a krautrock primer

DAILY N TE
THE DAILY NEWSPAPER FOR LONDON FROM THE RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY
16/24
A KRAUTROCK PRIMER // INSIDE THE KOSMISCHE SOUND
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
TRANS-EUROPE DAILY EXPRESS
BACK IN MID-’70S BRITAIN, MUSIC HAD GOT
SO TURGID AND EXTRAVAGANT IT TOOK
THE CLEANSING FIRE OF THE SEX PISTOLS
TO RID THE SCENE OF LONG-HAIRED
HIPPIES WRITING OPERAS ABOUT KING
ARTHUR. MEANWHILE, OVER IN GERMANY,
EXPERIMENTAL BANDS WERE QUIETLY
MAKING PROGRESSIVE MUSIC THAT
ACTUALLY PROGRESSED, CHURNING
OUT SOME OF THE MOST EXCITING MUSIC
OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY. AND THEN,
NOTHING. IT TOOK AN ACID-FRIED BRITISH
ROCK GOD TO REAPPRAISE ‘KRAUTROCK’
AND GIVE IT THE RESPECT IT CLEARLY
DESERVES. IN TODAY’S DAILY NOTE, WE
LOOK BACK AT JULIAN COPE’S LEGENDARY
KRAUT TEXT AND TALK TO ARTISTS SUCH
AS KRAFTWERK, PORTISHEAD’S GEOFF
BARROW AND UNDERWORLD’S KARL
HYDE ABOUT THE CONTINUING INFLUENCE
OF THE MOTORIK SOUND. AMON TO THAT.
“I FIND LONDON CONSTA
NTLY
INSPIRING, PARTICULARL
Y THE
LAST YE AR OR TWO. PEOP
LE
HAVE GIVEN UP ON THE RU
LES
OF DANCE MUSIC, WHICH
IS
ALWAYS A GOOD THING.
THE
RHYTHMS OF JUNGLE AN
D
2-STEP ARE SO INGRAINE
D
IN KIDS’ MINDS FROM SU
CH
A YOUNG AGE THAT THEY
KNOW
ALL THE RHYTHMS AND
THE
BOUNCE AND THE JERKINE
SS
AND THE WAY THAT YOU
DO
HI-HATS. NOW THEY CAN
DO THAT AND THEY’RE NO
T
BOUND BY THE RULES TH
AT
WERE PART OF THE GAME
BACK
THEN. THEY’RE THROWING
IN
TECHNO AND BITS OF RE
GGAE
AS WELL. THERE’S A LOT
OF GOOD STUFF GOING ON
!”
RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY IS...
Since it began in Berlin in 1998, the Red Bull
Music Academy has fostered musicians’ creativity
by bringing them together with a diverse and
talented group of peers. Here, aspiring artists
from around the world learn from and collaborate
with the musical pioneers who minted the genres
they themselves are now pushing to new levels.
It’s about mutual inspiration, helping them to
connect the dots and make their own contribution
to music. This year’s host city is London.
The Academy has landed.
MALA: “THE ACADEMY IS THE
WORLD INSIDE ONE BUILDING!”
DAILY NOTE ISSUE 16 / 24
EDITOR ROBIN TURNER
DEPUTY EDITOR
PIERS MARTIN
MANAGING EDITOR
JUSTIN HYNES
CHIEF SUB-EDITOR
STEVE YATES
STAFF WRITERS TOM HALL,
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VERGHESE
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
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ART DIRECTOR
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DESIGNER RICHARD MURRAY
PICTURE EDITOR
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PHOTOGRAPHY
THOMAS BUTLER,
RICHIE HOPSON, DAN WILTON
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
MILES ENGLISH
PRODUCTION MANAGER
ADAM CARBAJAL
PRE-PRESS PRODUCTION
LEE LAUGHTON
SUB-EDITOR
ALISTAIR HAYES
THANKS TO ROSIE AT BLACK
DOG, JON SAVAGE, RICHARD
KING, PEROU, KARL HYDE,
GEOFF BARROW, LISA AT
IN HOUSE & TREVOR JACKSON
FOR THE COVER ILLUSTRATION
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DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
/// FROM T HE AC A DE M Y///
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
/// FAC TS OF L IFE///
BASS, THE
FINAL
FRONTIER
FUTURISTIC DUBSTEP
FRENZY IN ALDGATE
THIS WEDNESDAY.
YOU’RE COMING, RIGHT?
PARTICIPANT PASS NOTES
WHETHER DRESSED AS A GIANT
SPACE SHRIMP SINGING IN FRONT
OF THOUSANDS OF SCREAMING
GUADALAJARA TEENS, OR
PERFORMING IN A WOLF SUIT AT HE
SXSW FESTIVAL, THE LATIN GRAMMY
NOMINEE JUAN PEREDA PACKS HIS
FRAGILE, LOOPY POP GOODIES UP IN
COLOURFUL CANDY WRAPPERS.
DUBSY DIVER
Scuba finds the Berlin
sunbeds a little rich for
his skin tone
/// T U N E IN, T U R N ON ///
“It’s basically the three central musical ideas of
house, techno, dubstep and this weird
drum’n’bass stuff. These were the three inputs,
if you like.”
So says Scuba of Triangulation, his imminent
second album. A key figure in the development
of dubstep, Scuba runs the Hotflush label, who
put out early singles by the likes of Distance
and Search and Destroy, and last year enjoyed
crossover success with releases from Mount
Kimbie and Joy Orbison.
It was that very Joy Orbison single, Hyph
Mngo, that made the number one spot in
online dance mag Resident Advisor’s singlesof-the-year countdown, and Scuba – real name
Paul Rose - will be returning the favour at T
Bar tomorrow night, when he plays RA’s joint
party with the Academy.
Having reconnected with house and techno
since moving to Berlin, Scuba has found a
niche between the 130 BPM of Europe and the
140 BPM of dubstep, and it’s manifested to
thrilling effect in his DJ sets and Sub:stance,
his recent mix CD for Ostgut-Ton. He even
says of SCB, his house and techno side project,
/// WOR L D PA RT Y ///
INTRODUCING…
SPACE DIMENSION CONTROLLER
“I doubt I would even have started that if I’d
still been living in London now. It’s a direct
result of going out to Panorama Bar at 11
in the morning.”
Supporting him is Untold, maybe the most
celebrated dubstep producer of last year. His
shape-shifting tracks like Anaconda and Stop
What You’re Doing were heavily influenced by
jungle and grime, and opened the door to
fellow producers to experiment wildly with
form and percussion, challenging
preconceptions of what dubstep even is. He’s
one of the country’s best selectors – check last
year’s FACT mix (over at factmag.com) if you
don’t believe us.
Also on the bill is Jamie Vex’d, another
dubstep veteran who’s been recording
dramatic space-age funk on Planet Mu and
recent RA podcast contributors Marco
Passarani and Thompson, alongside Harlembased Academy graduate Mike Slott.
WE FIRST ENCOUNTERED SPACE DIMENSION CONTROLLER,
AKA BELFAST’S JACK HAMILL, WHEN HE RELEASED THE LOVE
QUADRANT LAST YEAR. A BREATHTAKINGLY PRETTY AND
PSYCHEDELIC HOUSE AFFAIR, IT WAS ONE OF 2009’S BEST
DEBUTS BY A COUNTRY MILE. SDC IS A PARTICIPANT AT THE
WHAT DID YOU GROW UP
LISTENING TO?
MY FIRST REAL LOVE OF MUSIC
WAS WHEN I WAS AROUND 14 OR
15 AND I WAS JUST GETTING OUT
OF MY HEAVY METAL PHASE. I
STARTED BY LISTENING TO
DARKDANCER BY LES RYTHMES
DIGITALES WHICH IS UP THERE AS
ONE OF MY FAVOURITE
Resident Advisor & Red Bull Music Academy at T Bar,
18 - 22 Houndsditch, EC3A, free entry, 9pm—2am
ALBUMSEVER. THE NEXT BIG
THING WAS BRIAN ENO AND APHEX
TWIN.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE
YOUR MUSIC?
