Krautrock Genre (Can, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, etc.) (1 Viewer)

I have had music by some of the above groups over the years, mostly Tangerine Dream. Popol Vuh came to my attention due to a very atmospheric score/soundtrack for Werner Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God (which Ebert was a huge fan of, and Herzog in general). I have liked Tago Mago ('71) by Can for a long time, and just listened to it again. That is the only album I have by them, but I want to explore more of their work - Ege Bamyasi ('72), Future Days ('73), Soon Over Babaluma ('74), Soundtracks ('70), as well as compilations such as Unlimited Edition ('76), the 3 CD box set Lost Tapes ('12) and the 2 DVD/1 CD retrospective Can ('03).

Can is hard to describe, other than they have a pulsating, hypnotic, rhythmic groove quality. One or two members were students of modern avant garde classical composer Stockhausen (a huge influence on Paul Buckmaster, and through him, Miles Davis On The Corner, imo one of his greatest albums post- In a Silent Way and B. Brew). They were also listening to James Brown and Sly Stone, as well as jazz, and incorporated all that into their sound. They were reportedly influenced by pre-DSOM psychedelic Pink Floyd (as were a lot of Krautrock bands), especially in the sense of their best, most otherworldly music emerging as a collective. They referred to their studio and live work as "spontaneous composition". My sense is bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit are not THAT widely known or generally appreciated, except within the more narrowly circumscribed world of Krautrock, yet they are arguably one of the greatest rhythm sections of their era (possibly ever, regardless of genre?). Liebezeit, in particular was a monster and human metronome, possibly a cyborg.

Can - Tago Mago (full album AUDIO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm1sjgOUoDQ

Can - Paperhouse live on German TV (VIDEO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLL2j8ZtxE

From Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krautrock

Krautrock is a form of rock and electronic music that originated in Germany in the late 1960s, with a tendency towards improvisation around minimalistic arrangements. The term was popularized in the English-speaking press. Later, German media started to use it as a term for all German rock bands from the late 1960s and 1970s, while abroad the term specifically referred to more experimental artists who often but not always used synthesizers and other electronic instruments.

The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one particular scene, style, or movement, as many krautrock artists were not familiar with one another. BBC DJ John Peel in particular is largely credited with spreading the reputation of krautrock outside of the German-speaking world.[citation needed]

Largely divorced from the traditional blues and rock and roll influences of British and American rock music up to that time, the period contributed to the evolution of electronic music and ambient music as well as the birth of post-punk, alternative rock and new-age music. Key artists associated with the tag include Can, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, Popol Vuh, Cluster, Harmonia, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Neu!, and Kraftwerk.

Etymology

The word "krautrock" was applied to the experimental German rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s by the British music press, and ironically was retained by its practitioners.[5] The term krautrock was originally a humorous one coined by the UK music press (such as New Musical Express and Melody Maker), where "krautrock" found an early and enthusiastic underground following. The term derives from the ethnic slur "kraut", and its use by the music press was inspired by a track from Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground titled "Mama Düül und Ihre Sauerkrautband Spielt Auf" ('Mama Düül and her Sauerkrautband Strike Up').[6][7][8] As is often the case with musical genre labels, few of the bands wished to see themselves pigeon-holed, and tended to eschew the term. The term is also a problematic category due to the considerable differences between the artists so labelled.

Musicologist Julian Cope, in his book Krautrocksampler, says "Krautrock is a subjective British phenomenon," based on the way the music was received in the UK rather than on the actual West German music scene out of which it grew.[6] For instance, while one of the main groups originally tagged as krautrock, Faust, recorded a seminal 12-minute track they titled "Krautrock", they would later distance themselves from the term, saying: "When the English people started talking about Krautrock, we thought they were just taking the piss... and when you hear the so-called 'Krautrock renaissance,' it makes me think everything we did was for nothing."[9]

Characteristics

Krautrock is an eclectic and often very original mix of post-psychedelic jamming and moody progressive rock mixed with ideas from contemporary experimental classical music (especially composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, with whom, for example, Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of Can had previously studied) and from the new experimental directions that emerged in jazz during the 1960s and 1970s (mainly the free jazz pieces by Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler). Moving away from the patterns of song structure and melody of much rock music in America and Britain, some in the movement also drove the music to a more mechanical and electronic sound (a group of 5 expatriate Americans, The Monks, who toured playing beat music clubs throughout Germany, were also exploring this industrial/mechanical sound, as evidenced on their 1966 German-only release LP "Black Monk Time"). The key component characterizing the groups gathered under the term is the synthesis of rock and roll rhythm and energy with a decided will to distance themselves from specifically American blues origins, but to draw on German or other sources instead. Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust says: "We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different."[9]



Typical bands dubbed "krautrock" in the 1970s included Tangerine Dream, Faust, Can, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel and others associated with the celebrated Cologne-based producers and engineers Dieter Dierks and Conny Plank, such as Neu!, Kraftwerk and Cluster. Bands such as these were reacting against the post-World War II cultural vacuum in Germany and tending to reject Anglo-American popular culture in favour of creating their own more radical and experimental new German culture and identity, and to develop a radically new musical aesthetic. Many of these groups began their musical careers with little or no awareness of (or interest in) rock and roll: exposure to the increasingly radical and innovative music of the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, for example, led members of groups like Can and Kraftwerk to embrace popular music for the first time.



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. A common rhythm featured in the music was a steady 4/4 beat, often called "motorik" in the anglophone music press. Krautrock was heavily influential on black hip-hop artists from the 1980s onwards, who frequently sampled bands such as Can and Kraftwerk because of their inherent funkiness. An example of this is Afrika Bombaataa and Soulsonic Force's 'Planet Rock', which conspicuously samples Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express.'

damo sazuki made Can *very* interesting. big fan of amon duul too. "wolf city" is a sterling addition to the genre.

I saw Kraftwerk "live" during their Computerwelt tour.

them.

saintfool said:

damo sazuki made Can *very* interesting. big fan of amon duul too. "wolf city" is a sterling addition to the genre.

Click to expand...

Agreed. Not too many vocalists I can think of like him, off the top of my head. He uses his voice like another instrument. Interesting that both vocalists were non-German. The first was an African American ex-pat (?), who I haven't heard, but I guess will when checking out the compilation albums. Reportedly he was on stage during one of the band's patented, signature stretched out grooves, when he had a breakdown and started repeating upstairs, downstairs over and over. Weird that Syd Barrett (early Pink Floyd supposedly an influence on Can) also had a breakdown, though not one that was so specific or isolatable. They found Damo busking in Germany. It is almost like they went out of their way to not have a German singer, perhaps because that fit their collective conception of the sound they were seeking, something different, out of the ordinary, more outside and/or cosmopolitan (Damo was all of those)?

this track by Can - "Vitamin C" - is like the blueprint for probably my favorite band, Stereolab. that little groove working in the back there is so very tasty.

The 20 Best Krautrock Albums

http://pigeonsandplanes.com/2014/06/the-20-best-krautrock-albums/

Many of the initial choices were obscure, but they became increasingly familiar (for me).

#1) Can - Ege Bamyasi

After a string of consistently stellar albums, the fourth studio album by the paragon (and the exception of krautrock) was both their funkiest and their most concise offering, with enough groove easing out of the rhythm section to match George Clinton. Probably the most enduring and memorable krautrock band, Can was also the most identifiably unique, with a knack for funk and a habit of stumbling into extended sonic experimentations more gnarled and serpentine than their peers.

