My first encounter with Krautrock came when my older brother turned up in my room with a nearly new CD. Price sticker on, sleeve untouched, and the considered opinion, ‘This is CAN – Future Days. It’s shit. You have it.’
On looking at the track list, I saw why my brother had rejected the album – wincingly long track lengths and awful titles. In spite of this I gave CAN a chance.
As it turned out, my brother had, in typical first-listen-to-Kid-A style, totally missed the point. Given time to gestate, the unique, hypnotic-surf-music intensity of the album grabs you. It’s a classic, blending ambient, marshmallow-soft guitar and keyboard lines with the relentless, metronomic pumping of Jaki Liebezeit’s drum kit.
It’s an intoxicating mix, and singer Damo Suzuki’s spontaneous vocals, honed through years of busking throughout Europe, mix English, German and Japanese to further confuse and seduce the listener.
It would be easy to imagine CAN as a one-off, but in truth the late 60s and early 70s were a uniquely creative period for the German avant-garde music scene. While their American and British contemporaries were turning to jazz and concept albums to flavour their emergent ‘prog-rock’, German bands like CAN, Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream and of course Kraftwerk, chose to become more aurally mechanical. They experimented with minimalism, electronics, and more industrial textures.
At the time, bewildered NME hacks coined the largely derogatory term ‘Krautrock’ to describe the bands, unfairly lumping them together into one group. However, by the late 70s, as Yes and Genesis disappeared up their own arses in a puff of pretension and indulgent keyboard solos, it became clear that, in spite of the music press’ early dismissal, the Germans would have the last laugh.
To describe the Krautrock scene as influential would be an insulting understatement. Along with Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream pioneered the atmospheric, synth-led ‘space music’ which so influenced David Bowie and countless others in the late 70s. Kraftwerk’s distinctively repetitive, robotic sound, made possible the electronic music explosions of the 80s and 90s.
Finally, CAN and Neu!, the latter made up of former Kraftwerk members, produced a percussion-heavy, droning form of progressive rock which predicted much of post-punk and New Wave. Sonic Youth, Joy Division and Radiohead have all cited CAN as a major influence.
It’s hard to imagine another group of bands in all of rock music that could claim to have influenced so many, while remaining in such obscurity. Perhaps, however, that same obscurity was their greatest strength.
Safe in the knowledge that their music would probably be ignored by all but the most open-minded British and American press, they were free to experiment in less fashionable areas than their contemporaries and therefore to produce truly revolutionary music.
