The Krautrock Space

While we're at it, I think ADII is another example of the Middle Eastern fixation in Krautrock though there it's more specifically Central Asian and not Egyptian. (isn't the band name a reference to Turkish folklore?)

Nachtfahrt! 

Sagichim wrote: Nachtfahrt!

Hey, if you gotta fahrt, it may as well be at nacht!

Sorry Mike it's just my childish sense of humor, I thought maybe it could mean Night Farts.Please don't pay any attention.


Edited by Sagichim - August 20 2013 at 14:41

Toaster Mantis wrote: Haven't been to this forum for years so I apologize if this has been brought up before over the course of a 40-something page thread, but Krautrock and the related progressive electronic scene's basically the only kind of prog I still listen to regularly... and I've started wondering what it is with the Ancient Egyptian vibe much of that music gives off to me, more so than with other countries' prog/psych rock scenes. In the cases of Agitation Free and Ash Ra Tempel it's obviously intentional, but I also get some of that vibe from the first Cosmic Jokers LP as well as quite a bit of Tangerine Dream's material: Phaedra, Rubycon, especially Ricochet as well as the Tangerine Tree recordings from Le Ponts de Cé 1973 and Adelaide 1975 concerts. Not sure how much of it's just me, though, going by the titles of those two TD studio albums it's probably more a Greek/Roman mythological atmosphere they were aiming for.

Edited by Guldbamsen - August 20 2013 at 16:20

What a masterpiece, David. The album is good, but not as good as this haunted song.

hellogoodbye wrote: What a masterpiece, David. The album is good, but not as good as this haunted song.

Sorry Pierre, my bad

Guldbamsen wrote: I get what you're saying about those Egyptian vibes, although I figure it's down to all the movies we've seen over the years with that ever so "Egyptian" vibe. Of course most of the pioneering Krautrockers would tell you, that they tried to start from scratch, carte blanche, just to get that foul taste of Nazism and forced conformity out of their mouths. They came pretty close, but there's a good deal of Middle Eastern music in there - as well as ragas, late 60s American experimental psych and the blues.

Yeah, that probably explains a lot. That the German/Italian/Japanese prog/psych scenes would have thought much further outside the box than US/UK prog by default, since most of the musicians had grown up in the knowledge that their parents' generation had been on the wrong side during WW2. You're gotta get some interesting art out of a generation gap that big.

The strange thing is that the Germans don't quite have as much of a history with interacting with that part of the world as the British or French did, though. Then again there really was more of a general non-Western influence in Krautrock (see also Can or Popol Vuh) which was one of several major directions, and I guess the Egyptian stuff would come naturally since that's been one of the most famous non-Western cultures in Europe since the Greek/Roman antiquity. Another current being the integration of ideas from avantgarde 20th classical which is also where the progressive electronic stuff came from..

Thanks for the link to the Brainticket song, by the way.

You can also see a creepy upside-down version of that phenomenon in how eagerly so many metal groups from ex-USSR countries have embraced Fascist ideals.