Christoph Dallach’s book Neu Klang is a thoroughly researched and fascinating history of Krautrock.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Reveals to Anglophone listeners a generation of musicians wading through the legacy of fascism [. . .] revelatory and propulsively arranged.”
In his own words, here is Christoph Dallach’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock:
- Cool in the Pool – Holger Czukay
I won Holger Czukay’s solo album “Movies” in a competition. I was a teenager and had no idea who he was. I had never heard of Can, the Cologne based band he used to play bass in. I had never heard of the term “Krautrock”. But when I listened to “Movies” it sounded like nothing I had heard before. Back then, in a boring suburb of Hamburg my soundtrack was mostly provided by bands like The Stranglers and The Sex Pistols. I was not interested in German music at all. The adventurous way Holger approached music was new to me, and I was impressed from the first listen. After that I began to explore the music of Can and entered a new world.
2. Hallogallo – NEU!
In 2007 I went to a Red Hot Chilli Peppers show in Hamburg and was surprised when an unannounced guest joined them for the encores: Michael Rother from NEU!, Harmonia, and (for a short time) Kraftwerk. Together they performed the NEU! Classic “Hallogallo”, from their 1972 released debut. I was even more surprised when I looked at the audience and saw all the confused faces that seemed to say: Who the hell is this guy? Back then Rother used to live in Hamburg, and I found it strange to see that nobody seemed to recognize him. There are very few German musicians who had a worldwide impact, if you will (Apart from classical music of course), but Rother is one of them, being praised from Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and David Bowie (Who wanted him to play on his “Berlin-Trilogy”) to Thom Yorke and John Frusciante. Rother probably didn’t care too much about it, he is a very humble guy. That night I decided to talk to him and all the other, so called, “Krautrockers” about their life and their work and to compile a book with these interviews. “Hallogallo” still sounds modern and fresh and electrifies me every time I hear it.
3. So weit so gut – Harald Grosskopf
At the end of the sixties the drummer and keyboarder Harald Grosskopf nearly joined The Scorpions, who were from the same area. But then he ended up in the art rock band Wallenstein, who were signed to the “Pilz” (“Mushroom”) label run by infamous and legendary journalist and trickster Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. Kaiser was a pioneer who helped get German musicians like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and Wallenstein get an audience. Problems started when Kaiser discovered LSD and liked it a bit too much. That’s when he invented “Die Kosmischen Kuriere” (“The Cosmic Couriers”), some kind of Krautrock-Supergroup, featuring members of all bands signed to his label. They met at a studio run by producer Dieter Dirks (Who worked on loads of Scorpions records), took LSD and jammed for days. One of the few participating musicians who brought a bit of structure to those wild sessions was Harald Grosskopf. Kaiser disappeared in the second half of the seventies, and to these days his whereabouts are a mystery. Harald, who survived the drug-madness unharmed, saw him thirty years ago at a gas station near Cologne, but decided not to approach him and watched him drive away in a small car. Grosskopf released his amazing solo debut “Synthesist” in 1980 – now considered where this track is from. He has just finished a new album and his biography.
4. Spoon – Can
When I decided to write a book about so called “Krautrock” the first musician I reached out to was Irmin Schmidt, founding member of Can. He then invited me to his home in the south of France where he lives with his wife Hildegard, who used to manage Can. Irmin had studied classical music and was on his way to become a conductor. But he changed his mind. He had studied in Cologne under legendary German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, where he met and befriended fellow Stockhausen-student Holger Czukay. And he had spent time in New York City where he listened to La-Monte-Young and John Cage and was impressed.
So, to the horror of his parents, in 1968 he decided against a career in classical music and with Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit and Michael Karoli started the band called Can. They were different from all other Krautrockers: They were bit older and trained musicians, apart from Karoli who had been Holger’s pupil. The albums like “Monster Movie”, “Tago Mago” or “Ege Bamyasi” they recorded in the beginning of the seventies are now considered classics, having been praised by fans like Mark E Smith, Thurston Moore or John Lydon, to name just a few. As the only surviving Can member, Irmin still lives in France with Hildegard. Right now, he is working on new music.
