Krautrock
Rock and roll arose in the United States in the 1940s, and spread across the world beginning in about 1956. Though American rock was popular in Germany at the time, especially rockabilly stars like Bill Haley & His Comets, there were few German performers. While the term krautrock (komische musik) is often used as though synonymous with German rock in general, it may be more specifically applied to a group of early 1970s bands like Tangerine Dream and Faust, many of whom worked closely with celebrated Cologne-based producer and engineer Conny Plank.
1960s and 70s: Krautrock
Mostly instrumental, the signature sound of krautrock mixed rock music and "rock band" instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums) with electronic instrumentation and textures, often with what would now be described as an ambient music sensibility.
By the end of the 1960s, however, much had changed. The American and British counterculture and hippie movement had moved rock towards psychedelia, heavy metal, progressive rock and other styles, incorporating, for the first time in popular music, socially and politically incisive lyrics. The 1968 student riots in Germany, France and Italy had created a class of young, intellectual continental listeners, while nuclear weapons, pollution and war inspired protests and activism. Music had taken a turn towards electronic avant-garde in the mid-1950s.
These factors all laid the scene for the explosion in what came to be termed krautrock (coined by the British press), which arose at the first major German rock festival in 1968 at Essen. Like their American and British counterparts, German rock musicians played a kind of psychedelia. In contrast, however, there was no attempt to reproduce the effects of drugs, but rather an innovative fusion of psychedelia and the electronic avant-garde. That same year, 1968, saw the foundation of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin by Hans-Joachim Rodelius, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, which further popularized the psychedelic-rock sound in the German mainstream.
The next few years saw a wave of pioneering groups. In 1969, Can formed, adding jazz to the mix, while the following year saw Kluster begin recording keyboard-based instrumental music with an emphasis on static drones. In 1971, the bands Tangerine Dream and Faust used electronic synthesizers and advanced production techniques to make what they called komische musik.
In 1972, two albums incorporated European rock and electronic psychedelia with Asian sounds: Popol Vuh's In Den Gaerten Pharaos and Deuter's Aum. Meanwhile, komische musik saw the release of two double albums, Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht and Tangerine Dream's Zeit, while a band called Neu! began to play highly rhythmic music. By the middle of the decade, one of the most well-known German bands, Kraftwerk, had formed and released albums like Autobahn, which laid the foundation for electro, techno and other styles later in the century.
90s German rock
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the resurgence of electronic music and a new generation rediscovering much of the early work of German music in that period, Krautrock came to be considered a style in and of itself. Artists such as Stereolab, Laika, Boredoms, and Tortoise working under the post-rock and electronica