Though Damo Suzuki’s rambling and Holger Czukay’s sneaky bass lines are in rare form, the real star of Ege Bamyasi is drummer Jaki Liebezeit and his mechanical grooving, which would later resonate in hip hop, offering early breaks for b-boys (as well as a sample for Kanye's "Drunk and Hot Girls." Without the 10-minute sound exploration “Soup,” the only remnant of Can’s previous album Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi would easily be Can's most palatable release, but as it stands, it remains both challenging and endearing and the preeminent document of a fruitful time for experimentation in pop music.

Some prominent Krautrock film scores/soundtracks...

Aguirre: Wrath Of God by Werner Herzog in two parts (VIDEO), Popul Vuh score/soundtrack. Sub-titled (German dialogue).

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12fej1_aguirre-the-wrath-of-god-1972-pt-1_creation

Thief by Michael Mann and starring James Caan from the Criterion Collection - full movie (VIDEO), Tangerine Dream score/soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sDNvDRQTag

Sorceror by Billy Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider - excerpt (VIDEO), Tangerine Dream score/soundtrack. One of my top 10 movies (maybe top 5?), I saw a premier of the restoration version at the TCM Film Festival last year, in which the director addressed the audience beforehand, probably the single greatest film experience I've ever had at a theatre. Partly due to the awesome sonics of having a theatrical sound system blaring out the score. The bridge scene is one of the most viscerally harrowing scenes I've ever experienced (this was more or less a remake of and homage to the French classic, Wages Of Fear). Friedkin claimed he would have used Tangerine Dream for the Exorcist if he had heard and known about them earlier. They also did the score/soundtrack for the Stephen King novel adaptation, Firestarter (among others). Incidentally, Friedkin will be directing some True Detective season two episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE9FfbFOs48

Friedkin talks about Tangerine Dream before they perform the Sorceror theme in Copenhagen (I find him brilliant and a compelling speaker) VIDEO. He committed to using them on his next movie before even knowing what it would be, two years later they submitted one long piece, movie sight unseen (he hadn't shot it yet). Friedkin claimed he actually cut the movie to the score (much like Leone's method with the great composer Ennio Morricone on spaghetti westerns like The Good, Bad & Ugly).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDb_CZPn-bc

Great article interviewing Friedkin at length and in detail about his relationship with Tangerine Dream, and especially the LATE co-founder and leader, Edgar Froese, who he remained friends with. I had no idea Froese just passed away last month (which likely prompted the interview).

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/william-friedkin-edgar-froese-interview

I think the below is basically 2/3 of the Can box set (and all of the video portion)? The third disc is separate solo music, which I'll post later if I find it.

Can - Free Concert in Cologne ('72 VIDEO 50 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FaydRUQ42Q

Can Documentary (VIDEO nearly 90 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNhuwkmmzak

Anyone with a Facebook account who is interested in this stuff should join the Krautrock group. I thought I knew a lot about the genre but I'm constantly discovering new stuff that blows my mind.

I forgot that I have a few things by Klaus Schulze, Timewind, X and Cyborg. He was associated with Tangerine Dream, but later branched off to a brilliant solo career in the mid-'70s and beyond. Schulze's work features washes of synths and cosmic soundscapes. Some of his best work was very influential, and included some electronic masterpieces. The original Timewind album included two approx. half hour sides, and the remastered deluxe edition ('06) below extended that with another disc, bringing it to nearly two hours of playing time.

Klaus Schulze - Timewind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrERTabOJ9M

Krautrock - The Rebirth of Germany (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnMhkkgWpG4

Taylor Parkes of The Quietus on Can's Lost Tapes collection.

http://thequietus.com/articles/09079-can-the-lost-tapes-review

"Fifteen, twenty years ago, it would have been natural to respond to The Lost Tapes not just with astounded applause but with a rather lofty prescription: any group could learn a lot from close, repeated listening. It's still true, of course, but in 2012 it seems a bit out of touch. In many ways Can - whose name so clearly dates them to a time before the internet search - were not like us, sat here with conflicting histories of everything, isolated by choice and by the new demands of our miserable lives. Living and working together was the point; the strengths of five individuals merged to create something greater, something uncontainable.

It's maybe a bit naïve to think that this ideal - the band as a cell, decrypting codes and forcing doors, not so much jamming as un-jamming - could be recaptured, here and now. These days, with the creation and, to a great extent, the consumption of music reflecting the conditions of late capitalism - atomisation, anomie - Can's collective action feels like a nagging dream, something drifting in from another time, from the long-forgotten fringes of the libertarian Left. The communal, the collective, the sense of musicians as cogs in a machine... it's barely a factor in rock music now, let alone the avant-garde. Everyone's too busy, or else intent on expressing their own worldview, their own confusion, their own longing for something beyond their own problems, their own self.

It used to be different, like a lot of other things. From 1968 to 1975, the period covered by The Lost Tapes, synergy between musicians was revered as popular music's basic source of power. This encouraged a certain snobbishness, of course, prioritising technique over content and giving a free pass to a great deal of rot - the loosening of entry requirements for pop, when it happened, was long overdue and quickly rewarded. But this is irrelevant to Can, who were always beyond the showy stuff, working as they were towards a somewhat higher goal. There was rarely room in their music for anything so crass as an extended solo; the explorations here were conducted as a team, each member dependent on the others. The subtlety and grace with which they avoided (or inverted) boredom on all those long trips out there and back is still unrivalled, the fluency and invention of their ensemble playing often uncanny. This much, lots of us know already - The Lost Tapes confirms it, over and over.

Can's spontaneous, co-operative creativity hasn't been weakened by time or by anything else; the music here sounds somehow even more potent, having outlasted all the cultural currents which carried it in. It sounds almost revolutionary again. Something unburdened by the self, or by self-consciousness; free of the past and the present.

Holger Czukay, somewhat professorial at the age of 30, joined Inner Space (the original name of the group formed by keyboard player Irmin Schmidt) on the understanding it would be a kind of art collective, a rather academic fusion of rock with the teachings of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he and Schmidt's old teacher and mentor. In fact, from the sound of 'Millionenspiel', the opening track on this collection, Inner Space progressed very quickly to what would become the early Can sound ('Millionenspiel' is a psychedelicised Chantays on a surfin' safari through medieval Europe and Jamaica in the 50s, far beyond the fumblings of the Prehistoric Future tape). Still, it was only when grainy-voiced Malcolm Mooney joined on vocals that Czukay grasped what could really be achieved. As he describes it in the sleeve notes to The Lost Tapes, "Stockhausen with a hell of a drive!"

That drive was Can's trademark, powered not just by Mooney's aggression but by Michael Karoli's tattoo-needle guitar style and (especially) the drumming of Jaki Liebezeit, in which the delicacy and invention of jazz was applied to a series of rigidly mechanised beats, a kind of percussive hypnosis driving the others forward without fear. In time, as Mooney was replaced by the ethereal Damo Suzuki, the drive became more of a glide, the sound spun out until it was almost translucent, but the band retained its eerie power: heavy when featherlight, direct when delirious. In the glow of Schloss Norvenich, their hidey-hole near Cologne (then later at Inner Space Studios, a refurbished cinema in nearby Weilerswist), Can spent hours and days and nights and sunrises and sunsets playing. Everything was recorded, although not everything survived, because of the cost of tape, and - according to Schmidt in the sleeve notes - because of Liebezeit's insistence on constant forward movement: "Erase!" These three discs have been assembled from a pile of rediscovered masters, pulled from a cupboard after nearly forty years, and if they'd been recorded this morning they'd sound like they came from the future.

