Motorik madness: 10 Krautrock albums that rotated my head - part two
This is the second part of my introduction to Krautrock, aka ten Krautrock albums that rotated my head. You can read part one, which included records by Amon Düül II, Organisation, Ash Ra Tempel, Can and Neu!, right here.
In part two, things get weirder…
6) Popol Vuh - Hosianna Mantra (1972)
Is Hosianna Mantra, Popop Vuh’s third album, Krautrock? No. But, then again, it’s not really even close to anything in the scheme of modern rock music either.
On the group’s first two albums, 1970’s Affenstunde and 1971’s In den Gärten Pharaos, the group, led by keyboard player Florian Fricke, used the Moog synthesiser to create gorgeous, other-worldly music. For Hosianna Mantra, Fricke made a sharp left turn, selling his Moog to Klaus Schulze and using instead classical instruments such as the piano, oboe, tambura and violin, with Conny Veit’s gorgeous electric guitar playing to the fore. These instruments served as a sumptuous bed for the vocals of Korean singer Djong Yun, whose pure tone had the essential clarity that Fricke had apparently been searching for in the Moog.
You’d maybe call the result somewhere in between New Age, ambient and global music, if any of those ideas existed in 1972, which they didn’t; mixed up with classical music tropes, space rock and just the slightest shade of Krautrock. (In this respect, Hosianna Mantra reminds me of And The Waters Opened, the 1973 album by German composer Peter Michael Hamel’s Between project, whose track Devotion sometimes crops up on Krautrock / kosmische compilations. Both albums exist somewhere on the very edge of rock music, as if outside of time itself.)
Popol Vuh would go on to create soundtracks for several Werner Herzog films, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo, all of which come highly recommended. But Hosianna Mantra is their masterpiece.
7) Faust - Faust IV (1973)
For a generation now way above retirement age, it is comforting to know that a lot of the original Krautrock musicians remain active. I’ve seen both Hans-Joachim Roedelius (of Cluster and Harmonia, who we are coming to) and Michael Rother play live quite recently, while Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream keep on touring the globe.
I saw Faust, too, back in 2010, at the Pavement-curated All Tomorrows Parties festival, with my main memory being that it was incredibly loud and utterly thrilling. Faust are the third of the Krautrock big three, after Can and Neu!, and they were probably the first Krautrock band to make an impact in the UK, after they signed to Virgin Records in the early 70s and the label released The Faust Tapes, an LP-length odd-and-sods collection of recordings that sold for the price of a single.
Faust IV, the band’s fourth studio album, was released a few months after that and - perhaps coincidentally - was considered something of a sell out by the band’s more hardcore fans, for the crime of including actual pop tunes on The Sad Skinhead and Jennifer, the former a kind of lurching reggae pop number that sounds incredibly awkward, the latter a spectral and very moving ambient pop number, whose vocal seemed to point the way towards the whole indie rock movement. (It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl, from the band’s second album Faust So Far, is also something of a pop banger that pointed towards indie rock. So I’m not sure what the Faust fans were complaining about.)
As this combination suggests, Faust IV is one of the most thematically diverse Krautrock albums. It opens with the very literally named Krautrock, which sounds like Neu! with the drums turned way down; pivots through the very funky - and eventually chirpy - Just a Second; hits Syd Barrett / Pink Flod territory on Giggy Smile; incorporates folky acoustic guitars and jazz rhythm on Läuft...Heißt Das Es Läuft Oder Es Kommt Bald…Läuft; and ends on It's a Bit of a Pain, the sound of gilded country rock being interrupted by a buzzing alarm clock. Faust IV is, in other words, an utter, total, sprawling mess - but a thoroughly magical one at that.
8) Harmonia - Deluxe (1975)
Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now 90 years old and full of life, is a key figure in Krautrock history. He co-founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab (alongside Boris Schaak and Conrad Schnitzler), the experimental West Berlin live music venue that hosted gigs by the likes of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel during its short life; then formed Kluster in 1969 with Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius, who he met at the Zodiak. When Schnitzler departed in 1971, Roedelius and Moebius formed Cluster - their 1972 album Cluster II is a classic - and in 1973 welcomed Neu! guitarist Michael Rother into a kind of Krautrock supergroup, Harmonia.
In his selected Krautrock discography, which comes at the end of Wolfgang Seidel’s recent book Krautrock Eruption, journalist Holger Adam argues that Harmonia’s two albums, Musik von Harmonia and Deluxe “display a childlike joy for simple melodies and repetition”, which seems exactly right. Harmonia’s music - much like Kraftwerk’s - might be at the edge of the avant garde but it slips down incredibly easily, thanks to its wonderfully tender tunes.
Some people argue that Deluxe, the band’s second album, is a little too soft for their tastes. But this is precisely why I love it so and Deluxe (Immer Wieder), which opens the album, is an all-time classic, as fluffy and welcoming as a new dressing gown. Soft, quiet music is often dismissed as being too easy, somehow, too childish. But making music this tenderly welcoming is no easy task and Harmonia do it beautifully.