MY BRAIN DOESN’T LET ME GET
REPETITIVE, WHICH IS A BIT SHITTY
IF I WANT TO MAKE MUSIC FOR
PLAYING IN CLUBS. THAT’S THE
GOOD THING ABOUT ANALOGUE
PRODUCTION TOO, BECAUSE IT
CHANGES SO MUCH, IT GIVES
TEXTURE TO MY TRACKS AND
AVOIDS THEM SOUNDING BORING
AND STALE AFTER A MINUTE, AS IS
THE CASE WITH A LOT OF CLUB
MUSIC. THAT’S JUST MY OPINION
THOUGH…
DOWNLOAD HIS MIX AT
FACTMAG.COM
VISION ON
JUAN SON
Starting this week, Red Bull Music
Academy comes to your living room.
Alex Zane showcases the best of
London music. Wednesday night’s
first show in the three-part look at the
Red Bull Music Academy and its take
on London sees him traversing the
Academy’s events and bringing you
the highest of the highlights, as well
as accessing an exclusive live gig with
Academy alumnus Mr Hudson. Red
Bull Music Academy: London Calling
Channel 4, Thurs, March 3, 00:05am
Describe the type of music you make:
Basically, I don’t want to be classified. I just
play things I like and try to experience
everything from samba to bossa nova. Just
kidding. Maybe hard rock?
Where does your music come from?
Soul, heart and hands.
Where is your music going?
Depends. A lot of times to other souls and
sometimes to places I don’t know.
Where’s the weirdest place you’ve played?
A gay matador bar in Mexico City. It’s a small
place with a chandelier with red lightbulbs
and it’s where the people go after the
bullfights to eat the meat of the just-killed
bull. There are crystal boxes on the ceiling
with mannequins of toreros or matadores
kissing each other. It is called La Faena.
WHEELS ON FIRE
HOUSE HERO ROLLS OUT THE JAMS IN VAUXHALL
If you could play on the international
space station, what would be your
message to Earth?
Sooo long, suckers!
The Academy has brought a ton of unique events to London
these past few weeks, but we’re extra heart-in-mouth excited
about A Roller-Skating Jam Named ‘Red Bull Music Academy’ –
a collaboration with London’s glitterball-worshipping Horsemeat
Disco crew and Detroit’s Soul Skate. There are few modern
musicians who can lay claim to the status of “legend”, but the
enigmatic Kenny Dixon Jr, aka Moodymann, is one. His ’90s
releases are certified classics, sample-heavy house and techno
drawing on disco licks and blaxploitation flicks. Dixon is also
a massive fan of the rink, and has done more than anyone to
keep its spirit alive through his regular Soul Skate parties.
Who or what makes you throw the radio
out the window?
Mainstream pop, excluding Britney! Her song
Womanizer is a deep, ugly, guilty pleasure.
Which Londoner would you most like to
hang out with (fictional, historical, current)?
Elizabeth Fraser! Bowie, Lennox, Thom Yorke.
But the Cocteau Twins would make me wet
my panties!
ILLUSTRATION: LUKE INSECT
What is your favourite word in the
language or dialect you grew up with?
Cucaracha. It means cockroach.
Which cliché about your country or city is
true? Which one is totally wrong?
Burros, mafia, pretty beaches and chaotic
cities, all true. But we don’t wear sombreros.
Would you sell your soul for rock’n’roll?
No.
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
For this one-off spectacular, he’ll be
bringing ten of Detroit’s best skaters
and a box of his finest ‘rink jams to
the Renaissance Rooms in South
London. What could be better
than amazing music? That’s right:
amazing music on wheels.
Thursday, Renaissance Rooms, SW8,
£10, 8pm-2am
redbullmusicacademyradio.com/
shows/921/
THE WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER CARD
I
LEWD, CRUDE AND LIFE-AFFIRMING, LATIN’S
LATEST SOUND HAS SPEARED LONDON CLUBLAND.
VIVA REGGAETON, SAYS RAHUL VERMA
f only an Oyster card got us on the Diablo Rojos
(Red Devils), the pimped-out American school
buses covered in murals and graffiti that serve
as public transport across Latin America. They’d make
miserable, mute-commuting Londoners more chatty
and we might even nod our heads to the reggaeton the
drivers play loudly (you’ve got to be able to hear it
above the constant blast of the horn). It would even
drown out the teenagers’ mobile phone music. How
about it, BoJo?
Reggaeton – like grime – polarises opinion. Middleclass Latinos in South America screw their noses up at
it as if they’ve just whiffed an open sewer. “Music for
slags,” the twenty-something chicas would sniff, while
blokes grin knowingly but never admit to liking it in
the company of ladies.
Cumbia and ballaneto, traditional forms of
Colombian folk found across Latin America, are the
preferred soundtracks of the continent’s cultivated and
educated. And if music is a badge of honour
representing race, culture and identity, then it’s no
great surprise that cumbia’s rich history, folk tradition
and classy dancing in couples means it’s favoured over
reggaeton’s lurid, life-affirming tales of sex, drugs and
partying.
However, there is no denying that in London,
reggaeton’s proved the catalyst for a Latin American
clubbing revolución. Whereas previously Latinos had to
contend with drunken Brits clumsily trying to pull at
salsa nights, reggaeton’s cool, edgy cachet (ghetto chic,
if you will), means Latin club nights such as La Bomba
now happen in famous venues such as the Ministry. La
Bomba was until recently London’s best-kept secret:
that mythical place where the vibe was lively and
friendly, the girls outnumbering the guys. It’s difficult
to express what the night means to London’s Latinos,
who couldn’t really take their English, Indian or
African mates to a community-style fiesta in a Brixton
or Elephant & Castle dive.
Take them to La Bomba at Ministry, however, and
they’ll find national flags, girls in Latino clubbing
uniform – denim hot-pants, strappy tops, boob tubes
and trainers – and renowned DJs and artists from
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
across the diaspora. It’s glamorous and sultry and the
gyrations would make a Jamaican dancehall queen
blush. Which is probably why La Bomba’s now spread to
Brighton and Pacha Ibiza.
Latinos’ sense of collective pride has spread beyond
clubland as the community, and its youngsters in
particular, campaign for recognition of their joint
heritage. While many ethinic groups resent the
amassing of personal information by the state and their
inclusion in the bureaucratic racial and cultural
breakdown, Latinos are seeking the opposite: real
recognition of their status as a distinct, homogeneous
grouping.
Although reggaeton’s metronomic clunking can
grate at La Bomba or new night Unidos, you’ll hear its
commercial variant (such as Daddy Yankee, a sort of
Panamian David Beckham, whose latest aftershave
adorns 30-foot billboard posters in his homeland),
mixed up with Latin house. Last summer’s Ibiza anthem
was Michel Cleis’s La Mezcla, which sampled a
Colombian cumbia song, while its soundtrack comprised
UK funky (which shares its African rhythms with LatinCaribbean styles such as rumba), kuduro (tub-thumping
Angolan breakbeat rap), baile funk (Brazilian favela
rave music) and electro-flow.
Electro-flow mirrors mainstream hip hop, drawing
on electro and getting faster, shifting reggaeton’s BPM
anywhere up to 120 and bringing an electronic house
backdrop to Spanish rap and bashment. It also segues
easily into UK funky, electro and house and is influenced
by Puerto Rican DJ/producer Nelson, who returned
home after a recent trip to Britain with stacks of
drum’n’bass, dubstep, funky and bassline for inspiration.
If these potential crossovers seem a little peculiar,
remember that the Indian-Latin fusion bhangraton
sprang from renowned reggaeton label Looney Tunes.
It reflects the international perspective of a region
hungry to make its mark and devour all the music it can
lay its hands on. The possibilities are endless and
exciting, just as some of them may seem inane. Music
snobs can dismiss reggaeton as rudimentary, slack.
Get. Over. It. The 21st-century voice of Latin America’s
streets is here to stay.
FRANKFURT, ARE YOU
READY TO KOSMISCHE ROCK?