Occasionally, the centre fails to hold and Can are pitched off in different directions: such is the price of freedom. Still, on those rare occasions where the music is slightly ragged, it remains relentlessly inventive. The single most jaw-dropping thing about Can was this unstoppable originality - what stands out most clearly here is that even at the point of exhaustion, where anyone else would fall back on shopworn blues riffs and keyboard-demo drum fills, Can were utterly incapable of cliché. And when all five members coalesce - which they do more often than not, more often than pretty much any other group who ever relied on improvisation and daring - the results are incomparable, sometimes indescribable.

The Lost Tapes wouldn't be a good place to start, being essentially a sequence of snapshots; in that sense at least it's clearly inferior to the self-contained worlds of Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, the early-70s trilogy on which Can's reputation rests. But these are not just offcuts and outtakes - despite the inevitable incoherence which comes with any compilation, this is plainly superior to a fair few of Can's original albums, and here and there comes close to touching the tail of their very finest work. Almost nothing here is worthless, much of it is so good you could laugh out loud at the thought of sounding like this and then forgetting all about it for the best part of four decades. But Can were busy, doing something different in a different time; in many ways, they were not like us.

In November 1968, a woman called Beate Klarsfeld climbed onto the podium at the conference of the Christian Democratic Union, West Germany's ruling party, and slapped the Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, screaming "Kiesinger - Nazi! Stand down!" (It later transpired that she was in the pay of the East Germans, but it's doubtful this fact would have put off many young firebrands at the time.) The swell of radical thought in the West that year took a slightly different shape in different countries, and in West German cities the mood was especially fractious and politicised. Kiesinger, formerly a NSDAP propagandist, was only the most visible link between the country's new establishment and the horrors of the recent past.

The de-Nazification of West Germany after World War Two was an almost impossible task handled badly. Plenty from the German professional classes had something in their history which didn't look good; some (most famously Wernher Von Braun, developer of the V-2 rocket turned architect of the US space program) were poached by the Allies for their expertise. Others - pen-pushers, bureaucrats, torturers - remained in the system providing continuity for the Bundesrepublik. For several decades ex-Nazis held positions of power at every level of German society: federal and local government, the police, the judiciary, the intelligence service, the civil service, the media, the church. The foreign ministry provided protection for former party officials, advising on and assisting with travel and any associated legal issues. At one point two thirds of the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police Office, were ex-members of the SS Totenkopf. The BND - Bundesnachrichtendienst, the West German secret service - was also riddled with SS veterans, and for years seemed disproportionately concerned with the surveillance and occasional harassment of German leftists and "pacifists". Generally, there was quiet acceptance that not much more could be done, and besides, a few old fascists could be useful weapons in a Cold War against Communism. A younger generation of Germans - Can's generation, born just before, just after or during the Second World War - were inclined to disagree. In 1967, a student protest against a state visit by the Shah of Iran was put down with such enthusiasm, a young man was shot through the head at point-blank range by the police, and instantly the battle was on.

It's hardly surprising that the radicalism of West German youth in the 60s and 70s went beyond the waving of placards and sit-ins in the college canteen. Its seriousness, in fact, could reach ludicrous extremes: a poll revealed that a quarter of Germans sympathised with the murderous inanity of Andreas Baader's Red Army Faction. Crossover between this idealistic unrest and the extreme German music of the time was sometimes pretty direct - Baader-Meinhof fugitives hiding out at Amon Düül's place (much to the band's dismay, in fairness) - and sometimes a little more subtle. The music of Can was never explicitly political, but it was always radical. A synthesis of Stockhausen, Sly & The Family Stone, 'Sister Ray' and Ornette Coleman would be musically incendiary at any time, but in these times it was more than that. Can's aesthetic choices may have been instinctive, but they weren't coincidental: they were drawn to African rhythms, to the music of Eastern European gypsies, to non-hierarchical systems, personally and musically (crucial to their sound was the abuse of those strict tonal relationships enforced by the Third Reich's cultural guardians). They were, in Nazi parlance, Entartete Musik - degenerate music - taken almost to its limit. This was not necessarily a deliberate choice on their part. But with that mindset, in that country, at that point in history, there was no choice.

Progressive rock in Britain reflected a kind of aspirational complacency: trying to escape a three-chord trap, these generally well-brought-up musicians reached for the classical forms in which so many of them had been schooled. Fundamentally snobbish and bourgeois, this approach was poison to the new German bands, the kind of thinking from which they felt compelled to take rapid, immediate flight. The so-called Krautrock groups, even as they pushed at the limits of what rock could do (or what it could be), were drawn to precisely the elements of this music the Brit-proggers sought to purge: the inarticulacy, the mantric repetition, the grunginess, the extraneous noise. In Can's case, this sat well with an avant-garde aesthetic which couldn't have been more clearly opposed to the fetishisation of formal "perfection". What's more, they understood the potential significance of sound, its psychological sway, its strange capacity for subversion.

"Television is immensely interested in the political opinions of beat musicians, because they can't talk," a smirking Irmin Schmidt informed a German TV crew in 1971. "TV is not at all interested in the political opinions of people who also want socialism and a more human society, [and] can spell it out. I am insecure, I know much too little... so television, being gloriously critical of society, can take me as an example. So that it can preach: 'look, they do not know what they want!' [A little] bit of the revolution we want is included in the music, but you can destroy this when you manipulate the musicians in such a way that they are forced to interpret their music with words..."

Jaki Liebezeit was playful when he suggested that Can could be an acronym for communism, anarchism, nihilism, but it wasn't supposed to be a joke. This is a side to Can which is often forgotten, but they were as much oppositional as anything else, an extreme reaction to their own past and present. There's no other way to make sense of them; the unity, the exquisite restlessness, the way they work so very hard to transcend time and place. Can's relationship to the mood of post-war Germany is more than a footnote. It doesn't define them, but does provide a context within which they're easier to understand, and harder to reduce. This was "alternative" music, not (just) in the sense of consumer choice; a demonstration of a different way of living, an impression of freedom. Way out, as a way out.

The Lost Tapes is incredible, of course, but inevitably it's not all great. A few of these tracks, like the live (and very long) 'Abra Cada Braxas', feature a lot of the shrieking and rumbling into which Can would sometimes descend when things weren't really working out; despite its marvellous title, 'Networks Of Foam' is an uncharacteristically lazy lollop into the middle of nowhere, Irmin Schmidt's homage to Chick Corea let down by a meandering Karoli (finally, Schmidt gives in and just starts slamming his elbows down on the keys). It's not the musical form that's the problem - another live piece where they let it all hang out, 'Godzilla Fragment', sounds authentically crazed - it's the form of the musicians. It would have been slightly creepy if Can had not had the occasional off-day, but be prepared: a couple are recorded for posterity here.

While this is indeed three-and-a-quarter hours of unheard Can, in a way it kind of isn't, as many of these tracks are warm-ups or dry runs for some of the group's best-known recordings. 'A Swan Is Born' is the pencil sketch for Ege Bamyasi's 'Sing Swan Song'; 'Desert' is an early try-out of 'Soul Desert' from Soundtracks; 'On The Way To Mother Sky' is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bash at the instrumental sections of 'Mother Sky' (though there was still some way to go).