If you’ve come to this list looking for things that sound a little like Kraftwerk, then Deluxe is probably your starting point. Released just one year after the Autobahn album, Deluxe sounds like the gentle Motorik thrills of that record’s title track crossed with the neo-classical experiments on the LP’s side two. Just about perfect, in other ways.
Harmonia were also important for bringing Brian Eno into the Krautrock fold. Eno called them “the world's most important rock band” around the release of Musik von Harmonia and would work with them in 1976, shortly before starting work on David Bowie’s Low. These recordings remained in the can until 1997, when they were released as Tracks and Traces by Harmonia 76.
There would be no more Harmonia records, although Roedelius and Moebius went on to record two albums with Brian Eno in the late 1970s, both of which are excellent: 1977’s Cluster & Eno and 1978’s After The Heat (as Eno Moebius Roedelius).
Although Cluster were a duo for most of their time, Conny Plank was vital to the success of many of these records. He was the third member of Cluster on their eponymous debut album and he produced the band’s following three albums, Cluster II, Zuckerzeit and Soweiso, as well as the two Eno collabs and Harmonia’s Deluxe. Plank’s first album with Dieter Moebius, 1980’s Rastakraut Pasta, is also essential, bringing dub reggae and Krautrock together in a gloriously unholy union that really shouldn’t have worked but totally did.
9) Tangerine Dream - Sorcerer (Soundtrack) (1977)
Where do you even start with a band as fundamentally monumental as Tangerine Dream? A band whose ever move screams grandiloquence and scale, who continue today, playing large concert halls, despite the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 and no original members? Tangerine Dream aren’t really Krautrock or kosmische or ambient, they are just Tangerine Dream and they have more than 100 albums to their name. (For anyone in Barcelona, they are playing Paral·lel 62 tonight!)
So what one Tangerine Dream album would you pick? What’s your favourite leaf on that tree? What’s the best apple you’ve ever eaten? 1974’s Phaedra is generally considered their classic, introducing their sequencer driven sound. 1971’s Alpha Centauri is the band’s most Krautrock, with organ and flute to the fore (although you should check out the much bootlegged Bath Tube Session from 1969 if you want to see Tangerine Dream in full-on live freak-out mode). And their most recent new album, 2022’s Raum, produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive, is a worthwhile trip back into past glories.
Instead of these, though, I am going to for 1977’s Sorcerer, a soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film of the same name, which I haven’t actually seen but am assured is excellent. This is a historically important Tangerine Dream album, their first soundtrack to be released (although they recorded a soundtrack for the 1971 German TV horror film Vampira, which wasn’t released until 2005), a sideline that would go on to become highly lucrative and rewarding for the band. (And, yes, that includes the soundtrack to Tom Cruise’s 1983 film Risky Business, which included Love on a Real Train, perhaps Tangerine Dream’s greatest hit.)
But my main reason for including Sorcerer here is because it is, quite simply, the Tangerine Dream album I listen to most, a relatively concise precis of all that makes Tangerine Dream great. (Does anyone come to Tangerine Dream for conciseness? Probably not. But all the same…)
Sorcerer runs through 12 tracks in a sprightly 44 minutes but, in doing so, showcases all of their sequencer-led beauty (on The Journey, for example, which is one of the most alluring songs in the Tangerine Dream universe), melodic smarts (Betrayal (Sorcerer Theme)) and unsettling freakishness (the frankly terrifying Abyss). Sorcerer is the perfect introduction to Tangerine Dream, from which you can then plunge into 17-minute epics and extravagantly strung-out synth tumbles.
10) Harald Grosskopf - Synthesist (1980)
The relationship between Krautrock and electronic music is difficult to entangle. Krautrock isn’t electronic music per se - the clue’s in the name - but it did lean heavily on early synthesiser technology. Kraftwerk aren’t generally considered a Krautrock group; Harmonia are; but they sometimes sounded very similar.
Who cares, you might ask? Isn’t musical genre just a stupid thing journalists lean on when they don’t know what else to do? Well, yes. But if we didn’t have musical genre then how the hell would we find anything in record shops? And considering music in terms of genre also allows us to think of the connections between different musicians and their sounds.
What’s more, some of my favourite Krautrock-adjacent compilations focus heavily on the electronic music emerging from Germany at the time. I’m thinking of Soul Jazz Records’ excellent Deutsche Elektronische Musik albums from the 2010s, which opened my ears up to lots of fabulous new music. Despite the title, volume one of the compilation included the very rock-ish likes of Can’s A Spectacle, Neu!’s Hallo Gallo and Faust’s It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl, alongside the more electronic-y songs. And I will forever be indebted to the album for introducing me to the utterly transcendent La Chasse aux Microbes by Michael Bundt, from his 1977 album Just Landed Cosmic Kid.
More recently, the sister compilation album to Wolfgang Seidel’s book Krautrock Eruption included gorgeous electronic works from the likes of Harald Grosskopf, Riechmann and Asmus Tietchens, alongside Faust, Kluster and Cluster.