MOTORIK
CITY BEAT
Agitation Free settle
into the drone zone in 1973
WEST GERMANY IN THE ’70S WAS A MAELSTROM OF MINDBENDING
MUSIC. OVER THE NEXT EIGHT PAGES WE DIG THE NEU! BREED AND
HAIL THE MEN WHO CAN. BELOW, POP HISTORIAN AND DAILY NOTE
COLUMNIST JON SAVAGE SAVOURS THE KOSMISCHE SLOP. COVER
ILLUSTRATION BY TREVOR JACKSON
L
et’s begin with a word. Krautrock is
the term most commonly used for
psychedelic, expansive German
rock, but it began as an insulting piss-take,
coined by the British music press in the early
’70s. Although in general use, it’s problematic.
But there is an alternative: the title of a 1972
double album on Ohr, and the subtitle of
Julian Cope’s groundbreaking book,
Krautrocksampler.
So Kosmische Musik it is. The Ohr
compilation has a side each from Ash Ra
Tempel, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh and
Klaus Schulze, as well as fantastically
pretentious sleeve notes. A few phrases will
give you the idea: “the time-move journey”;
“the wave oscillations of the external unity”;
“the structure of the external form like a
wave motion”. Now you’re talking.
During the past 20 or so years, Kosmische
Musik has gone from obscurity to global
fascination and acclaim. Its time has come
today. Why? Because it’s so good; because it
offers a third way between American and
British styles; and because it represents a
creative response to the peculiar situation that
its creators found themselves living in.
It is Year Zero music, born out of a
profound national disaster. As Ralf Hütter
explains about the time when Kraftwerk
began: “When we started it was like, shock,
silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. The
classical music being 19th century, but
in the 20th century, nothing. We had no
father figures, no continuous tradition of
entertainment.”
Inspired by Stockhausen, Terry Riley, The
Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention
and The Beatles, young Germans responded to
the freedoms of the late ’60s with a particular
and unique intensity. Bootleg DVDs from the
early ’70s show groups such as Can and Amon
Düül going at it in mad improvisations. There
seemed to be no boundaries.
Underlying much of the music was the
straight line: an idea taken to its logical
conclusion by the most direct means possible.
This is the relentless forward drive – later to be
described motorik – that captured the nature
of motion within mainland Europe: the ability
to fahren, fahren, fahren without speed limits
on the autobahn, to get on a train and travel
through three countries before lunchtime.
This is a great entry point into the wealth
of ’60s and ’70s German music. Think of
Harmonia’s ten-minute Walky-Talky, Faust’s
grumbling roar on the 12-minute Krautrock,
or Neu!’s pre-punk psych stormer, E-Musik.
Serious music it was, and serious music it
remains, with more than a hint of German
romanticism and minimalism, allied to killer
propulsive grooves that echo in space.
But there is so much more. That scholar
and gentleman Julian Cope did a great
service with 1995’s Krautrocksampler, which
laid down the foundations for a Kosmische
Musik canon with lengthy chapters on barely
researched acts such as the Cosmic Jokers,
Ash Ra Tempel and the almighty Amon Düül
II. But even this was only part of the story.
In the intervening 15 years, there have
been more and more discoveries: sitar
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
“ KRAUTROCK IS
THE TERM MOST
COMMONLY USED
FOR PSYCHEDELIC,
EXPANSIVE
GERMAN ROCK,
BUT IT BEGAN
AS AN INSULTING
PISS-TAKE”
FAUSTIAN PIC
Faust try to calculate the royalties from
the sales of a 49 pence album
drenched epics such as Krokodil’s Odyssey in
Om; the gay/glam pulsing of Automobile by
The Lilac Angels (from the album I’m Not
Afraid to Say Yes! on Klaus Dinger’s
Dingerland label); or the sprawling prog/
tribal jams contained on the excellent new
Soul Jazz compilation Elektronische Musik.
My own exposure to Kosmische Musik
began in 1972 with repeated, stoner exposure
to Amon Düül II’s monolithic Yeti and
continued through Faust and Neu! until
Kraftwerk become the “other” sound of
1977/78. The way Trans-Europe Express
inspired early Bronx hip hop artists is one
of the great stories of 20th-century music.
In 1978, I went to Cologne to interview
Devo at Conny Plank’s studio. It was an eerie
time in West Germany, still under siege by
Baader-Meinhof. Devo were not at all nice, for
whatever reason, but Conny Plank was a total
delight: heavy, bearded, brimming with
enthusiasm, he played me tapes by Cluster
and Harmonia – setting me off on another
quest for the drone.
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
So this piece is dedicated to his memory.
And just to let you know where I’m
coming from, my top ten Kosmische LPs
(in no particular order:)
1. AMON DÜÜL II Yeti
2. CLUSTER Zuckerzeit
3. FAUST Faust
4. UFO UFO
5. HARMONIA Deluxe
6. NEU! Neu! ’75
7. CAN Tago Mago
8. KRAFTWERK Trans-Europe Express
9. EDGAR FROESE Epsilon in Malaysian Pale
10. SAND Golem
redbullmusicacademyradio.com/
shows/2202/
Cluster, live at Elevate Festival, Graz
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
GOING UPWARDS AT 45°
JULIAN COPE’S MID-THIRTIES WERE A TIME OF PAGANISM, POLL TAX RIOTS AND
GETTING DROPPED BY HIS RECORD LABEL: THEN CAME KRAUTROCKSAMPLER.
RICHARD KING HAILS A CRIT-LIT CLASSIC
A
t the dawn of the ’90s, when
the baggy breakbeat was in its
full purple-hoodied swing, an
idiosyncratic lopsided shuffle came into
view to join the hunched-up, puddingbowled party. The vocals showed a searing
way with melody, sounding simultaneously
happy and vulnerable. Beautiful Love was
Julian Cope’s comeback single, a song
rippling in wonder.
The record it trailed was Peggy Suicide,
a dense double LP complete with pictures of
the Poll Tax riots and Cope saying “how do”
to his alter ego, Sqwubbsy, on top of
Avebury Hill. The album was a perfectly
realised State of the Nation Underground
address. Peggy Suicide is Cope’s There’s
a Poll Tax Riot Going On, audio-verité
focussing on police corruption, ravers and
the wider ecology – Cope spent the video
budget for Beautiful Love on a research trip
to the west coast of Ireland to see how
dolphins responded to his trumpet playing.
For sessions on the album, Cope had
been working with Hugo Nicholson, an
engineer who’d been around Happy
Mondays. Inspired by stories of Shaun
Ryder arriving at the studio with lyrics that
consisted of two words, “Get” and “Up”,
and Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic’s wahwah bliss, Cope let everything hang but
maintained a resolute focus. Peggy Suicide
was Cope’s metaphor for Mother Earth and
he was here to tell us to loosen up or lose it.
Listening to it now, it captures perfectly the
combination of optimism and resistance
that marked a genuine cultural shift of the
period: balls to the Tories, balls to the men
in suits – we’re now going to have some fun.
On a roll, which he has yet to come off,
Cope recorded the follow-up, Jehovahkill,
another double, in double-quick time. Cope
and the trinity of Donald “Ross” Skinner,
STONED
Julian Cope does the chicken
dance in 1992
THE MUSIC OF
KRAUTROCK
WAS, AS COPE
WOULD LATER
WRITE: ‘WHAT
PUNK ROCK
WOULD HAVE
SOUNDED
LIKE IF IT WAS
ONLY JOHNNY
ROTTEN IN
CHARGE’
Rooster Cosby and
Nicholson embedded
themselves in the state-ofthe-art technologies of
Island Studios and
converted the place into
an astral research flight
deck. The sound of the
record is crystal clear. Not
just a complete music
statement, Jehovahkill is
a complete musical world.
If Peggy Suicide was
street-level direct action
inspired by John Sinclair’s
Guitar Army, Jehovahkill
mainlines the ley lines to
discover our pagan truths.
The sleeve is an
abstraction of a burial
mound locating itself at
the heart of a cross. The manifesto was
mythology, as Cope wrote in the
accompanying booklet: Jehovahkill,
Concerning The Kelt & The Kraut, The Cross
& The Serpent.
