Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of krautrock, the underground music of 1970s Germany. But Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang — the phrase means “new sound” — finds a novel route through familiar ground. The book is billed as the first oral history of the movement. Interviewees include a wide cross-section of musicians, from members of leading bands such as Can and Neu!, to industry figures, scenesters and foreign admirers like Jean-Michel Jarre and Brian Eno. These many voices are confusing to follow, but they testify to krautrock’s scope.
Invented in the 1970s by “one of those arrogant British music journos”, in the words of radio DJ Winfrid Trenkler, the term itself was widely disliked in Germany. It was catchy, yes — but inaccurate and supercilious too. “We made electronic music — not kraut or rock,” says ambient pioneer Klaus Schulze, formerly of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, interviewed before his death in 2022. Schulze’s occasional bandmate Harald Grosskopf recalls a British music press article about Kraftwerk that was illustrated by Nazi runic lettering, flaming torches and the Brandenburg Gate; the headline was “Muzak from Germany”. “In the UK they’d make their jokes,” says free-jazzer Peter Brötzmann, who died last year, through what can be guessed as gritted teeth.
Neu Klang struggles with the diffuseness of the acts grouped under the krautrock umbrella, jumping rapidly between locales and people. Links are loose or non-existent (“I wasn’t interested in any kind of dialogue or exchange,” says Neu!’s Michael Rother). Intriguing life stories are truncated, like Suzanne Doucet’s wild swerve from performing Schlager hits — Germany’s homegrown pop songs, infamous for cheerful vulgarity — to trippy psychedelia. “I wanted total liberation,” she says. Despite the differences, a distinctively German character emerges. Dallach is eager to emphasise the music’s prophetic nature. “The best krautrock sounds came, in their time, like unheard radio waves from the future, and will go on radioing into the future,” he writes in the introduction.
Can’s improvisations — “instant composition” in the words of their bassist and electronics expert Holger Czukay — aimed for complete immersion. They were inspired by radical musical theories about spontaneity, but also Germany’s criminal history. “What we did then with Can had a lot to do with clearing away that past,” Czukay, who died in 2017, says. The synthesiser was another tool for starting over. Krautrock’s experiments with electronic music overlapped with developments in the UK and the US. But German acts such as Cluster and Schulze took it further, creating space-age soundtracks that anticipated the development of ambient music and techno. Again, the motive was to escape the terrible pull of recent history. For one interviewee, the synthesiser was “a gift from the gods, because it really enabled us to create something new, with no set paths to follow”.
What about krautrock’s own paths? Given the erosion of the cheap rents and social security that effectively subsidised musicians 50 years ago, and also the collapse in record sales, the period covered in Neu Klang resembles a distant dream. Today’s young musicians will read record executive Siegfried Loch’s words with envy. “The more autonomy you have,” he says, “the more future you get.” Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock by Christoph Dallach, translated by Katy Derbyshire, Faber £25, 448 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen.