The lengthy 'Dead Pigeon Suite' - assembled from the soundtrack to a TV movie called Tote Taube In Der Beethovenstrasse; Dead Pigeon In Beethoven Street - is clearly the best of these works-in-progress. Groping towards 'Vitamin C' (arguably the most compact and clinical Can tune, the track on which their experimentation is at its most economical), 'Dead Pigeon Suite' is sprawling and open-plan, a sequence of variations spliced together and offered up like a sketchbook. It's almost a shame to be shown the workings - deep down, I think, we'd all like to believe that Can just played for nine hours one day, and somewhere in there was 'Vitamin C' - and yet as Damo Suzuki finds his bearings ("Hey!" he yells at 7:09; "you're losing!" at 7:18; "hey you!" at 8:17, and so on) it's impossible not to be drawn in. The band are still searching for the groove, as Liebezeit drums his limbs off and the others approach the track from every conceivable angle, and others besides. The keyboard break appears first as a spooky introduction on Damo's penny whistle, then again towards the end as an even spookier organ piece, Smile set in Mitteleuropa. But while 'Dead Pigeon Suite' is fascinating and at times almost painfully brilliant, it's still a (slightly) inferior version of something we already knew - too much of this and The Lost Tapes would have gone down the same road as The Beatles' Anthology, a curio, to be played increasingly rarely as the novelty wore off.

Most of this stuff, though, is brand new even to Can collectors and sounds implausibly, miraculously fresh. The tracks with Malcolm Mooney date from both before and after Monster Movie (the one LP on which he appears) and provide a broader view of what Can were up to at the very beginning. 'Waiting For The Streetcar', the best example here of that early, explicitly garagey Can, is a definite progression from the first album, fantastically delicate, fluid and brutal. A couple of these early shots are no more than "interesting" (barely that, in the case of the painfully stoned 'True Story' and the literally piss-taking 'The Agreement', a field recording from a lavatory) but there's plenty of Mooney material here which dwarfs Delay 1968, the earlier trawl through Can's 60s archive. 'When Darkness Comes', one of their last recordings together, sounds like Tim Buckley's 'Starsailor' with the smack drained from its veins, and offers a clue to how Can might have sounded in the 70s with their original line-up (the answer is "not quite as good", which makes it easier to enjoy). The best bit is right at the end: Mooney's head begins to clear and he launches into some basic R&B chanting, Schmidt underlines it with a mangled chord, and the whole thing stops abruptly at the very moment it's fallen together.

The Can sound expanded slowly, from the infinite density of Monster Movie to the wide open spaces of Future Days and the underrated Soon Over Babaluma, finally reaching heat death at an unspecified point in the late 1970s, by which time The Lost Tapes is over (there's one track from 1975, but nothing at all from later than that). Inevitably, most of the action came in that early-mid period, during which Can were possibly the most exciting group on Earth. On the fabulous seventeen-minute 'Graublau', short wave radio samples weave through a roughly-edited jam which has Can at their most obviously "Krautrocky" - it sounds like it dates from some time in 1970, between Soundtracks and Tago Mago - and their most effortlessly inspired. 'Messrs Scissors, Fork And Light' cuts together contributions to the soundtrack of Das Messer, another Can-scored polizei drama, and shivers exquisitely (with bits of 'Spoon' stirred in) while Liebezeit tries to channel the percussive power of a West African village. A live version of 'Spoon' does away with the record's twilit larking, setting the controls to "up" and then accelerating for seventeen minutes. Equally bold is another live recording, in which Can strip the sullen 'Mushroom' down to an ominous chug and lash at it with squeals from Karoli's guitar, until the tension is broken with a scream from the synths and a sudden collapse; it's frighteningly good. These are the moments where what Can "lost" in a cupboard sounds most beautifully like what most of us lost when we learned to speak.

In between are a number of minor tracks, highlighting the endlessly-curious eclecticism which kept Can six steps ahead. These range from the entirely abstract ('Blind Mirror Surf', 'Evening All Day') to snippets of ambient dislocated folk ('Private Nocturnal', 'Obscura Primavera'), serrated Teutonic funk ('Bubble Rap', 'Midnight Sky') and even, on 'The Loop', a stunted and shivering Chicago blues. These odd diversions and little tossed pebbles were always a part of Can, and while none of these tracks are shattering, it wouldn't be the same without them.

And whatever reservations can be rustled up in the name of objectivity or whatever, ultimately this is just... amazing. The Lost Tapes is in no way comparable to previous authorised doggy bags like Delay 1968 or Unlimited Edition. This is something else entirely - Can at their peak, indomitable.

And so, that lofty prescription, then: any group could learn a lot from close, repeated listening. It's still true, I think, but... well, that's it. It's still true. Isn't it? Now more than ever.

Trying to copy Can is irredeemably stupid, of course, unless you happen to have been trained up by a giant of the avant-garde, and have access to the greatest drummer in the history of popular music (anyone else intending to try should change the name of their band to Can't). People still talk about Can a lot, or steal a riff, or steal a beat, but what's worth taking is under the surface. The courage, the constant communication, the idea of the band as a cell; the countless possibilities suggested by Can in those five, six, seven years are still there ready to be used, and will bring light and space and something indefinable to any music brave enough to use them.

Anyone, in fact, could learn a lot from this; anyone caught in a present defined by atomisation and anomie. You only have to listen. The beauty and strength of The Lost Tapes is a reminder of that unused alternative, something drifting in from another time, a glimpse of what we could really achieve by living and working together."

any krautrock list without amon duul on it is hideously benighted. WOLF CITY, hundinnen!!

They are mentioned in the first two posts (latter by saintfool).

That is a band, along with Faust, Ash Ra Tempel and Neu, I'd like to learn more about (any favorite albums?), though I'm currently exploring Can. Both videos of the concert and doc linked in post #8 were outstanding, imo.

El Floppo said:

I saw Kraftwerk "live" during their Computerwelt tour.

them.

Click to expand...

At one time I had an album (I think Autobahn, but possibly Trans Europe Express?), and it seemed a bit dance/disco-oriented, but I never really checked them out more in depth, I know they were seminal electronica artists, and techno pioneers.

Kraftwerk - Pop Art (2015 BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foeQwGa085I

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution (three hour Krautrock doc, with an emphasis on Kraftwerk).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4JhwDa2Wvc

Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (40 minute doc, Eno gets some Krautrock cites for his work with Cluster, also did groundbreaking work in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, David Byrne/Talking Heads on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Light, David Bowie's Berlin period, he was one of the Godfather's of ambient music, as well as having a stellar production body of work, including U2).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9EkfGrkuEQ

Brian Eno - Another Green World (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPOz5-rcIeA

Bob Magaw said:

El Floppo said:

I saw Kraftwerk "live" during their Computerwelt tour.

them.

Click to expand...

At one time I had an album (I think Autobahn, but possibly Trans Europe Express?), and it seemed a bit dance/disco-oriented, but I never really checked them out more in depth, I know they were seminal electronica artists, and techno pioneers.

