The Krautrock Space

 

From my point of view, there are 3 quite clear designs, or "schools" that define "krautrock" ... although one could sit here and define more ... and sub even more ... and I'm not even considering or including the jazz side because it was not small either.

 

Free Form Rock -- with the emphasiz on still having a rock context. Great example was Guru Guru. There are some interviews out there, and even Helmut Hattler say that they were stoned many times and on occasion they would look at each other and go ... now what ... and Mani or someone else would say ... do something ... I like that because it is one of the places where most musicians do not "live", "understand" or want to learn from. You can not become a Hendrix, or a SRVaughn or one of those folks that flows away ... until you feel "free" of form and you learn to play with, or against anything. Early Amon Duul (the original) and the first 2 albums by AD2, fit here. AshRaTempel in the earlier days before they went to Virgin. Cosmic Couriers.

 

Academic Form Rock -- I would like to put in this group the folks that came out of the Berlin School and many others. Again, CAN fits here a lot better than they do the free from stuff, although it looks like in their very early days that they fit the Free Form Rock very well, but not later and certainly not after Tago Mago. Novalis fits here, as do most and any.

 

The who cares Electronic Front -- Both Klaus Schulze and TD fit here, but then, so does Faust and the unreal number of solo keyboard artists that appeared quickly in the German scene. There was a side of it, that was about the "trip" a lot more than it was about anything else. I never thought, or accepted that Tangerine Dream, or Cyborg, or Zeit were about drugs, and they never needed to be ... and like Neu, Kraftwerk and Faust, they were experimenting and learning the knobs and how to make music with it ... and this reminds me of the earlier works by Beaver and Krause in America and later the likes of Tomita and even Walter/Wendy Carlos. Many of these folks were not exactly musical tramps and were very well versed and studied ... so the likelyhood is not that they were doing their pimples/pistols impressions but making a serious effort to create something new. And both TD and Schulze have shown this by their endurance and unreal quantity of work.

 

Now comes a problem ... the more you go with one of these three styles (if you will) the less they become "krautrock" and the more they become something else ... which we have no label for! But we hurt the definition, when we look at TD and KS today doing work with orchestras ... and you and I sitting here and all we can say is ... that's krautrock?

 

The jazz side ... I have no idea and have to go back to the start to even be able to know how to write about it ... I have 2 Between albums and I don't even remember them ... and they are vastly different from the Peter Michael Hamel meditation stuff that he had  ... which is nothing lke the other stuff he also did, or wrote about!

 

Yeah ... that was a part of it all. But is it rock? ... is it jazz? ... or just music?