One thing that unites Bundt, Grosskopf, Riechmann and Tietchens is that their first solo works came relatively late into the 1970s, often after years working in groups. Grosskopf’s debut album Synthesist was released in 1980, the same year as Tietchens’ Nachtstücke, while Riechmann’s Wunderbar came out in 1978. By this point both Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were long established global stars, so the four artists’ work with synthesisers didn’t seem particularly ground-breaking when viewed in light of their peers. (Which seems harsh…)
What they did have, though, was beautiful melodies. Synthesist’s floaty drum and synth songs are probably my pick, their undulating shapes an utter joy (and the title track is a cosmic disco classic for the ages), although Riechmann’s similarly inclined Wunderbar definitely deserves a wider audience, with Himmelbau’s epic space shapes bringing a tear to the eye. Tragically, this would be his only solo album, as Wolfgang Riechmann was murdered while on a walk through Düsseldorf's Old Town two weeks before the album was released.
Finally, a word for Pyrolator, aka Kurt Dahlke, who was a founding member of D.A.F., only to leave the band in 1979. His debut album, Inland, released the same year, is brutal rather than beautiful, a work of industrial despair that at times - such as on the crushing swirl of Minimal Tape 3/7.2 - sounds exactly like techno, arrived several years too early.
Happy listening. And let me know your favourites in the comments.
Some listening
Every new song from DjRUM seems to wind up the coming delight of his new album Under Tangled Silence, bringing tangled musical alloys and sumptuous chord sequences. Waxcap might be the best yet though, with its 2-step-ish beat, breakbeat tease and rippling piano, like an octopus figuring out Ableton and bringing us a tale of a tranquil but rather melancholy life under the seas.
Butcher Brown - Unwind (feat. Melanie Charles)
“Work is done, it’s time to unwind” sings Melanie Charles on the new single from Virginia jazz quintet Butcher Brown, the group an object lesson in why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover or a band by its suspiciously carnivorous name. This song isn’t about unwinding, though. Not really. Sure, the vocal is beautifully lax and the flute sounds more than ready for 40 winks but the band’s groove is wound tighter than an anxious spring with a tax return, the push and pull between the two moods making the song into paradoxical triumph.
Red Stamp - Dancing With My Baby
Red Stamp is the union of Catalan Irish singer songwriter Núria Graham - of the exquisite 2023 album Cyclamen - Aoife Nessa Frances and Brendan Doherty and Dancing With My Baby is its first fruits of their labours. The song luxuriates in a position somewhere between bossa-nova, folk and California soul, like Astral Weeks with a serious sun tan, Frances and Graham’s vocals twisting an elaborate tango around each other like Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen on vintage Stereolab. As it inevitably slips through silken fingers, you won’t want to let Dancing With My Baby go.
Perpetual Emotion Machine is the title of Avalon Emerson’s new project, which I think is a collection of singles, although she describes it as “a living, evolving project; a conduit for human connection on the dance floor”. It is very telling name for whatever the project might be, with Treat Mode employing a poignant central chord sequence to hang a load of clanks, whooshes and squirts around, like Orbital at their most tear-jerking. (I seem to be comparing ever more songs to Orbital at the moment - what is going on?) You know that moment when you finally get dance music and one special song drives you kicking and screaming into the grooving horde? Well Treat Mode could be that song. (If you are a lot younger than me, obviously.)
Mount Kimbie - Shipwreck (Special Request remix)
This Special Request remix of Mount Kimbie is a bit slow, I thought to myself as it chugged past its third electro-ish minute, not really what I expected from Paul Woolford…. only for the song to explode into a AFX-ish acid and jungle scramble that blew time, space and reason off my ears in a delightful manner, the same mournful synth chords providing a useful through point / guidance path through the remixe’s nine and a half minutes of madness.
It might be because I once saw Tortoise share a stage with Lee “Scratch” Perry in full-on eccentric mode but I have always thought of the post-rock adventure boys as a pretty playful kind of group. Which isn’t to say that they don’t take their music seriously - of course they do - more that they seem to find genuine delight in combining all their favourite music into unlikely new shapes. Oganesson - their first new song in almost 10 years - is a case in point, uniting the most mournfully sedate jazz chords to a rolling drum beat and a gentle undulating bass, in the kind of immaculate jam that could happily go on forever. Every single one of the Krautrock bands featured in this list would approve, I think.
Things I’ve done
We have another classic (old) interview on the Line Noise podcast this week. Back in 2019, the Sprung team of myself, Johann Wald and Mark Dix spoke to Steve Rutter and Mike Golding of the legendary electronic outfit B12 - one of the VERY best IDM groups - ahead of their gig at the Mira festival in Barcelona. I brought it back this week for no other reason than B12 are brilliant - and what more reason could you want?
DJ Python - i was put on this earth EP
I reviewed the new DJ Python for Pitchfork.com. And very charming it is too. “The EP is a triumph of gentle reverie and quiet upheaval, one whose delights are more appropriately passed on by whispered word-of-mouth than shouted from the hills.”
The playlists
Play is the beginning of knowledge, according to George Dorsey. To which I can only reply, yes but playlists are the very peak of knowing. So here are my two: my best new music of 2025 playlist. And my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.