Kraftwerk - Pop Art (2015 BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foeQwGa085I

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution (three hour Krautrock doc, with an emphasis on Kraftwerk).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4JhwDa2Wvc

Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (40 minute doc, Eno gets some Krautrock cites for his work with Cluster, also did groundbreaking work in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, David Byrne on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Light, David Bowie's Berlin period, one of the Godfather's of ambient music, as well as a stellar production body of work, including U2).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9EkfGrkuEQ

Brian Eno - Another Green World (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPOz5-rcIeA

Click to expand...

Their first albums through Autobahn and Radioactivity do some pretty far-out exploration into electronics, rhythms and sound sculpting with the occasional more straight ahead "rock" stylings (Rucksack and Stratovarius were two of my fave tunes from those).

eta: their use of instrumentation was all over the place with mostly analog instruments fed through filters of some kind (I think). later albums were exclusively synth/digital.

They definitely went more into the dance realm with Trans Europe Express (1977- and one of my first three albums I ever bought, along with Queen, Live Killers and Kansas,Point of Know Return. My grandparents paid for them, but I have no memory of how I thought to grab TEE... maybe just from the album cover). IMO, TEE is one of the seminal albums of the 20th century- no hyperbole. I feel like it changed the way dance music sounded- and pretty much still sounds- and also helped create an entire genre. That it crossed over almost immediately into the hip-hop world isn't much of a surprise.

Their live show for Computerwelt was pretty ####### great in 1981 (I was in Paris on vacation with my family and somehow talked my parents into letting my older brother and I go)- in a small club where we were just off the stage. I'll never forget Showroom Dummies, where they turned the lights off briefly and when they came back on, perfect likenesses (mannequins) of the entire band were set up next to the performers... couldn't tell them apart, which should be pretty horrible given the implied state of stasis required to pull that off... but it worked incredibly somehow. but the best moment was Pocket Calculator, when the pulled up hand made, hand-held synths and drum machines... and of course a calculator for the song. Sounds hokey (they might be giants kitchy) now- but it was amazing in that moment.

Bob Magaw said:

Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (40 minute doc, Eno gets some Krautrock cites for his work with Cluster, also did groundbreaking work in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, David Byrne on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Light, David Bowie's Berlin period, one of the Godfather's of ambient music, as well as a stellar production body of work, including U2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9EkfGrkuEQ

Brian Eno - Another Green World (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPOz5-rcIeA

Click to expand...

i'm not sure what the tie-in is for Eno and Krautrock. Eno is a LOT of things but not kraut-y. i feel like it's stretching some things from, say, AGW to speak of him in the same breath as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Faust and others. sure, Tangerine Dream with the ambient stuff but the output for Eno in the 70's is all over the place. i think of his rock albums of the day - Here Come the Warm Jets, Before and After Science, Taking Tiger Mountain - as art rock. his DNA absolutely found in Bowie and Talking Heads during the time. i always sort of equate Krautrock as the euro response to the very british Prog rock movement. they're both born out of pyschedelia of, say, Floyd but prog is as specfic as Kraut is in its identifiers to me.

saintfool said:

Bob Magaw said:

Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (40 minute doc, Eno gets some Krautrock cites for his work with Cluster, also did groundbreaking work in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, David Byrne on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Light, David Bowie's Berlin period, one of the Godfather's of ambient music, as well as a stellar production body of work, including U2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9EkfGrkuEQ

Brian Eno - Another Green World (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPOz5-rcIeA

Click to expand...

i'm not sure what the tie-in is for Eno and Krautrock. Eno is a LOT of things but not kraut-y. i feel like it's stretching some things from, say, AGW to speak of him in the same breath as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Faust and others. sure, Tangerine Dream with the ambient stuff but the output for Eno in the 70's is all over the place. i think of his rock albums of the day - Here Come the Warm Jets, Before and After Science, Taking Tiger Mountain - as art rock. his DNA absolutely found in Bowie and Talking Heads during the time. i always sort of equate Krautrock as the euro response to the very british Prog rock movement. they're both born out of pyschedelia of, say, Floyd but prog is as specfic as Kraut is in its identifiers to me.

Click to expand...

completely agree.

Tangerine Dream at Coventry Garden (may be dreaded audio dub, but from same period, circa Ricochet '75?), 27 minutes VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGByDwiiECw

saintfool said:

Bob Magaw said:

Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (40 minute doc, Eno gets some Krautrock cites for his work with Cluster, also did groundbreaking work in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, David Byrne on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Light, David Bowie's Berlin period, one of the Godfather's of ambient music, as well as a stellar production body of work, including U2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9EkfGrkuEQ

Brian Eno - Another Green World (BBC doc 1 hr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPOz5-rcIeA

Click to expand...

i'm not sure what the tie-in is for Eno and Krautrock. Eno is a LOT of things but not kraut-y. i feel like it's stretching some things from, say, AGW to speak of him in the same breath as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Faust and others. sure, Tangerine Dream with the ambient stuff but the output for Eno in the 70's is all over the place. i think of his rock albums of the day - Here Come the Warm Jets, Before and After Science, Taking Tiger Mountain - as art rock. his DNA absolutely found in Bowie and Talking Heads during the time. i always sort of equate Krautrock as the euro response to the very british Prog rock movement. they're both born out of pyschedelia of, say, Floyd but prog is as specfic as Kraut is in its identifiers to me.

Click to expand...

I think his work with Cluster is the main point of connection (if any?), but I'm admittedly not that well versed on them, I once had one of their albums. And possibly a stretch, but in Bowie's Berlin period (Low, Heroes, etc.), his original conception was to use Krautrock musicians such as Neu, not sure about the history and specifics of why that didn't happen. I think Neu actually had a song called Hero, mentioned in the Krautrock doc (post #11). As far as the timeline, it was right after Eno had spent time in Germany with Cluster. But not to belabor the point, or put too fine a point on things, maybe there was little or even no connection for practical purposes. I was listing music such as Roxy and the collaborations with Fripp and Byrne/Talking Heads just as a resume/CV more than anything else. Certainly the Roxy and Byrne/Talking Heads material doesn't have much to do with Krautrock. Some of the Eno/Frippertronics instrumental soundscapes were SOMEWHAT reminiscent of Tangerine Dream* (or at least had some similarities in abstract electronic sensibility) to me, but I am probably in the minority on that.

* Let's just say, some of Eno/Fripp's work sounds more like Tangerine Dream of that era to me, than it does like same era British prog bands like Yes, ELP, Genesis and even King Crimson (Fripp's band). Anyway, if he has any connection, it could be remote. I just find Eno interesting for a lot of reasons, and when I saw a few videos within a similar grouping of Krautrock videos, that prompted me to include the links. Others can disregard for our purposes within THIS context as they see fit. Thanks for the critical input, I'm interested in learning more about the genre, and it sounds like you know more about it. Anything that makes the thread more accurate and potentially useful to others is also appreciated. Other than Tangerine Dream and just recently exploring Can in a lot more depth, you could fill the Hollywood Bowl with what I don't know about Krautrock! I am liking some early Neu! samples, after hearing some hints and sonic glimmers in the aforementioned Krautrock doc.