The “Kraut” Cope references is of course
the heroic, blasted, liberated sound we still,
a little problematically, call krautrock,
Like any self-respecting teenager
waiting for punk, Cope had flashed on
Andrew Lauder’s United Artists label. Home
in the mid-’70s to such gnarled outlaws as
Hawkwind and Groundhogs, it also gave
house space to the combined weight and
vision of Neu!, Can and Amon Düül II. Along
with Faust and Kraftwerk, these bands were
the first exposure British audiences had to
the melding of avant-garde composition,
radical politics and mind-shaking rock
music produced in the mid-’70s during
Germany’s turbulent age of social unrest
and internal terrorism. Krautrock was, as
Cope would later write: “What Punk would
have sounded like if it was only Johnny
Rotten in charge”.
During the Peggy Suicide tour, Cope’s
roadie Rizla Deutsch, aka Gavin Wall, put
Neu! 2 on the tour bus
tape deck and Cope was
reconnected with the
sounds of his teenage
head. Jehovahkill is a
heart-of-the-sun
exploration of the
sounds of the
kosmische. From the
mid-’90s onwards,
when krautrock albums
were finally reissued on
affordable CDs, the
motorik rhythms and
stretched-out grooves
of Can and Neu! would
inform dozens of wellmeaning experiments
and records.
Jehovahkill, however,
uses krautrock as a
portal. Lost in its forward-moving drift,
Cope explores the mythic past of what he
calls in Give Me Back My Flag “the islands of
Albion, where we’re too frightened to carry
on”, reaching back to our pre-Christian
identity in a wash of sound that transmits
the ecstasy of Neu!’s Leb’ Wohl, from “the
long barrows of Wiltshire to the Pyramids”.
To hear Jehovahkill is to hear
transgression in action; the sounds of the
autobahns and communes of mid-’70s
Germany as map references to a higher
Salisbury Plain. Opener Soul Desert
borrows a track title from Can to explore the
Celt psyche in isolation. Slow Rider delights
in containing the sound of an engineer
talking about moving a microphone
accompanied by some wilfully out-of-tune
guitars. Cope and his brethren may have
been in one of the world’s most expensive
studios, but mere commerce was of no
interest on this particular trip.
Not unlike accompanying the artist
Richard Long on one of his long West
Country walks while in possession of
excellent drugs, Cope re-charts the
topography of Britain by channelling what
he described as “the transcendental Cosmic
Fuck-rock played by Superfit amphetamine
Visionary Poet-druids that always had an
attitude-to-the-Mooooon”.
Thus Necropolis and The Subtle
Energies Commission rename Neu! multiinstrumentalist Klaus Dinger’s Apachespeeding heartbeat drum patterns Boudica.
Poet is Priest has Cope using an almost
beautiful falsetto before the song shifts into
side two of The Faust Tapes, hazily greeting
the sunrise on day three at Castlemorton.
Meanwhile, The Tower takes Can drummer
Jaki Liebezeit’s Yoo Doo Rights tom-tom
patterns for a walk along the towpath.
Jehovahkill is raw, rural aural bliss, the
sound of someone digging heroically deep,
taking the mysterious as a starting point
and working in all directions, but always
forwards. After completing Jehovahkill,
Cope was dropped by his record company.
Not remotely deterred, he carried on with
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THE GRIM READER
Cope’s 1995 tome Krautrocksampler,
currently a snip at £90 on Amazon
his mission and released Krautrocksampler
on the world in January 1995 via his own
Head Heritage Press imprint.
Krautrocksampler remains one of the
handful of great books ever written about
music. Subtitled A Head Heritage Cosmic
Field Guide, it arrived in pocket-book
format, packed with colour and annotations.
Over about 140 pages, Cope writes with the
zeal of a seeker after truths. The result is a
coherent cultural history of Germany during
the ’70s brought to pulse-quickening life,
with none of the sensationalism of a stylised
Baader-Meinhof biopic, but all of the music’s
incendiary impact.
One of its great strengths is Cope’s
ability to self-edit. Self-edit, that is, to the
point of not actually levitating with wonder
at the intensity of the music he is writing
about. On the beginnings of Neu!: “Neu! was
born in a royal shitstorm, live on German
TV, on a bizarre night in August 1971.” And
a few pages later on their now
acknowledged masterpiece Neu! 75: “Neu!
75 is punk as eating the snot off your mate’s
face, spiritual as dawn on any clear day. It
was a moving fucking Zone-out geddit?”
Allow yourself to be transfixed by his –
and there really is no other word for it – jive.
The feeling is of being let into a secret world
of lipstick shamen and righteous sonic
mayhem. One of Krautrocksampler’s
singular joys is Cope’s inability to forego any
autobiography. Though this is hardly
surprising, the opening line to
Krautrocksampler is: “I was a teenage
krautrocker.” When talking about Faust, we
are back with him at school: “[Faust] had
become a part of mid-teenage British
culture and The Faust Tapes was subjected
to Monty Python-like rituals in the
schoolyard to see how much of it we knew
and sort out the real Heads.”
Similarly, the Black Country was clearly
a hunting ground for future members of any
oppositional tendency, Amon Düül II’s
second LP having broken through the
consciousness of Thursday teatime Top of
the Pops: “In Tamworth Yeti was such a big
LP that longhairs actually called each other
yeti as a greeting. It was only two years ago
that my friend Doggen, himself a fellow
Midland Man, told me that Nottingham
mates had also referred to each other as
yeti. Doggen is ten years younger than me
but the oral tradition remains.”
What makes Cope such a necessary
writer is his ability to chronicle this kind of
sub-cultural behaviour and weave it into a
modern mythology. You would never hear
these kinds of anecdotes in the sanctioned
broadcasts of today’s nostalgia industry.
How lucky for us that, in place of the
standard takes of the mid-’70s being the
three-day week and Joe Gormley, Cope
gives us longhairs in longcoats and Yeti Lad.
Cope’s skill as a mythographer extends
skywards during Krautrocksampler’s most
exhilaratingly far-out yarn. In the early ’70s,
LSD emeritus Dr Timothy Leary was on the
run from the US authorities and given safe
passage by the Black Panthers, landing
finally in Switzerland where he hooked up
with Ash Ra Tempel’s Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and
plotted his next, never-to-appear book.
What happens next is an extraordinary tale
of magic, heavy manners and cosmically
beautiful music. Cope’s excitement at
retelling the story reaches new levels of
abandon: “With his $10,000 share of the
book advance promised, but not yet
forthcoming, [Black Panther] Eldridge
Cleaver relaxed his paranoid gip on Timothy
Leary for the time being. And it was during
this time that both Leary and Brian [Barritt,
British psychedelic guru] discovered that
they had been working independently on
similar Neurologic Mind-map systems.”
Such is Cope’s conviction as a writer and
researcher that every word makes you feel
like you’re sharing valuable secrets. And you
are. Read Krautrocksampler while playing
Future Days by Can, or Faust IV, and magic
starts to happen.
As well as his wonderfully intense prose,
Cope fills the book with a Top 50 list of the
best albums, and as many guides to the
record sleeves and pronunciation to the
bands’ names as he can squeeze in. These
are almost always followed by the same
imperative: “Buy them all!”
I’ve tried, along with many others,
to persuade Cope to republish
Krautrocksampler. He gives the same
reason, that Krautrocksampler contains
factual errors and that he, modestly, doesn’t
want to position himself as an expert,
having met people he considers better
informed. Cope’s reluctance to be
bombarded with irate mails supplying
corrections is understandable. Now
Krautrock is a recognised and established
feature in the rock-crit canon, there are also
those who find Cope’s reading of the music
a little too narrow, citing the lack of an indepth assessment of Agitation Free or Xhol
Caravan an oversight.
But given the impact of
Krautrocksampler at the time, the way
it smashed through the consensus of a
sanctified Beatles ’n’ Beach Boys, Clash ’n’
Pistols past, this is nitpicking.
Such a concise piece of scholarship
written with wide-eyed abandon is rare.
