumburg; and Nina Hagen (probably just because her band was once part of Lokomotive Kreuzberg) but none of the other various German punks like Mittagspause, Male, The Wirtschaftswunder, or Fehlfarben. I consider these aberrant inclusions in such a list to be unwarranted, as the punk/NDW scene was really quite a different movement.

Julian Cope - Krautrocksampler (1995)

Title: Krautrocksampler

Author: Julian Cope
Publisher: Head Heritage
Year: 1995

I inherited an interest in Krautrock and Kosmische Musik in the good old fashioned way: through my dad's Kraftwerk records and an older friend in college that lent me his Neu! collection. I eventually started picking up remastered Can CDs, and when I left the USA to live in Germany for a year, I decided I would make a habit of digging through record stores in search of treasured old German albums. With great persistence, I managed to find a good batch of Neue Deutsche Welle albums, but I actually had a very hard time finding Krautrock records. It turns out those albums usually have complicated histories of limited pressings by various labels, authorized or otherwise, and they always sell at high prices. The only exceptions were La Düsseldorf, whose incredible first two albums I found at cheap prices, and Wolfgang Riechmann, whose lone album was a lucky find.

I continued my search upon return to the States. I started finding expensive Faust and Amon Düül I/II reissues, and with the income of a full-time job, I could finally actually afford them. Somewhere along this process, I started to hear about Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler, supposedly the premier source of information on these bands and others. I knew Cope well from The Teardrop Explodes, an excellent post-punk band, so it was believable that he could be an authority. However, the book was long out of print and impossible to find, just like most of the records. At one point, a bartender overheard me talking about it and claimed that he'd just sold his copy for a couple hundred dollars. This was the stuff of myths – again, much like the records.

Eventually I managed to acquire a copy. It's actually a rather slender book of only nine chapters and about 140 pages. It's also very poorly edited, rather poorly written, questionably accurate, and highly subjective. That doesn't make it a worthless book, but I was quite disappointed by the lack of an attempt to be balanced, objective, thorough, methodical, consistent, or comprehensive. If you manage not to worry about those things, and somehow excuse the occasional ableist language, it's at best a mildly enjoyable read, mostly because Cope lets it play out more like a fabled story instead of a historical document.

The book starts off with some background information covering the roots of Krautrock, such as the 60s student riots, The Monks, leftist politics, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the commune movement, Yoko Ono, and a general desire to make new music that wasn't just rooted in Anglo-American rock music. But after the comparatively well-written, organized, and thoughtful first two chapters, the remaining seven are each dedicated to a particularly notable band or two. These chapters are dominated by Cope's overwhelming predilections for storytelling and hyperbolizing, which prevent the narrative from getting sidetracked into things as trivial as facts. His language gets even more casual and excited to the point that it becomes hard to trust his opinions. (Example: "It's hard to feel spiritually satisfied by Neu 2 but it is truly pretty fucking good.") While such nontraditional descriptions of music can sometimes be clever and enlightening, they often leave you wondering just how subjective those experiences are.

While the sections on Neu! and Can are mostly reasonable, the section on Faust has been hotly contested, and the Amon Düül section lacks any great insight. The book really veers into total mythic territory for the sections about Ash Ra Tempel and the Cosmic Couriers. There might be some truth to the wild tales of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and his mostly unwitting gang, but the whole thing is hard to take seriously, especially since Cope is so fanboyishly fond of the Cosmic Jokers albums. These albums may have had their moments, but they were constructed under questionable circumstances and sound quite dated and indulgent today.

The last fifty pages of the book take the form of an appendix of Cope's top 50 Krautrock albums, reviews of these albums, and several prints of album sleeves. Some of this content is great to have, but most is rather trite. In particular, his choice of the best albums of the genre is very strangely distributed. He generally selects the first three or four albums by his favorite bands, along with everything related to the Cosmic Couriers. But why exactly is Amon Düül II's Tanz der Lemminge excluded? Where did Moebius and Plank's Rastakrautpasta (1980) come from, if almost everything else on the list is circa 1969 – 1975? There are also albums like Guru Guru's UFO and Klaus Schulze's Cyborg that were hardly mentioned in the primary text. (The Guru Guru choice is especially questionable, since their next few albums after UFO are actually better.) It's also incongruous that several albums by Popol Vuh are in the Top 50 when they were largely ignored elsewhere in the book. And considering Cope's tastes, it's certainly odd that Agitation Free are only mentioned in a tiny extra blurb on the very last page of the second edition.

Cope is allowed to have his own preferences, but he does a disservice to his work by lacking consistency and failing to even mention countless other bands that were part of the same movements. He clearly downplays the influence of Kraftwerk (only listing their practically forgotten 1970 debut album in his Top 50), despite that they are probably the only Krautrock band in the mainstream consciousness (although in fairness there is plenty of information about them elsewhere). He might also be right to dismiss bands like Jane (too hard rock) and Embryo (too jazz fusion), but what about bands like Annexus Quam, Hoelderlin, Paternoster, Xhol Caravan, Grobschnitt, or Kraan, to name just a few? These bands might be second-rate to the bigger names he does cover, but it is inaccurate to pretend that there were only a few players on the scene(s).

The final straw for this book is the number of typos and mistranslations. Many, many German words are misspelled, and it is clear that no one fluent in German ever proofread the book. "Aufspielen" means "strike up", not "speak out", and "Gelt" should be "Geld", and it means "money", not "gold"! How is it that these errors still made it to the second edition? Mistakes like these only further reduce Cope's legitimacy and reinforce the notion that his perspective is that of an outsider.

Supposedly, Cope has not reprinted the book in many years because he admitted there were too many factual errors and realized there were greater authorities on the subject. While I think Cope is right, unfortunately, most of the existing literature suffers similar faults. There don't even seem to be any remotely comprehensive German-language works on the relevant movements. (I'd love to be proven wrong.) Compared to Cope's book, Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy (2010; edited by Nikos Kotsopoulos) seems similarly short and incomplete, and the relatively new Future Days (2014) by David Stubbs also seems heavily opinionated, just with a different set of biases (see here and here for reviews). The best-looking publication might be The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, first published 1996 as a book and later as a CD-ROM. It seems to aim to be the most comprehensive guide, but judging by the "light" version freely available online, it lacks a certain amount of critical analysis. It's also worth remembering that AllMusic, discogs.com, and Wikipedia (especially if you read German) generally have a lot of this information, too, along with the scanned album sleeves.

For better or worse, Krautrocksampler is still considered the most important resource on the subject, probably just because it got there first. If Cope opened the door, then I'm thankful for it, but his work cannot be considered authoritative or definitive. While the upbeat and enthusiastic tone gives the book an encouraging rush of energy, the poor language and many typos and errors render the book ineffectual and unsatisfying. He does cover a lot of great music, so I would hate to think that the low quality of the book would reflect negatively upon the subject matter. Seek out these bands, but follow some other guide. [Update 2024.01.12: I can recommend The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock, edited by Uwe Schütte.]

Score: D+

P.S. Next up: a post about the terminology and scope of Krautrock and Kosmische Musik, along with a few opinions of my own on the bands in question.