** Probably also worth noting (or reiterating, as it was noted in the initial wiki description) for the thread, there wasn't a Krautrock "scene" per se, it was a label by the British press that caught on globally, and I have used it in the thread title. Many of these bands may not have been aware of their counterparts at the beginning, and Can doesn't sound much like Kraftwerk, for instance (and in the end, may have so many more differences than similarities, it brings into question the validity of the descriptive term). Krautrock can be a useful tag, label, identifier, code, shorthand since most people realize that many groups may have had virtually nothing in common, other than being from Germany (maybe there are even Mongolian and Eskimo Krautrock bands? ), falling within a loose time frame and having this genre moniker. When I think about it, using synthesizers seems to be a big part of the seeming perception that Krautrock has some meaning and is a useful distinction, but even there, not sure they were ALWAYS used (I saw Can jam with acoustic instruments in the studio, though that would seem to be the exception live and in their recorded body of work), and they were clearly used by bands in greatly different ways, for different sounds and purposes. If the descriptive term arises out of the pretty simplistic and reductionist confluence of bands and music that are marked by being German and employing synthesizers, it would be completely bizzare to lump all British bands that use synthesizers within a similarly loose time frame under the imaginary rubric of Limeyrock (and one of the Neu! musicians makes more or less this same point in the doc). "Spaghetti" Western as a cinematic genre descriptor is perhaps a related example, in that it is somewhat of a slur that became so broadly used and entrenched, most people probably give no thought about its potentially offensive root word.

*** A more substantive difference or distinction marking Krautrock, is that many of them (whether thay knew each other or not) were reportedly consciously attempting to break from Anglo-American rock, specifically its roots in the blues. Here also, though, there must be an infinite number of ways to accomplish that? I'm curious and interested if you care to elaborate and expand on the alluded to specific identifiers that serve to "define" and link those bands that fall within the overlapping Venn diagrams comprising the genre sub-set we commonly associate with Krautrock.

Inherent Vice Soundtrack/Score, includes the Can song Vitamin C (second track) highlighted by saintfool in post #5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCzH4iC0-lg&list=PL_P1WAMWspRA-fIAosJaZeFJXcvVU5952

When I went to see the movie, a few things stood out. The back catalog-type songs were quirky, off beat and at times somewhat obscure (and incidentally pitch perfect for the era), so I stayed in the theater through the end of the credit roll to see who they were by. Can may have been the only band or artist with two songs (Spoon* was also in the movie but not included on the soundtrack), and it also included Journey Through The Past by Neil Young. I'm not that familiar with Radiohead so didn't know about guitarist Jonny Greenwood, but his atmospheric, understated incidental music scoring and orchestration served the movie well (guess he has done a few previous Anderson films, such as There Will Be Blood). I have read sine that Thomas Yorke and Greenwood have mentioned Can as influences, and I think performed/recorded a cover song.

Both Can songs were from their fourth album - Ege Bamyasi. While they had more good albums, some critics think they had three consecutive masterpieces when they were really on a roll in the early to mid-'70s. All included the eccentric, unpredictable but gifted former street musician, singer Damo Suzuki (along with his predecessor and fellow amateur vocalist, African American sculptor Malcolm Mooney, who was dodging the draft in Germany in the last '60s, they were from the shamanic, highly repetitive mantra school of singing). Ege Bamyasi, arguably their most immediately accessible album, was preceded by psychedelic classic Tago Mago, and followed by the ethereal, ambient infused/interlaced Future Days.

The musicians in Can and their albums/songs were decades ahead of their time, and at their TRANCE FUNK best they still sound contemporary, even like they could have been made in the future (or strangely timeless).

* Spoon

Bob Magaw said:

I forgot that I have a few things by Klaus Schulze, Timewind, X and Cyborg. He was associated with Tangerine Dream, but later branched off to a brilliant solo career in the mid-'70s and beyond. Schulze's work features washes of synths and cosmic soundscapes. Some of his best work was very influential, and included some electronic masterpieces. The original Timewind album included two approx. half hour sides, and the remastered deluxe edition ('06) below extended that with another disc, bringing it to nearly two hours of playing time.

Klaus Schulze - Timewind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrERTabOJ9M

Click to expand...

Klaus was always one of my favorites in this genre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59gR5aJh_S8

I was listening to Timewind and X again the past few days, they include some sweeping, massive soundscapes, and were even better than I remembered (I tended to listen to Tangerine Dream back in the day, and discovered Schulze relatively later). I need to give the earlier Cyborg (second album?) another listen. Any others you would recommend?

Bob Magaw said:

I was listening to Timewind and X again the past few days, they include some sweeping, massive soundscapes, and were even better than I remembered (I tended to listen to Tangerine Dream back in the day, and discovered Schulze relatively later). I need to give the earlier Cyborg (second album?) another listen. Any others you would recommend?

Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ATeFGN2Ss

I thought you might mention that, Timewind and Mirage made a top 25 ambient albums list. Moondawn is another one that sounds critically acclaimed. Bummer the latter two seem to be OOP and deleted from his back catalog.

For the thread, Schulze is a multi-instrumentalist that was an early drummer for Tangerine Dream, and also played with another Krautrock outfit, Ash Ra Tempel, before branching off into an extraordinary solo career. His orchestral conception and sound is very Teutonic (think Wagner or Mahler if synthesizers were available to them in the 19th century). Schulze was without a doubt an electronic keyboard pioneer and synth wizard (like diverse, eclectic artists in jazz, pop, funk and rock such as Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder, Bernie Worrell, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Todd Rundgren, not to mention groups such as The Beatles and Pink Floyd).

Tangerine Dream recorded prolifically. Not counting bootlegs, there were over 100 titles. Their movie scores alone came to over 60. Their first score Sorceror is still my favorite, partially because it is attached to the Billy Friedkin movie which is one of my favorites. Thief by Michael Mann probably second, another great movie. Friedkin recommended them to Mann, and that is the score that really broke them in Hollywood. The below article is the best entre I've seen into their body of work. It focuses on the years they recorded for Richard Branson's Virgin label. Prior to that, they had four albums (Electronic Meditation, Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem). Part I covers the first half of their Virgin stint, with the so called classic lineup of Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann.

Five albums from this period can be found in post #28 below. First Virgin album Phaedra is considered a seminal electronica work, and was the first in which they used their signature sequencer-driven sound. They had some momentum in England, as legendary DJ John Peel had named Atem his " Best Album of '73". Ricochet and Encore are the two earliest and arguably remain the best live albums in a career that spanned more than four decades, and might be a good place to start for anybody that is unfamiliar with them, at least outside their film score/soundtrack legacy, where no doubt many were first exposed to them (the live albums Logos and Quichotte/Pergamon, from the second half of their Virgin period, and the later Jive label release Poland, all with the Froese/Franke/Schmoelling lineup iteration, were also well received).

Tangerine Dream: Remembering The Dream

http://www.ambientcentury.co.uk/classic-author-writings.html

PART 1

Tangerine Dream! The very name conjures up vistas of a different age. An age when hair was long, when Afghan coats and joss sticks were all the rage. An age when hours and hours of electronic music was listened to in packed halls, Cathedrals and amphitheatres across the world. For Tangerine Dream were, and still are to millions of their fans, the de facto progressive rock group. A group whose albums were long excursions into electronic sound possibilities, whose concerts combined the latest technology with the flash of rock improvisation. A group whose mystique has remained virtually intact for nearly forty five years.