Krautrocksampler remains, along with
Henry Rollins’ Black Flag memoir Get
Back in the Van, a lost love-letter to the
transformative power – and the effect of
lives lived in the total immersion – of music.
Now a mystical text, Krautrocksampler
resides afloat on the internet, or gets taken
down from the shelf in hushed tones and the
right conditions by those lucky enough to
own a copy. There can be no better legacy
for a book that has now ascended to the
level of a holy testament.
Richard King is co-editor of Loops magazine and
is currently writing a history of the independent
music industry for Faber
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DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
RURALALBIONDREAMSTATESYNTHROCKSAMPLER
ENO SCHMENO: RICHARD KING CELEBRATES
BRITAIN’S TRUE SONS OF THE KOSMISCHE MUSE,
CHEAP AT TWICE THE PRICE
TALKING THE PLANK
BRAIN MEETS BRIAN
T
he sounds and textures of Krautrock took several
generations to be assimilated into British music.
David Bowie, at his mid-’70s chameleonic peak, was
the first high-profile artist to move in on the kosmische muse.
Low’s (1977) all-instrumental second side mimics the haunted
tone poems of Cluster and early Kraftwerk. Released just nine
months later, “Heroes” came in quotation marks, a typically
Gnostic acknowledgement of its debt to Neu! 75’s Hero. The link
was Bowie’s producer, Brain Eno, who had visited Harmonia at
their rural hideout in ’76, laying down tracks with them before
going to record with Cluster in June ’77.
Eno’s ’75 third solo album, Another Green World, had been a
turning point, not just for his career, but also for the way music
was understood in later years, especially after punk’s scorched
earth policy. Another Green World contains nine instrumental
tracks, anticipating Eno’s next move: Music For Airports and the
birth of ambient. Instrumental music now came with a fixed
code of practice. It was a seductive calibration that would see
Eno enthroned as Record Producer with Big Ideas, the go-to
man for dressing up your ambitions for world domination in
abstract moves (see U2 and Coldplay), but his Ambient series
is bereft of the gritty, dirty ache of the kosmische which so
influenced it.
As Cope notes in his review of Cluster’s third LP: “[Eno]
spent a great deal of time making... Another Green World full of
similar short vignettes. But compared to the Cluster technique,
his muso-packed eulogy was stilted and unorganic.”
Upon Krautrocksampler’s publication, the records Cope
discussed jumped from the racks of £1.99 detritus onto the walls
of used record shops with a £30-plus price tag. One minute
krautrock was unedited hippy indulgence, the next it was the
most exciting sound on earth.
Here then, is the chaotic, grubby, stargazing of true mid-’70s
Albion kosmische, all, give or take, still under a fiver, wherever
you care to look:
“Now if you remember we were
talking about God and you.” Few
records have ever been so aptly
titled as Julie Tippetts’ 1975
meditation Sunset Glow. Robert
Wyatt considers it Rock Bottom’s
female identical twin. Aqueous and
soulful, this almost drumless set
places Tippetts’ extraordinary voice
at the heart of an exploration of the
self. The lyrics breakdown the singer
-songwriter tendency to a much
more direct kind of soul searching,
eg, What Is Living? Musically, the
arrangements of horns, treated
pianos and echo create a sunset of
deep burnt hues, colouring in empty,
fragile spaces. Surrounding herself
with the cream of UK players from
the deep-end/deep-head tradition,
Tippetts captured the sound of
Albion ennui at dusk.
T
NEIL ARDLEY
HARMONY OF THE
SPHERES (1978)
MIKE OLDFIELD
HERGEST RIDGE
(1974)
DAVID BEDFORD
INSTRUCTIONS FOR
ANGELS (1977)
TIM BLAKE
CRYSTAL MACHINE
(1977)
STEVE HILLAGE
RAINBOW DOME
MUSICK (1979)
Ardley, who died in 2004, made
two landmark albums of mid-’70s
British instrumental music: 1976’s
Kaleidoscope of Rainbows and
1978’s Harmony of the Spheres.
His arrangements weave together
hallucinogenic patterns, like
watching the dawn break on a
Cornwall beach, as fat analogue
synths meld perfectly with the
Brit jazz outsider sensibility. On
Harmony of the Spheres, Ardley
worked out the phase patterns of
the solar system and transcribed
them into note form. John Martyn
(none deeper, none more cosmic)
contributes echoplexed guitar lines
that howl like last orders at the pub.
Fittingly, Harmony of the Spheres
got the South Bank Show treatment
on its release.
Oldfield was blindsided by the
runaway success of Tubular Bells,
which netted him and the nascent
Virgin Records untold fortunes.
Still barely out of his teens, Oldfield
was a nervous wreck. Seeking
perspective and isolation, he bought
a sheep farm in the Welsh Marches
and recorded this brooding yet
ethereal masterpiece. Named
after his new location, Hergest
Ridge sounds like Tubular Bells
in a vacuum. Upon its release it
went straight to number one in the
album chart, only to be replaced
three weeks later by Tubular Bells,
the record-buying public voting
with their feet when it came to just
exactly how they liked their beanbag
soundtracks to develop over a
turn-up-the-quad evening.
Bedford had been bandmates with
Oldfield in Kevin Ayers’ Whole
World and had encouraged Oldfield
to go solo and explore his muse,
remaining a key ally throughout
his career. Oldfield returned the
compliment by playing intense guitar
wig-out on Instructions for Angels
while Bedford played chord after
cloudy chord of Anglican organ-led
self-examining broodiness. If this
had come out on a German label
such as Brain in the mid-’70s it
would be discussed in hushed
tones. As it is, it’s hard to get past
a sleeve that looks like a catalogue
for a New Age family campsite.
Undeterred, Bedford went on to be
an arranger for pop stars Madness
and Frankie Goes to Hollywood,
making him something of a geezer.
Blake is from the first division of
the punk-era dispossessed, having
worked with both Hawkwind and
Gong. His experiments with lasers
and star-patterned synths gained
their first mass audiences at the
solstices at Stonehenge, making
him a kind of tractor-powered Jean
Michel Jarre. Crystal Machine
sounds like arguing the merits of
time travel with one of the convoy up
at the stone circle, while Eat Static
are at play forever down below.
This is space rock trip out music
with voiceover; it therefore nudges
the edge of sober acceptability or
interest. But find yourself a flight
path past the patchouli and it’s every
bit the Camelot equivalent to the
dark-prince-in-tower meditations of
solo Tangerine Dream albums.
Originally recorded for the Festival
for Mind-Body-Spirit at Olympia
London before such a phrase
became the growth sector of every
provincial Waterstones. Ripples of
textured bubbles slowly ebb and
flow like a hexagonal riverbank as
Kenneth Graham undergoes selfactualisation. This is a very pretty
record that can be played quietly,
or very loud, turning your home
into the end of the Dome Rainbow.
Famously, Hillage wandered into
Land of Oz and heard The Orb’s
Alex Paterson playing Garden of
Paradise to some cabbaged ravers.
Heard in that context, Rainbow
Dome Musick completes the circle
begun with ’70s Stonehenge sit-ins
turning into a massive impromptu
rave 20 years later.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
JULIE TIPPETTS
SUNSET GLOW (1975)
WHEN UNDERWORLD’S KARL HYDE WAS STARTING OUT IN MUSIC BACK IN
THE EARLY ’80S, HIS RECORD COMPANY SENT HIM TO WORK WITH CONNY
PLANK, THE MAN BEHIND CLASSICS BY KRAFTWERK, NEU!, CLUSTER AND
MORE. HERE HE RECALLS WORKING WITH THE LATE LEGENDARY PRODUCER
Brian Eno wonders how to turn
Harmonia’s kosmische grit into
antiseptic ambience
he first time I ever flew in a plane was to
Bonn to work with Conny Plank on our first
album. Rick (Smith, later also of Underworld)
and I were in Freur and had recently signed to
CBS. We were living in Splott in Cardiff and
our A&R Muff Winwood came down and
auditioned us live in Rick’s bedroom. We
discussed producers and Conny’s name came
up, mainly due to his work with Kraftwerk.
