The quirky cover of Guru Guru’s Känguru – a mama and her joey adrift on the ice, with curious speech and thought bubbles – tells you all you need to know about this Krautrock heavy hitter. Their message is simple: our music is weird and fun and inscrutable. Känguru feels less a product of its circumstances and more like a beam from some kosmische asteroid: four songs of heady, rapturous, meandering rock. They’re jammy but structured, punctuated by climaxes and build-ups, vibe shifts and open space. But it’s about the journey, not the destination: get on the ice floe and float along, man…
Category: Krautrock
Dieter Schütz :: Voyage / Inventions
Two reissued albums from Dieter Schütz, an electronic musician who died young, show an eccentric artist turning the future sounds and computer worlds of industrialized Western Germany to his own eccentric devices. Full of heart yet proudly artificial, tropically tinged, loosely lively and factory made, Schütz’s music offers a point of entry into obscure and overlooked corners of the Berlin School and krautrock scenes.
Guru Guru :: The 1971 Bremen Concert
Guru Guru aren’t the most celebrated of Krautrockers, but this 1971 live recording puts the lie many of the common and naive Krautrock narratives: not motorik enchanters but psychedelic shredders, not minimalists but maximalist noise makers, not anti-American but celebrants of Bo Diddley! It’s a miracle a German radio station was there to capture this killer performance.
Yatha Sidhra :: A Meditation Mass
Yatha Sidhra only recorded a single record, but A Meditation Mass is often spoken of in hushed tones as a secret gem in the canon of 1970s krautrock. Its ritualistic sound and Buddhist iconography (not to mention the eye-watering prices it fetches) have turned into something of a holy relic. It may not quite be that, but it is still a stupendous piece of German psychedelia. If you don’t know it, we invite you to get initiated.
CAN :: Live In Keele 1977
The last installment in the Can live archival series continues to explore the unfairly maligned late period of the pioneering German band. Recorded at Keele University in 1977, it finds former bassist Holger Czukay settling into his new role as effects wizard, with replacement bassist Rosko Gee, also of Traffic, upping the funk quotient for long, elaborate improvisations and sometimes surprisingly industrial pieces. As with the other entries in the series, it shows a group committed to exploding their sound, exploring the outer limits and creating new worlds, for as long and as far as they could go.
Agitation Free :: At the Cliffs of River Rhine
Agitation Free emerged in the early 1970s in the same Berlin circles as electronic experimentalists like Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. But this killer 1974 concert from Cologne reveals them in their true form, a first-rate psychedelic jam band influenced by open-ended American boogie outfits like the Allmans and the Grateful Dead.
Moose Loose :: Elgen er løs
Elgen er løs, it must be said, does not sound like ECM jazz. Instead what we have here is a blast of funky, fuzzed-out jazz psychedelia. The sinewy “Flytende Øye” could easily pass for a straight-up krautrock jam. Honestly, the whole thing hews closer to Soon Over Bamaluma than Return to Forever.
CAN :: Volkshalle Wagtzenborn-Steinberg, Giessen, October 22, 1971
Farewell to Damo Suzuki, an indomitable spirit, an outrageous performer, a force of nature. During his time with Can in the 1970s, he offered an authentic, thrilling alternative to the rock frontman role, embracing the wild, all gates open approach of his bandmates’ music — and doubling down on it fearlessly.
For some real live evil, dig into this absolutely killer audience recording of Can in 1971 from the Tago Mago era, with Damo effortlessly surfing the waves of this still-radical sound, shrieking, whispering, conjuring, celebrating. Schmidt called Can’s onstage high points “Glücksgefühl, the ecstasy.” You’ll find plenty of Glücksgefühl here.
Manuel Göttsching & Michael Hoenig :: Early Water
A long-lost rehearsal tape for a 1976 tour that never happened, Göttsching and Hoenig’s Early Water occupies a special place in the Ash Ra mythology. When so much of the Berlin space music scene was opting for massiveness, Göttsching and Hoenig recorded a beautiful, liquid jam of buoyancy and light.
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Based on sheer musicality, Wolf City could be the strongest record Amon Düül would ever make. The ensemble’s second record of 1972, released just a couple months after its predecessor, removes theatrics, limits improvisation, and its blistering riffs shake the very foundations of psychedelia. Things get quaking in wavering slink. The entire world begins to reverberate around the serpentine exchange of acoustic and electric guitar interplay. A false chorus ushers in a fiddle led freak-out and synthesizers begin to malfunction before heading into a lull.
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Yeti went down in the psychedelic annals as a movement defining juggernaut. The four sides that constituted the behemoth opened the gates of kosmische hell—the stamp of approval that acid-drenched weirdness could live on well past the 1960s, even if the adherents to such gospel were relegated to pop-music obscurity. On Tanz Der Lemminge, we’re greeted by the familiar echoes of psychedelia, but not as we’ve known it.
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Launching the listener into the aural assault of “Soap Shop Rock”, Yeti wastes no time getting started. The wandering, acid-drenched psychedelia of Phallus Dei is noticeably absent. The Mothers-esque eccentrics traded in favor of tectonic heaviness. As the four-part suite arrives at its second movement, Amon Düül clears a path for denim-clad stoner rockers to follow for the next half century.
CAN :: Soon Over Babaluma
Soon Over Babaluma is a satellite moon in CAN’s oeuvre, perpetually orbiting the seismic mass of the music they created between 1969-1973, one last psychedelic excursion before transitioning into the tighter arrangements and slicker production of the mid-late 70s. CAN was floating ever deeper into space, fresh off the gravitational break achieved on Future Days. Recorded on the heels of Damo Suzuki’s departure, Soon Over Babaluma marked both the end of era and a reinvention of everything the CAN had been working toward— the deepening of a sound that was still hurtling toward the outer reaches.
Every Angel’s Terrifying: Explorations in German Jazz-Rock, 1970-1980
… reverberating flutes, amplified saxophones, liquid Fender Rhodes keyboards The guitars are jazzy and lysergic in turn, sometimes in the very same track. At times, the drums sit right in the pocket; moments later, they are thundering out for the old gods. It was not so much a fusion of jazz and rock as a continuum where these forms could mutate one into another and back again. All of this music is compelling; some of it is sublime. This darker corner of the krautrock era of the 1970s deserves a good deal more light.
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The break up was cemented. The live reputation established. Amon Düül’s more musical half – adopting the suffix ‘II’ – entered the studio and laid down the first identifiable Kosmische slab. In name alone, Amon Düül II’s debut demanded attention. “The God Cock” would formally signify Germany’s emergence as a world power once more—though this time on the countercultural stage. Preceding Can’s Monster Movie by two months, Phallus Dei would be the introductory major-label document of a burgeoning Gegenkultur coming out of West Germany at the end of the 1960s.