What is most incredible about Tangerine Dream is that they achieved 10 million album sales and a worldwide fame on the basis of reputation alone. My first encounter with the Dream was in the late 1970s in Dublin when the brilliant 'Stratosfear' album was doing the rounds of University campuses. Nobody had really heard much about them and many compared them to Pink Floyd. Nevertheless thousands queued patiently for their gig at Dublin's National Stadium while truckloads of equipment was unloaded. When entry was finally gained the packed arena was treated to a phantasmogorical display of sound and light effects punctuated by the odd billowing of dry ice. As was their custom, the German trio hid behind a dark gauze, surrounded by banks and banks of flashing lights and glistening equipment. And no one seemed to mind for this was an occasion of pure connection - when sequenced electronic pulse overlayed by keyboard and guitar melody plucked at the heart of each and every listener.

That famous critic Lester Bangs once thought he saw God at a Tangerine Dream gig during the '70s. And many would agree with him for the group's mystique was always as important as the magical way they extracted melodic and beautiful sounds from what seemed to an observer a tangle of wires and switches. Even a glance at track titles such as 'Fly and Collision of Cosmas Sola', 'Astral Voyager', 'Cloudburst Flight' or 'Thru Metamorphic Rocks' indicates that here was a group of individuals whose interests transcended the frippery of the three-minute pop song. A constant in reviews of concerts or records of the 1970s is the power of the group to make the listener travel, the sheer organic life inherent in the music itself.

Back in the Autumn of 1987 Tangerine Dream played a huge free concert at the Reichstag near the old Berlin Wall. A virtual cornucopia of laser effects and electro-rhythms it was evident that they had lost none of their charisma. And as the CD age came upon us the power of the Dream's electronic voyage was brought into even sharper relief. For here was a music that seemed like it was invented for the digital age - a music of silence and volume, of subtle tones and shifting colours. Though founder-member Edgar Froese still leads a contemporary Tangerine Dream today it is the classic trio recordings made with Virgin in the decade from 1974 which form the bedrock of their reputation. And not only does this lovingly remastered boxed set document those years it also celebrates what for many is one of the most revolutionary sound adventures in rock.

Semblance of a Dream

"Music is like an ocean. It's a huge ocean of ideas and you've got the chance to create big rivers out of that ocean or just little streams of water. It depends only on your visions, mentality, emotional situation and creativity. One must work hard and think about the old composers for inspiration. Beethovan and Mozart, they were the revolutionaries who died physically for therk. They were the rock and rollers of their time!"(Edgar Froese)(1)

Edgar Froese was born in Tilsit, Lithuania on June 6th, 1944. His first choice of music was classical and he spent five years studying painting and sculpture in Berlin. Influenced by the rock music imported by American GI's , Froese turned to guitar and auditioned for a band called The Ones. He was quite into the Stones at the time. " I was first of all attracted to their looks. Their faces were absolutely damaged. They were the absolute opposite of The Beatles!"(2)



Froese's group , which included an organ, did the Berlin clubs until a painter friend invited him to Cadeques, a fishing village in North Western Spain near to Salvador Dali's villa in Port Lligat. This was a crucial move for on meeting Dali Froese thought that he might be able to apply the painter's surrealistic techniques to music. Back in Berlin huge grants were attracting the likes of Stockhausen and John Cage to the city. The place was alive with new ideas for tape and electronic music. In 1967 Froese and The Ones returned to Cadeques to work with Dali on a French television film. They also performed at his villa - and were involved in a happening around Dali's famous "Christ Statue." That was their height for afterwards they spent four depressing months starving in Paris, playing Johnnny Halliday's club and supporting Jimmy Cliff at a club near the Moulin Rouge. Not surprisingly the band broke up with only one single to their name. (above)



Back in Berlin Froese's head was full of exotic musical ideas. The summer of love had brought with it the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and inspired by a line from John Lennon's 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', Froese formed Tangerine Dream in Sept 1967. The first line-up included Volker Hombach (flute and violin), Kirt Hirkenberg (bass) and Lanse Hapshash (drums). The period was one of great upheaval in Germany as the politics of hippiedom drifted through youth culture and out on the streets of Berlin. The word was revolt and music with tunes was considered bourgeois. Hans Roedelius (later of Cluster) founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab with Conrad Schnitzler in Berlin in 1968 to reflect the changing mood. With one room painted black and another painted white it played host to sound experiments with amplifiers, tone generators and organ manipulations. Tangerine Dream would play five to six hours a night, an explosively loud group they were reputed to begin with Pink Floyd's 'Interstellar Overdrive' and go up in register from there, improvising all the way!



Together with such groups as Can, Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru, Kraan, Amon Duul, Agitation Free,Floh De Cologne and Organisation (later Kraftwerk); Tangerine Dream were part of a new vanguard happy to break with Germany's inglorious past. In Sept 1968 they played a famous Essen festival headlined by Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley. But the line-up was unstable with various drummers and bass players coming and going. In 1969 a Berlin Conservatory student Steve Jolliffe joined on electric flute but had left by Nov 1969 when Froese met Klaus Schulze a classical guitarist turned drummer who had formed the group Psy Free. Together with old friend Conrad Schnitzler they set up in a rented factory space and let rip with a two-track Revox for company. The results were the debut Dream album Electronic Meditation.

According to Schulze - " We recorded and toured 'Electronic Meditation'. That for me is the primary electronic album. Edgar played guitar , Shnitzler organ and me drums through loads of effects. We were experimenting with a lot of random stuff and were making up our own sounds. I remember Conrad had this metal cup full of these bits of glass in which he stuck a microphone attached to an echo machine.I played a lot of different percussive sounds that were then altered by machines. It was just great to be in a band who were open to so much experimentation." (3)

Though it contained elements of late 1960s Pink Floyd and a lot of wigged-out psychedelic guitar the album had enough weird noises to attract the attention of the fledgling Ohr records who released it in 1970 after a tour of Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Surprisingly Schulze had quit the group before the album was even released. He joined Ash Ra Tempel and would go on to record 27 solo albums. And though he briefly rejoined the Dream in 1973 for a French tour his early association with the group ensured him a kind of mythical status amongst fans. By 1971 Froese was looking for a replacement and met Christoph Franke (b. April 1952) in Berlin. Franke was considered the best young jazz drummer in Germany and had done some serious study in Strasbourg and Nancy, particularly about the relationship between theatre and music. Franke was in the seminal Agitation Free and first saw Tangerine Dream at an experimental studio in Berlin. " They were making experiments with instruments and also with visuals, with pictures and exhibitions."(4) After doing some TV music and working in an Arts Lab in Vienna, Conrad Shnitzler then left to be replaced by Steve Schroyder on organ.

So the trio of Froese, Franke and Schroyder went into a studio in Koln and recorded their first cosmic album Alpha Centauri named after the brightest star in the Southern constellation. With its gothic organs, wafting flutes and weird synthesizer sound courtesy Roland Paulyck, 1971's Alpha Centauri established Tangerine Dream as Germany's premier space rock group. Again the line-up changed as Schroyder left and various organists came and went until Froese saw keyboardist Peter Baumann working in a Berlin club with a band called The Ants. Baumann, still in his late teens was interested in synthesizers as was Franke. By 1972 the classic line-up of Froese/Franke/Baumann was in place. They got down to a work on a huge double album called Zeit with Franke and Baumann on VCS3 synths, Froese on mellotron , organ and guitar, Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh on the big Moog and four cello players. It was called a 'Largo in Four Movements' and was completely experimental. To give an idea of how they were viewed at the time a French critic Herve Picart saw them play at a festival in the Theatre de L'Ouest,Paris alongside Kraftwerk, Ash Ra Tempel and other German groups of the period. In his Feb 1973 review , Picart contended that Tangerine Dream made -

"An abstract music, excessively intellectualised, a pure creation of sounds without any search nor any rhythm nor any evocation. A music of a cold empty cosmos, electronic , as distant as these impossible musicians entrenched and immobile behind their desks. In short, we are left with the feeling that Tangerine Dream think too much!" (5)

Their next work Atem , thir final album for Ohr, was released that summer. More accessible than 'Zeit' ,'Atem' involved long rustic organ solos reminiscent of Pink Floyd circa 'Ummagumma'. It experimented with volume and had an almost quasi-religious quality. Though many were baffled by Tangerine Dream's drift it has now been recognised that their early recordings are of historical significance.(In fact Virgin re-issued all four recordings in 1976). According to American New Music expert John Schaefer - " Here were three young German rock musicians playing music that sounded as bizarre and self-indulgent as Stockhausen sounded to much of the traditional classical audience. Often without any recognisable melodies or harmonies early TD recordings took the listener on a flight through a chemical wonderland - spacey, occasionally abrasive, at times completely adrift from conventional music forms."