We were massive fans of records like TransEurope Express and especially Computer
World… they were just extraordinary records.
I remember Rick buying the first Sony
Walkman I ever saw.
He used to walk up and down Queen St in
Cardiff having an epiphany. Kraftwerk was
our meeting of minds. We were obsessed with
records such as Silver Machine by Hawkwind,
lots of funk and dub reggae and Kraftwerk
sort of brought a lot of those ideas of
repetition, of trance-like music, into focus.
We were avid John Peel listeners and it
was him who turned us onto Krautrock. Back
then, those records made up a lot of his
playlist – Harmonia, Faust, Amon Düül, Neu!.
Those records made me imagine a bizarre
place called Berlin where all this cool stuff
happened. I was obsessed with the idea that
they seemed to refuse to acknowledge things
needed to be done in an American way.
The records were uplifting, positive and
mindblowing sonically, but they didn’t
kowtow to what was considered fashionable.
I’ve always had a theory that great ideas were
born in Berlin, appropriated and made
accessible here, then finally taken by
Americans, who made them massive and sold
them back to German kids. When we first
went to Germany to do press with Freur,
journalists laughed at us for saying we were
inspired by Kraftwerk – they weren’t yet
accepted in their home country as anything
other than a joke and the charts were full of
really ropey US/UK soundalikes. It was
bizarre. This was the country that gave us
Stockhausen and most people were listening
to really bad pastiche pop music.
Prior to the recording session, our first
encounter with Conny was in a very brown,
corduroy-clad hotel room just by Heathrow
airport. I remember him playing tapes of
a band he was working with called Kowalski,
who were just brilliant. They had these
incredibly powerful anti-fascist recordings
they’d made featuring Hitler addressing
rallies. I was really intrigued hearing him talk
about the importance of Hitler’s microphone,
how it distorted so much it had the effect of
making a little man sound so very big.
We arrived in Germany to work with
Conny and were picked up by a giant lemonyellow military troop carrier manned by four
bearded, long-haired hippies. We were
dressed in the regulation Freur beads,
crimped hair, make-up and plastic clothes, so
that must have made for an interesting sight.
His studio was a farmhouse with a beautifully
converted barn where the studio was set up.
The bricks in the pathway leading up to it
were laid in the shape of a reel-to-reel tape.
We loved it.
When we worked over there, a lot of
studio time was spent un-learning things.
Conny taught our drummer to find the spaces
between the beats; it was about missing
things out in a very particular way. His way of
working consisted of messing with sounds
while you were playing.
He’d also play a lot of psychological games
– funny ones – to get you in an abnormal
frame of mind. He was a massive fan of
Prince, records such as Dirty Mind and
Controversy. He thought they were the
cutting edge of electronic music, that Prince’s
very electronic funk was going to be the way
forward. Rhythm was incredibly important to
“WHAT WE OWE
TO THAT PERIOD
IS THE LOVE OF A
MACHINE PULSE
WITH A HUMAN
VOICE MOVING
ACROSS THE BEAT”
MASTER AT WORK
Conny Plank in his studio near Cologne,
supervising Killing Joke’s Revelations album
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him, funk was important, not making music
that aped other countries.
When we were working with him, he was
just starting to get ill. He used to lie down at
the back of the studio a lot, but was always
incredibly warm-hearted and funny. He really
loved British humour, too. We used to bring
over VHS tapes of The Young Ones and he’d
roar with laughter, he was fanatical. He told
us that as a young man he used to steal cars.
He was so poor, he’d break in looking for
things to eat. His style still resonates with us
today as Underworld. What we owe to that
period is the love of a machine pulse with a
human voice moving across the beat. That’s
remained in our blood.
Underworld release a new album later this year
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
MEN AT WERK
JON SAVAGE MEETS RALF HÜTTER OF KRAFTWERK,
ONE OF THE FOUNDING KRAUTROCK GROUPS
GEOFF BARROW
This interview was conducted in May 1991 to
coincide with the release of Kraftwerk’s DJfriendly compilation album The Mix, which
brilliantly reworked and remixed K’werk
classics such as The Robots, Trans-Europe
Express, Computer Love and Music Non Stop.
It was all very easy. Ralf Hütter was installed
in an empty office in the old EMI building in
Manchester Square, London, and was both
friendly and forthcoming, if not quietly
humorous. For some reason, I can’t remember
why, the interview was never written up and
so I am very pleased to publish it here for the
first time.
playing festivals. We have been friends with
Holger [Czukay, of Can] since the very old
days, art gallery concerts, sure. Germany has
no cultural centre, so it’s all different
textures in Munich, Cologne, Düsseldorf,
Berlin, and so forth.
Jon Savage: Did you study under
Stockhausen, or were you influenced?
Ralf Hütter: No, we did some private musical
studies, from a bourgeois type of background,
piano lessons, flute lessons, certain courses.
Then we followed improvisation courses at
the conservatory, and then I met Florian
[Schneider] accidentally. There were no other
people around there at the time in Düsseldorf.
All Kraftwerk’s albums, in different ways,
seem to examine and play with various
ideas about mass communication and
technology. Are you aware of how much
people have taken from your work, like
obviously hip hop and techno?
No, but we get feedback.
Is it the case that in German music you had
to really start from zero after the war? And
did that help in any way?
When we started it was like, shock, silence.
Where do we stand? Nothing. Classical music
was of the 19th century, but in the 20th
century, nothing. We had no
father figures, no continuous
tradition of entertainment.
Through the ’50s and ’60s
everything was
Americanised, directed
towards consumer behaviour.
So we were part of this ’68
movement, where suddenly
there were possibilities, and
we performed at happenings
and art situations. Then we
started just with sound, to establish some form
of industrial German sound, and then we
founded our Kling Klang studio: the German
word for sound is “klang”, “kling” is the verb.
Phonetics, establishing the sound; we added
more electronics. You had these performances
from Cologne radio, Stockhausen, and
something new was in the air, with electronic
sounds, tape machines. We were a younger
generation, we came up with different
textures.
Isn’t Düsseldorf quite a design centre?
Yeah, we’ve always incorporated different art
forms. The robots are part of our music, we
are part of the robots. The records, concert
appearances, we designed the instruments
and created pictures. We never felt like pure
musicians. We didn’t specialise.
Would it be right to say that one of the
things you’ve been trying to do is create a
kind of universal, or rather trans-national,
musical language?
That would be perfect. I would be too [big-]
headed to say that we did it, but if it comes,
it would be wonderful. We have played, and
been understood in Detroit, and in Japan,
and that’s the most fascinating thing that
could happen. Electronic music is a kind of
world music. The global village is coming,
but it may be a couple of generations yet.
People in England have this idea that
black music must be authentic and pure,
and I love the fact that the early hip hop
acts took something that seems very far
away from them, and made it their own.
We come from such a different background.
If you come from Texas or Chicago, we come
from outside of that.
Were you ever influenced by American
music at all?
In a way that it’s part
of the radio world,
or the entertainment
world in general, but our
roots are more in film
music, classical music,
German electronic music,
and in machinegenerated rhythm
patterns, things like that.
The guitar has never
played a part in our musical concept.
“THE GUITAR
HAS NEVER
PLAYED
A PART IN
OUR MUSICAL
CONCEPT”
Did you come up at the same time as Can
and Faust, or were they slightly later?
We would cross paths every once in a while,
Geoff Barrow (pictured, above right) is one third of
Portishead and beak>, whose debut album is out now
on his exemplary Invada label
You recorded mainly on analogue until
this album, The Mix?
Yes, and we transferred all our old tapes,
everything, onto the digital system.
That would surprise people who think you
always have the latest technology.
It’s true, we have. When we recorded Electric
Café, it was the beginning of the ’80s, and
we started in analogue, then we had to finish
on analogue even though we added a lot of
digital equipment during that time.
Do you think that computers have a
KR AFTSMEN
PHOTO: REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
In England, you’re subject, because of
language, to American domination, and
what interests me is that you seemed to
have solved the problem of what it is to be
a German making popular music of your
own, which takes from American, but also
from your own source. Is that important
to you, to retain a German identity?