5. Neonlicht – Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk was always a beautiful mystery. When I was a teenager in the seventies, their tracks like “Das Modell” or “Autobahn” were all around in Germany. But you did not know anything about the musicians responsible for the music. Their “robot” images were very clever and the perfect way to stay anonymous. Kraftwerk were German but somehow international too. Of course they’re not rock!
And they’re probably not too keen on the term “Krautrock”. I was not surprised that Ralf Hütter declined to be interviewed for my book on the topic. But Ex-Kraftwerk-Robot Karl Bartos is much more approachable. He was a robot from 1975 til 1990, and co-wrote songs like “Das Modell”, “Computer Liebe” (Sampled by Coldplay) or the wonderful “Neonlicht”, and agreed to be interviewed for “Neu Klang”. One thing he made clear was that all the other German bands from that era had nothing to do with Kraftwerk. They were always on their own trip. And they still are, touring the world and keeping their mystery.
6. Krautrock – Faust
The story of Faust is one of the most amazing and entertaining in the Krautrock-universe. It started 1970 in Hamburg, north Germany, when Jean-Herve Peron, Hans Joachim Irmler, Werner “Zappi” Diermaier and a bunch of other musicians met the journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, who was full of challenging ideas.
His best being selling this band of anarchic tricksters to major label “Polydor” as the “new Beatles”. Unbelievable but true: they accepted, and the rest is history if you will. They bought an old schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere for the band, and had it transferred into a studio where the members could live and create music in total isolation. It took Polydor some time and money and an infamous live performance in Hamburg til they realized that the band called Faust would probably not turn into the “new Beatles”. The genius, called Uwe Nettelbeck, then sold the band again – to the young entrepreneur Richard Branson and his new Virgin Records. The band then moved to the UK, recorded more music and started to develop their wild live performances including hammer drill and cement mixers. When I talked to Joy Division-New Order drummer Stephen Wilson, a lifelong Krautrock fan, he marveled about the Faust shows he saw as teenager in Manchester.
When the term “Krautrock” turned up in the early seventies, Faust – of course – decided to make a joke out of it and turn the term into a song. It was such a joy to talk to them for my book. And various incarnations of Faust are still active and every Faust concert is still an adventure.
7. Archangels Thunderbird – Amon Düül
Amon Düül are a wild bunch from southern Germany. You get an idea of their electrifying energy when you spend time with their singer Renate Knaup. She is in her mid-seventies now but still an uncompromising and highly entertaining character. A couple of years ago I was on stage with her at an event in a theatre in Munich, where the band started out of a commune at the end of the sixties. And it was wonderful to see how Renate’s stories of a revolutionary era electrified a young audience. She talked about exploring a new and different lifestyle in a commune in Munich (which was a very conservative city back then), and fighting with your parents, and about drugs and chaos, about Jazz and Hendrix and about police and anarchy. It was Renate who, coming back from a gig, found the infamous and dangerous terrorists of the Bader & Meinhof gang asleep in their commune beds and just told them get out and leave immediately, while the men in the band were frightened and silent. When the Düüls split into two bands: The ones who preferred the chaos and the ones who wanted to really explore music, she went with the music-gang, which turned into Amon Düül 2. Since then, she is the soul of the band, if you will. She’s probably the main reason that Amon Düül 2 are still going. A couple of years ago Renate moved back from Berlin to Munich where it all began. If you’re lucky enough to catch her and the band on stage, a highlight of their performance is always the song “Archangels Thunderbird” – from their legendary album “Yeti”, and you get an idea of how it might have been to see this wild uncompromising gang in the early seventies.
8. You play for us today – Agitation Free
I had sent a mail to Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler with a request for an interview for my book. He immediately replied with a phone number: “Call me now!”
Since then, we talked several times – but never met. I learned a lot from him.
Some experts claim that modern electronic music was born in the early seventies at Kraftwerk’s “Kling Klang”-studio in Düsseldorf. But you might argue that Thomas Kessler and his scholars did the same at his “Electronic Beat Studio” in Berlin, in a transformed schoolroom in the Charlottenburg area. That’s were Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching, and Agitation Free discovered the possibilities of electronic music with an EMS synthesizer – “Synthi A” that belonged to Thomas Kessler, the first of its kind in Berlin. Under his guidance they learned about sounds and structures.
