In Krautrocksampler, his great book about German cosmic music, the musician, collector and writer Julian Cope describes the sensation of being a fan of Can, Neu!, Cluster, Amon Düül and other bands as their records were originally being released: “Albums were impossible to judge as they came out because they defied analysis alongside anything else but other Krautrock.” The inside front cover of Krautrocksampler Published in 1995 for the tiny British imprint Head Heritage, Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Music – 1968 Onwards helped corral a bunch of amazing music that ..read more

Post-Can selections from one of our favorite drummers – Jaki Liebezeit. There’s no mistaking the sound of Can drummer Jaki Liebewitz’s pound. Both sparse and complex, the late percussionist helped birth the sound of post-war Germany with relentlessly repetitive patterns that fueled the band’s direction. Here’s Liebezeit discussing the band’s theory on repetition and the blowback it caused from critics: When I started with Can I had a lot of critics who said we were repeating all the time, and we didn’t have ideas. But I think the repetition, you have to feel it. With Can, for every tune we pla ..read more

Tracing the impact of seminal kraut rock bands like Tangerine Dream, Harmonia, Ash Ra Temple, and more. As a generation of youths of came of age in 1960’s Germany, they were forced to confront the legacy of horrors in the wake of the fall of the Nazis empire. When the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, had his reign over the radio, he filled it with saccharine, serotonin-inducing pop hits. The eerie intent was to distract civilian Germans from one of the darkest chapters of contemporary history.  The sonic catharsis from World War II took many forms around the world, and in West Be ..read more

Join us for a krautrock listening party this Friday at the JACCC private Japanese garden. Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Irmin Schmidt: The core members of visionary Krautrock band CAN released timeless experimental rock music over the roughly ten years that they were active. We’ve all heard the albums. Following the band’s breakup in 1979, though, the founding members split off into various configurations and continued to release incredible genre-bending music, taking the rhythms and sounds they developed as CAN and diving even further into them. Though less known, much of thi ..read more

“When I found out E2-E4 was played in clubs, I couldn’t imagine people dancing to it…” When the great German musician and thinker Manuel Göttsching passed on Monday at 70, it felt like the entire world collectively, simultaneously heaved with sorrow while coming to exact same conclusion: we’d lost a singularly brilliant artist and creator. Best known as the co-founder of Ash Ra Tempel, whose mesmerizing electroacoustic work starting in the early 1970s paved the way for generations of solo artists interested in collaborating with the increasingly sophisticated electronic machines that were upen ..read more

Though many of us have spent hours (days? weeks?) on end consumed in Can live performances over the years – really, is there any better reason for YouTube? – the most remarkable thing about the band is their work’s enduring nature. Pop on Monster Movie, Soundtracks or Tago Mago (which we just now did) and their awesomeness remains a glory to behold. This is especially true on a morning after a tense election that increasingly revealed the abyss dividing those of us who exist in reality and those who peddle and amplify lies. Today’s amplification involves an undeniable fact: Absorbing deeply fe ..read more

Listen to highlights from the selections. A master at comprehensive musical overviews and the thoughtful unpacking of brilliant sounds, writer Sasha Frere-Jones recently focused his attention on German music of the 1960s and ‘70s. It was penned for the tasteful recommendation site Shfl.com, which has gradually become home to a bevy of great music writing.  Frere-Jones highlighted 68 albums from the world of so-called Krautrock, and the result is a comprehensive primer on a remarkable moment in musical time: Most of the musicians in Dusseldorf, Berlin, and Cologne hovering around rock in t ..read more

Two legends of German music deliver nearly two hours of improvised bliss. In 1999, two towering figures of electronic music, Michael Rother and Dieter Moebius, stood onstage in Tokyo surrounded by the instrumental tools they first started harnessing 20 years prior in Düsseldorf, Germany. Rother was an early member of Kraftwerk and co-founder of Neu!.  Moebius cofounded Cluster with Hans-Joachim Roedelius —- and Harmonia with Roedelius and Rother.  Which is to say, by ‘99 they’d been tunneling through electronic circuitry together to mine the beguiling sounds within for most of t ..read more

Baltimore-based musician PJ Dorsey aka Tarotplane shares his five favorite Kosmische records. After giving up music for almost 10 years in the late 90s to mid 2000s, Baltimore-based musician PJ Dorsey aka Tarotplane seems to have hit his stride in recent years. Between 2020-2022, the guitarist/producer released three full length LP’s along with a 53-minute-long cassette titled Panthalassa with all original material. His sound, often dubbed “new school kosmische”, is heavily influenced by krautrock and experimental psychedelic records from the ’70s. Fans of Robert Fripp, Popol Vuh, Manuel Götts ..read more

Released by Mute and Spoon Records, ‘Live in Stuttgart 1975’ is available to stream today. Looks like listening for today is sorted! Here’s one and a half hours of glorious bootleg live music from 1975 remastered and engineered under the supervision of founding Can member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer Rene Tinner. The band’s line up for this performance features all four original members— Irmin Schmidt on keys, Jaki Leibezeit on drums, Michel Karoli on guitar, and Holger Czukay on bass. The five tracks simply titled 1-5 are pure, improvised, psychedelic jam madness and should get you thr ..read more