In and Out of the Top 100-- REVISITED

richardh wrote: I must admit I've never taken Krautrock that seriously possibly because of the unfortunate name. I also associated it with boring repetitive 'anti-music' and part of a German psyche I would rather avoid. That said I did buy my first ever Krautrock album just yesterday (Tago Mago predictably) and had a first listen as of last night. I don't hate it but it seems to have a split personality starting like a studio jam session before going a bit experimental Berlin school. Not sure it will ever become my favourite genre but you never know...

HUGE fan of Can and I suppose I love a lot of the aspects you won't enjoy, but Krautrock is also a little like RPI. The latter can be and mean both Le Orme and Area - and Krautrock is smilarly geographical. Meaning that if you checked out (the right albums by) say... Kollektiv, Mythos, Brave New World, Nosferatu... you'd never think in terms of boring repetitive 'anti-music'. It's mainly just progressive rock from Germany. In places with multiple genre tags, you'll also find early Kraan and Embryo albums (+many more) in the krautrock section - where they belong. These guys sure knew how to play their instruments. So did Can btw. More recent bands like Kosmisher Laufer and Trees Speak are not too distant in sound and approach to some music I think you already enjoy (and probably less repetitive than Tangerine Dream). This was a mess, but come from more of a "sympho" background, the Kraut-tag may cause you to dismiss a lot of bands you'd potentially enjoy. That said, plenty of Kraut probably sound like the kind of music you rather avoid:)

The sub-genre labels and the qualities/qualifications used to include bands into such are, in my humble opinion, quite misleading and inconsistent. "Krautrock" was the British moniker given to the music the Germans were, I believe, calling "Kosmische Musik"--meaning cosmic music, but here on PA Krautrock has gone on to become a bucket for dropping any experimental/alternative music created & performed by any German band. And, though the Deutsche seem to have accepted the term, it came from outside and is/was rather derogatory. 

Likewise with RPI: It seems that any Italian band gets dumped into this sub-genre first before considering whether or not it might be J-R-Fusion (à la Area) or Canterbury style (à la Homunculus Res, which was only recently [last year] re-assigned to its proper place from its RPI origins), etc., instead of defining it by a type of musical style. (The bands I think of as RPI tend to be bombastic and mostly symphonic, as they are often quite influence by their classical and operatic traditions.)

It seems that ten years ago Can, Neu, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, and Klaus Schulze each had multiple albums in PA's top 100 (or, at least, in the Top 250). I guess that goes to show you how PA has become more oriented toward the Anglo-American world (again) as well as that prog has had quite a flurry of appreciation for "newer" bands and albums--meaning, perhaps, that "prog" itself has been undergoing a shift in definition. A subject worthy of another discussion thread: Has our definition of "what is prog?" been changing?

Probably dangerous for me to enter a discussion I know little about but that never stopped me before.

I would have to challenge that last statement. I genuinely remember at least one German artist in the 80's referring to 'Krautrock' as a collective noun for all those German bands that should be forgotten and dismissed. This was probably coming from a new wave/punk perspective and he suggested the term was used by modern German artists against other German artists who failed to get on board with the new thinking. It's easy to blame the British for being racist for obvious reasons but I'm not convinced you are correct on this. I do agree though that its a terrible name and it always surprised me when I came on here that it was being used as a positive almost like those of African descent using the 'N word' in some vaguely ironic way.

Hi,

In the CAN website, for a long time, there was a quote from Holger about them wanting to get away from the Westernized modes of music, and in thousands of ways, "krautrock" fit into that mode, although we ended up confusing the turning of the dial for an effect as what ended up defining what became the repetitive modes around it, but in general, what helped Kraftwerk and their families (Neu for example) was not exactly the repetitive modes at all ... TD, KS, Faust, Can and a variety of others were not repetitive at all, and stuck to how/what they saw as their own element in music. Can, might have become a bit more conventional after Holger, but still had many elements that were way out there.

I think that a lot of the problems with listening to "krautrock" is that we're looking for something we recognize, and we're not finding it, thus putting our minds in a state of ... what is that?

AD2 was specially that way, and all the way to "Made in Germany" was totally out of control in the sense that they did whatever they wanted, and I'm not sure that the band members themselves agreed on a lot of things at all ... since the material goes quite far and away from a lot of stuff they had done before. However, the "jams" or the "improvisations" died in the desert with no water at all, and I wondered how much of those improvisations were the fruit that helped feed a lot of their creativity ... which left them with nothing but a few songs in the later albums ... still odd in their own way, but not focused if I may use that word for it. Later there are some wild improvisations by Renate in a couple of live albums that are interesting, but I think that the band is not sure, or cares what she is doing, and I think that hurts.

In the end, the very best ended up being Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze who were by very far the most creative forces of the whole thing, regardless of how and who we look at it. Their constant output, continuity and changes (specially KS) is enough to make them some of the most progressive of all the groups out there ... and when you consider the changes in TD, and all of a sudden with women in the group all the way to Edgar's passing, the sound and quality of their work was fantastic ... and we can't even discuss it, when a guitar is added here and there, and a drum solo takes over that is so far and way from TD, but Edgar had a good ear for music, and was able to add it and make it better.

That these do not show in the top crap heap ... is not a problem for me ... I started without the top anything and will end without the top of anything.

I can appreciate the changes in the ratings over a few years, but in the end, it only speaks of the fans, and how fickle so many of them can be, and has little to do with the music itself. Too much subjective stuff listed ... hurts what "MUSIC" is all about ... music is about the artists, not the fans, and we need to wake up to that!