Certainly. We come from Düsseldorf, which is
in the heart of the German industrial district,
and we’ve always lived there, we never
thought about moving. On the Trans-Europe
Express album, and in the film, it is strongly
expressed. We feel at home in this context.
I’ve always been a massive fan of German
progressive music from the ’60s and ’70s.
It’s very varied and hard to define – I’m not
even sure if it’s fair to lump it all together as
krautrock, to be honest. The idea of musicians
trying to find sounds and create music outside
the confines of ordinary “pop” has always
been of interest to me and the people I’ve
worked with. Records I’ve made with both
Portishead and beak> have been influenced
by music from back then, but I like to think
we are only moving those influences forward
rather than looking back in a retro sense.
I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to see these
great bands play live, but as a fan of this
important musical movement and out of the
respect for people such as Can and Faust,
I would hate to be thought of as part of some
modern “kraut” scene.
An unplugged Kraftwerk
from the early ’ 70s, before
the arrival of the robots
neurological effect on human beings?
Sometimes you think of something ahead,
and then you play it. That’s one way of doing
it. Then you play while you play; I have
singing fingers, talking fingers. Florian has a
talking typewriter. While you press the
phonetics and the letters, you hear them, so
it’s a speaking or singing typewriter.
Have you made those?
No, it’s distorted from an industrial product,
part of a big Siemens computer from the old
days, and Florian took it and we persuaded a
technician to modify it. That’s the voice you
hear on a lot of our records. I play mostly
keyboards, plastic knobs, just black or white
notes. There’s nothing to it. As we go along,
I sometimes don’t know where it’s coming
from, and that’s the best way I can explain it.
It’s nearly automatic, very relaxing and easy,
and the music is like a gift coming through
your fingers. It doesn’t happen all the time,
and you have to work on it afterwards, edit
and so on. I’m aiming for an improvised
situation with the computer.
Do you work all the time? Do you ever
take time off?
No, not all the time, but it isn’t always music.
We’ve spent time moduling the robots, and
programming, there’s lots of things to do in
the studio. Installing new speakers, this is all
part of our work.
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KRAFTWERK’S STATUS AS KRAUT GODS IS OFTEN
OVERBLOWN, BUT THE MENSCH MACHINES DID HAVE
A KNACK OF GETTING INVOLVED WITH THE RIGHT
PEOPLE. FROM HOSTING MICHAEL ROTHER AND KLAUS
DINGER OF NEU! , KRAFTWERK SPUN OUT CONNECTIONS
TO HARMONIA, CLUSTER, LA DÜSSELDORF, THE SMITHS,
NEW ORDER, CAN AND A HOST OF OTHERS
FACE THE MUSIK
What’s the environment in which you
work? Do you have any ambient sound
in your studio at all?
Yes, there is no glass wall in our studio,
we record and compose everything in one
room. It’s very ambient, sometimes with
a microphone, but obviously we’ve been
recording direct from the computer into
the board, and press the red button, “record”,
onto DAT.
What do you think the future of music is
going to be? I do think we’re in a new
musical age.
We’re in the middle of a revolution, there’s
one phase already finished. Miniaturisation is
continuing. Trans-Europe Express was done
with huge machinery, and all this smaller
stuff, transportable computers, will be great,
we’re still carrying a lot of weight from city to
city. We’re dreaming of carrying a briefcase
from place to place with a laptop, little
samples, little keyboards can be done already.
This very simple digital sound has become
an integral part of our daily lives, when
you use the telephone, personal alarms,
and that’s something that has changed our
lives in the past ten years. Do you think
that music should be environmental?
If you go against, or place technology in a
fetish, if you adopt a friendly attitude toward
it, you have a much wider range of behaviour.
KR AUTROCK BOOK OFFER
BLACK DOG RECENTLY PUBLISHED A BRILLIANT AND EXHAUSTIVE
COMPENDIUM, KRAUTROCK: COSMIC ROCK AND ITS LEGACY,
ON WHICH THEY ARE OFFERING DAILY NOTE READERS A 40%
DISCOUNT. EMAIL JESS@BLACKDOGONLINE.COM WITH YOUR
ADDRESS AND QUOTE “DAILY NOTE OFFER”. ALSO LOOK OUT FOR
SOUL JAZZ’S UPCOMING 2CD COMPILATION OF SPACED-OUT
KRAUTROCK CALLED ELEKTRONISCHE MUSIK
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
DAILY NOTE 03.03.10
TODAY I WANT...
THE THINGS WE’RE AFTER MOST FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3
TODAY’S ESSENTIAL
NEW RELEASES FROM
THE SHOP FLOOR
VARIOUS ARTISTS
DANCEHALL 2: THE
RISE OF JAMAICAN
DANCEHALL CULTURE
(SOUL JAZZ)
This is the second in the series
from our sister label, Soul Jazz.
Back-to-back tracks from the
finest dancehall artists ever, such as
Yellowman, Shabba Ranks, Lone
Ranger, Buju Banton, Trinity, Johnny
Osbourne, Half Pint and many more.
Compiled by Steve Barrow – author
of The Rough Guide to Reggae and
founder of Blood & Fire Records –
and with photos from Beth Lesser
adding visuals to the riddims, this is
truly the A-Z of the genre. And
where do you go from Z? Rewind!
THEO PARRISH
SUGGESTED USE
(SOUND SIGNATURE)
Super-exclusive mix from the
Detroit house legend on his Sound
UMEK
TOP 10
MARK PRITCHARD
ELEPHANT DUB/HEAVY
AS STONE (DEEP MEDI)
Man of many monikers, Pritchard
appears this time under the veil of
Mala’s bassweight imprint Deep
Medi. Elephant Dub shakes any
soundsystem or remotely moveable
object to its absolute core. These
are heavy rhythms that pulsate
like miniature earthquakes.
If you can’t move to it, then it’ll
probably just move you instead.
On the flipside, Heavy as Stone is
a change of pace and style, with
a typically old-skool electronic jazz
step flavour that fits nicely with the
current wave of 140 BPM steppers.
Slow, large and powerful, Elephant
Dub sounds exactly how the title
suggests it should, but somehow
stays totally unpredictable at the
same time.
STEFFI
TOP 10
VARIOUS ARTISTS
THE BLANK GENERATION
BLANK TAPES NYC 19751985 (STRUT RECORDS)
Strut Records keep coming with
strong compilations of missing
recordings from yesteryear. Blank
Tapes is the first compilation of
productions from one of New York’s
most revered disco dons, Bob
Blank, who recorded with Patrick
Adams, Sun Ra, Arthur Russell and
more. Blank has successfully turned
his hand to a few trades since
disco’s heyday, including
professional ballroom dancing. But
it’s his pioneering work under the
silver ball that he’ll be celebrated for.
Join the Blank generation here.
CAN
TAGO MAGO (UNITED
ARTISTS RECORDS)
Cheeky reissue of the bass-heavy
1970s krautrock outfit Can. Tago
Mago is arguably their best,
certainly their most celebrated,
album. The first to feature Damo
Suzuki on vocals after Malcolm
Mooney quit following a nervous
breakdown, it’s a complex fuzz of
rock, psychedelia and funk. Forty
years on, Tago Mago still touches
sonic soft spots that Can’s modern
descendents struggle to match,
even with all their technology.
Amazing packaging too, the vinyl
coming on double 12-inch in
transparent orange and green. This
is an album you simply need to own.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
NIGERIA AFROBEAT
SPECIAL: THE
EXPLOSIVE SOUND IN
1970’S NIGERIA
(SOUNDWAY RECORDS)
Brighton-based Soundway Records
are stringent with the quality of their
tropical sounds from Panama,
Ghana and beyond. Nigeria
Afrobeat Special is no different,
documenting the highlife and juju
scenes that incorporated African
folk styles with western blues and
rock. There’s a dedication to the
untravelled road here, as indicated
by its opening on a less familiar
original 45 of Fela Kuti’s Who’re
You?, later remade at Abbey Road.