With that knowledge Agitation Free travelled to the middle east in 1971, funded by the German state. They performed to audiences that were not used to rock music in Egypt and Lebanon. And they made field recordings on that trip. Back in Berlin, inspired by their journey and with the knowledge of what they learned at “Electronic Beat Studio,” Michael Hoenig, Lüül and the others in Agitation Free created the unique sounds that became their fabulous debut album “Malesch”, from where this track is from.
More than fifty years later their music still sounds unusual and fresh. And last year they released a comeback album and played some shows. Thomas Kessler returned to Switzerland after a long time and told me that his old EMS synthesizer still works.
9. Cosmic Vibration – A.R. & Machines
The A and the R in the band’s name stand for Achim Reichel, who, like me, is from Hamburg, in the north of Germany with a huge harbor. His long and very successful career is a unique one. His father and grandfather were sailors. But young Achim, growing up next to the Elbe River and not far away from the infamous red-light district of Reeperbahn/St. Pauli decided to start a rock ‘n roll band. With The Rattles he became a star and poster boy in sixties Germany. But at the beginning of the seventies, he was looking for a new adventure.
He found it by accident, while playing around with an echo machine he pushed the wrong button and liked what he heard so much that he decided to explore it. With his old Rattles mate Frank Dostal (Who later got super successful as a lyricist for Spanish pop duo Baccara: “Yes Sir I Can Boogie” – bestselling single of all time by a female group) he recorded the album “Die Grüne Reise” (“The Green Journey”), a set of softly weird cosmic tracks that became a moderate success, but most of his old Rattles fans thought he had gone crazy. As a teenager I found a copy at a flea market, liked it a lot, and could not believe that this could be the same Achim Reichel who still was famous popstar. Back then Reichel had made a second album as A.R. & Machines, that no one bought at the time that is now is an expensive collector’s item. After that he changed sounds again, created pop songs inspired by shanties and returned to the top of the charts.
His little Krautrock adventure was soon forgotten. When I interviewed Reichel at his Hamburg home he told me laughing how after decades he began to realize that A.R. & Machines might have found a new audience when his daughters told him that their friends would love “Die Grüne Reise” so much: First, he thought that they were just saying that because they wanted more pocket money, but then he began to accept that there was really a new young generation discovering his old stuff through the internet. When a big label got in touch offering to rerelease the old recordings, he decided to play a major show with “A. R. & Machines” at the prestigious and massive Hamburg concert hall “Elbphilharmonie”. An event that was sold out with fans coming from all over the world.
Reichel, now 80, is still touring and performing his bestsellers has now added tracks from A.R. & Machine to his program finally proud of this adventure.
10. Alphorn Prayer – Embryo
A sound you cannot categorize is always interesting. What is Embryo? Krautrock? World Music? Psychedelic? Jazz? Probably a bit of everything! But in the end, they just sound like Embryo.
Over the years more than four hundred musicians have played with the band whose only constant member was Christian Burchard, who started Embryo in 1969 in Munich. From early on he was touring the world – from Nigeria to Egypt and Japan, England and India back to Germany – building a global network of like-minded musicians who would join him when he was in their area. One of them was my daughter’s flute teacher. Through him I discovered Embryo and went to a show in a very small club in Hamburg. Everybody there seemed to smoke a lot of strange things, you got high just from breathing. Time seemed to stand still there, and it was probably like that when they started more than half a century ago. The musique still sounded unique, like freedom and adventure.
I’m glad that Christian Burchard answered my questions before he left this planet in 2018.
This could have been the end of the band, but Embryo were always special, and a new chapter of their story began when Marja Burchard – Christian’s daughter – took over. Her father had prepared for that, taking her on tour with him since she was eleven. She brought new members and a new spirit. And she got in touch with hip hop mastermind Madlib who often said that Embryo is his favorite rock band. On his label they released their fabulous album “Auf Auf” in 2022 featuring this track here.
Is it Krautrock? Who cares!
BILL “BLADE” HOWELL was born to Leonard Percival Howell and Tenneth Bent-Howell in 1942 at Pinnacle in Sligoville, St. Catherine, on the island of Jamaica. In 1956, Howell and his family were evicted from the land that they had been living on for over sixteen years through a series of corrupt tactics from government officials, wealthy landowners, and crooked lawyers. Howell went on to become one of the first Black art directors working in New York advertising agencies in the 1970s. He has been living in New York for over fifty years.