If it doesn't have improvisational material it is NOT Krautrock! Almost ALL of Krautrock was defined because of its experimental and improvisational content.

 

I'll check into this later on today. But not sure that we should be adding modern things that are calling themselves "krautrock" simply because ... it sounds like and has no improvisational content whatsoever in it, except a guitar solo for 30 seconds on one song or two! If the cut is 30 minutes long and taken from a massive free form jam that was 10 hours long (like Can) ... then it passes! (hehehe!)

 

Any German band that could actually compose music is by definition not Krautrock

That's actually true to a large degree. And it's hard to explain to people that some of these folks came out of the Berlin Conservatory of Music (CAN is the best example - and professor Peter Michael Hamel ... read "From the music to the self") and are very well trained in music and knew what they were doing ... so making sure that they did the complete opposite and totally blow out the concepts and ideas, is justified ... and is the start of krautrock. Today, only Klaus Schulze and Manuel Goittsching (AshRa Tempel) are really doing things wide open even though sometimes I think they are relegating themselves too much to beats and rhythms -- but more often than not as a way for them to "get out", which is very much an eastern concept that is used in "ragas" ... so maybe it is not that progressive an idea after all!

 

The problem is that anarchy in music is something that will have a hard time being discussed and described by "musicos" that think that "prog" has to have parameters and defining moments, and of course, the basic idea in krautrock was to get rid of such ideas in the first place ... so considering it "prog" in itself is an oxymoron!

 

I say it all the time, and is my own reason why I would prefer that all this music we like NOT be considered "prog" ... other than .. we met people that wanted to do far more with music than is conventional or manifested in pop/rock music ... and that ability to want to do more does not necessarily need a name. I don't mind calling it "progressive" if it is capable of giving the musicians credit for their work ... but in the end, you gotta love a new band ... "we're a prog band" ... and the only thing they are telling you is that they don't have enough of a talent for music to create their own to the point where they have to copy someone else's style so they can think of themselves as better musicians? Guess what ... that wasn't even a consideration for that music at the time!

 

You have to "let go" of ideas, in order to define something new, and those people did ... but we're afraid to accept the anarchistic concepts that it took to get them done. I always say that Amon Duul 2 is the perfect example and their breaking out of the commune thing and their first album called Phallus Dei ... saying it all ... all this, all these ideas, and all they are for is so we can have more sex? You realize what an immese up yours and finger that is to that social element? And how that romantic ideal of what a "commune" was was dis-integrating into? Yeah ... believe it baby!