Nerdy? That’s why we’re here.
01 / SPARTAQUE
01 / DEXTER
01 / DJ Nature
1992 (Instrumental) (Dolly)
02 / COSTANTINO NAPPI
& MICKY DA FUNK
02 / JUJU CHRISTIAN TREUTER
Win Lose and Dance
(Golf Channel Recordings)
03 / UMEK
Earth People (Juju Music)
03 / STEFFI FEAT. ELIF BIÇER
Individual Breath (1605)
Kill Me (Crushed Soul Mix)
(Ostgut Ton)
04 / DANIEL PORTMAN
& STANLEY ROSS
04 / NICK CHACONA
Tiny Dolls (Enormous Tunes)
05 / CHRISTIAN SMITH & GABE
Fidelidade (Tronic)
Be like Olive
(Levon Vincent remix)
(Moodmusic)
03 / CORTNEY TIDWELL
Palace (Aus Music)
04 / I:CUBE
Un Dimanche Sans Fin
(Versatile Records)
05 / VRIL
V2 (Giegling)
Nevada (Dataworx)
06 / SAN PROPER
07 / THOMAS GOLD
06 / SPACE DIMENSION CONTROLLER
Love Baby Love (Dekmantel)
THE BUTTON
(Umek’s Button To Push remix)
(Toolroom Records)
The Love Quadrant
(Kinnego Records)
07 / SOLOMUN
08 / ANDREA DI ROCCO & SKOBER
Plesetsk Cosmodrome
(FXHE Records)
This Is My Religion
(Manu C remix)
(SPECA)
09 / YURI ALEXEEV
La Cabeza Loca
(Italo Business)
10 / M0H
Lost Tribe
(Ground Factory
Records)
08 / LINKWOOD
System
(Prime Numbers)
09 / I:CUBE
Falling
(Versatile Records)
10 / PAUL DU LAC
Blowback EP
(Clone Records)
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
W
02 / MANUEL TUR
05 / MARTYN
07 / OMAR S
EXTREME NOISE TERROR
Dream & Delirium
(Mild Pitch)
Seventy Four
(Redshape remix) (3024)
06 / MARCO BAILEY
THE LAST WORD IN… SOUND
MANUEL TUR
TOP 10
Resolved (Stereo Seven Plus)
Home to Wait (1605)
EACH MONTH, RA
COMPILES THE CHARTS
OF TOP DJS FROM
AROUND THE WORLD.
WITH NEARLY 2,000
JOCKS HIGHLIGHTING
THEIR FAVOURITES,
THERE’S NO BETTER
WAY TO FIND
OUT WHAT’S ROCKING
DANCEFLOORS
WORLDWIDE
Signature imprint. Suggested Use
Part 1 sees Parrish delving deep
into funky foot-shuffling African
grooves, jazz-funk and the dirty
Detroit sound. Featuring tracks from
The Headhunters, Skye, Larry
Heard, Patrice Rushen and DâmFunK, it’s a set laden with uplifting
late-night stompers, mesmerising
soul-soaked hip hop, and a healthy
dose of Parrish’s own productions
thrown in for good measure.
Cloud Dancer
(Manuel Tur remix)
(Diynamic Music)
08 / MARTYN
Seventy Four (Redshape remix)
(3024)
09 / REZKAR
Above The Clouds
(Mystery Boy edit) (Running Back)
10 / MANUEL TUR
Beasts and The Birds
(Tim Toh remix)
(Delusions Of Grandeur)
ILLUSTRATION: OPTIGRAM
SOUNDS
OF THE
UNIVERSE
SOUND HAS BEEN USED AS A POWERFUL DETERRENT THROUGHOUT HISTORY,
BUT NEW ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY ARE PRODUCING EVER MORE EFFECTIVE –
AND DANGEROUS – DEVICES, WRITES CHRIS HATHERILL
hen activists from the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society
went up against the Japanese
whaling fleet this January, they faced rough
Antarctic seas, powerful water cannons and a
new weapon that’s being used with increasing
frequency around the world: sound.
Mounted onboard the Japanese ships
was the new standard in acoustic armament:
the LRAD, or Long Range Acoustical Device.
Manufactured by the American Technology
Corporation, LRADs are circular superspeakers which “use directionality and
focused acoustic output to clearly transmit
critical information, instructions and
warnings with a maximum output of 152
decibels”. Think of it as a Notting Hill Carnival
truck, squished into a 40-inch disc – with the
significant advantage that it can be aimed.
Like any self-respecting speaker stack, it emits
a focused noise beam loud enough to cause
pain and permanently damage hearing if you
don’t move out of the way.
In the recent battle in the Southern Ocean,
the Sea Shepherd activist Steve Roest was
knocked over by the force of these sonic blasts,
while helicopter pilot Chris Aultman felt the
full fury of an LRAD as he hovered near a
Japanese harpoon ship. “At first it was just
a loud noise,” he told reporters. “Then they
turned up the volume and we could feel it
in our legs and chest.”
Beyond the Japanese whalers, buyers
include the US Navy, various cargo and cruise
lines concerned about pirates, and even Sea
Shepherd themselves – who have confirmed
they now own an LRAD but have not used
it, quote, “yet”. Other customers are the US
Army and homeland security agencies, who
have fired it at targets ranging from Iraqi
insurgents in Fallujah to protesters at the
G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. When it comes to
sound, it seems we’re all guinea pigs.
While powerful, the LRAD is no longer
the loudest soundsystem on the block. That
dubious honour goes to Ultra Electronics’
Hyperspike, currently listed as the world’s
loudest Acoustic Hailing Device by Guinness
World Records, which cites its “laser-like
beam” and notes that “its output equivalent
is 182 dB and, under optimal conditions, it
can transmit audible voice communications
to a target over a distance of more than 3km”.
Useful for festivals, then.
Reportedly more unpleasant are devices
designed as close-range deterrents. These
range from the infamous “Mosquito” noise
box that’s used to discourage trouble-makers
at shopping malls, to the “Inferno” sound
barrier. After volunteering to test the latter,
Wired journalist Sharon Weinberger wrote:
“I’m not sure words can do justice to what can
only be described as the most unbearable,
gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard.”
In his book, Sonic Warfare: Sound,
Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Steve
Goodman (aka London-based dubstep
producer Kode9) examines the way these
and similar sonic weapons and tactics have
been used throughout history – and how
similar sounds can be used in music with the
opposite effect. The same frequencies, he
argues, that have been used as weapons to
inspire fear and dread are the very ones that
he and other producers use in their music.
Writing about what he calls the politics of
frequency, Goodman is clearly fascinated
by “proactive tactics that grasp sonic
processes and technologies of power and
steer them elsewhere, exploiting unintended
consequences of investments in control”.
One example is the vocoder – used
to good effect by everyone from Giorgio
Moroder to Cher – which, Goodman writes,
has its roots in the military: “The vocoder
[can] be tracked from a speech encryption
device during World War II to the spread
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
of the vocodered voice into popular music.”
Covering everything from sonic booms to
sub-bass, Sonic Warfare makes an excellent
starting point for anyone with an interest in
how music and sound combat have crossed
paths, and where both might take us next.
With seriously scary stuff under development
– flesh-liquefying sound beams, for one –
it’s interesting to note that current systems
such as the LRAD are basically just amazing
speakers. With their ability to focus sound,
it’s surely only a matter of time before we see
them being “deployed” to outdoor festivals
and illegal raves, thereby potentially ending
complaints about noise from the neighbours.
When writing about the effectiveness of
sonic weapons in repelling Somali pirates,
Lloyd’s List, published by the maritime
insurers Lloyd’s of London, notes that “LRADs
generate noise levels of around 150 dB, which
is well above the maximum legal limit in the
music clubs so popular with young people
today”. But perhaps there is still a way to go
before frequencies become the ammunition of
choice: “Readers of an age to remember 1970s
rock shows by the likes of Motörhead and The
Ramones regularly subjected their tender ears
to blasts measured at around 148 dB for those
at the front, and thoroughly enjoyed it.”