Phaedra

If European audiences were puzzled by their direction, in Britain they had a sizeable and growing following. DJ John Peel was a big fan of 'Atem' and wrote and phoned Edgar Froese to tell him how much he loved their music. 'Atem' became his album of 1973. That summer Peter Baumann left to travel in Nepal and India and Tangerine Dream were reduced to a duo. Virgin Records in London were impressed by the burgeoning following of the group and wanted to sign them up. In Baumann's absence , Froese and Franke went into Skyline Studios Berlin to record Green Desert , a series of electronic tone poems using such devices as a rhythm controller and phaser along with the usual synthesisers and keyboards. The album was not released until 1986 but today shows just how much ongoing "sound research" the group was involved in. When Baumann returned from his travels the group played the tapes for Virgin. Richard Branson offered them a five year contract and was keen for the trio to come to Britain to record a new opus at the Manor studios in Shipton where Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' had been hatched. A huge modular Moog synthesizer was bought with the advance and the trio arrived in Oxfordshire in the winter of 1973 for what would become one of the most important recording sessions of Tangerine Dream's life.

Recorded in less than six weeks Phaedra has passed into the lexicon of electronic music as a state of the art showcase of embryonic technology coupled with fearless innovation. The title comes from the Greek myth of Phaedra who committed suicide after her stepson refused her advances. The album is divided into four sections, two credited to the group, one each to Froese and Baumann. Along with conventional instruments like guitar,bass, organ and flute each member used a VCS 3 Synthi. Froese played his mellotron, Franke the big Moog and Baumann electric piano. The title track 'Phaedra' was a blueprint of sequenced Moog beat and electronic embellishment. At over 17 minutes it conveyed feelings of the cosmos, of giant suns exploding, of huge ocean movements , of mythological lands, of eddies and drifts. Layer upon layer of futuristic sounds piled one on top of the other until the whole thing climaxes in some interstellar void. 'Mysterious Semblance at The Strand of Nightmares' had a sub-aquatic feel, all thick Mellotron and effects as if it were the soundtrack for the birth and death of ancient land masses. 'Movements of a Visionary' brought back the sequenced Moog with overlays of organ and bright keyboards. Baumann's final 'Sequent C' had hints of Mahler with its textured flute drones and at just over 2 minutes was a fittingly brief finale to an incredible album. Described as 'melting music' with a cover to match 'Phaedra' was released on the 20th Feb 1974 and rocketed Tangerine Dream straight into the U.K. album charts. An incredible feat for an electronic music album, 'Phaedra' reached the Top 20 (No 15) and stayed on the chart for 15 weeks on the strength of its quality alone. Edgar Froese remembers -

" The first recording session took place on Nov 20th 1973 in the Manor near Oxford. Until this session Tangerine Dream had only improvised. 'Phaedra' was the first album in which many things had to be structured. The reason was that we were using the Moog sequencer (all driving bass notes) for the first time. Just tuning the instrument took several hours each day, because at the time there were no pre-sets or memory banks. We worked each day from 11 o'clock in the morning to 2 o'clock at night. By the 11th day we barely had 6 minutes of music on tape. Technically everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The tape machine broke down, there were repeated mixing console failures and the speakers were damaged because of the unusually low frequencies of the bass notes. After 12 days of this we were completely knackered. Fortunately, after a two day break in the countryside a new start brought a breakthrough. 'Mysterious Semblance' was recorded on Dec 4th. Pete and Chris were asleep after a long day's recording session so I invited my wife, Monique, into the studio. I called in the studio engineer and recorded it in one take on a double-keyboaded Mellotron while Monique turned the knobs on a phasing device. This piece is on the record exactly as it was recorded that day. And this practice was to continue for the rest of the session."



"For example on the title track Chris pressed the button to start the bubbling bass note. Unfortunately the bass pattern didn't work the way it should have - after a few seconds, as you can hear on the album, the note drops in but out of tune. Chris then started tuning the bass sequence while running it. What he didn't know was that I had told the engineer to press the recording button whenever music or some sounds could be heard. So what you hear at the beginning of 'Phaedra' is a rehearsal! Even when I started playing the melody line it was just a try - no one thought it would go on the record. A day later, Simon Draper, Virgin's A & R man, popped into the studio to say hello. After he heard the opening title track he was stunned. When the album was released it topped the charts all over the place, the group receiving gold records in over 7 countries around the globe." (7)

Surprisingly Tangerine Dream's first move after the album's release was to come to England to work on the soundtrack for a play 'Oedipus Tyrannus',produced by the actor Keith Michell for the Chichester Theatre. Michell was fascinated by 'Phaedra's "space time element" and wanted a special project. In London in April 1974 the group gave a fascinating interview to journalist Karl Dallas about their working practices and philosophy. Froese talked of spending " a month in rehearsal to work out most of the thousand sounds that are possible. It's real teamwork." Added Baumann - " We get into the feeling of the situation and we start to choose the instruments and the special parts from harmony up to rhythm up to the colour of the sound to get close to the situation. When we're in the right surroundings we can put more of ourselves into the music and thus have more feeling. And the equipment helps." They seemed to be dissatisfied with straight rock. Baumann felt that " after a while you find you can't listen to loud music". Froese concluded that electronics saved the group and that things were nearly over when Franke sold his drums. " We had to start all over from the beginning with just a sine wave, discovering the difference between real sounds and just imitating sounds." (8)

In June of 1974 they recorded the "Oedipus" score at CBS studios and a concept album version of it at the Manor but they weren't happy with it so it was never released. That month also saw their first U.K. concert at Victoria Palace Theatre and at the near the end of the year Tangerine Dream returned to do a full twenty date British tour, trademarking the almost sacred nature of their work by playing mostly improvised sets from a darkened stage to a hushed audience. This religious aspect was heightened by their performance at Reims famous Gothic Cathedral in North East France. Supported by high-priestess of gloom Nico (of Velvet Underground fame) the event turned into something of a legend when 6000 people turned up at a venue only designed for 2000. Chaos ensued and later Pope Paul VI issued a decree banning them from playing any more Catholic cathedrals. He even went so far as to have Reims purified. In any event it gave Tangerine Dream an enormous amount of publicity as well as credibility.

Crossing the Rubycon

The crossing of the river Rubicon in 49 B.C. by Julius Caesar led to an unstoppable war. Hence the phrase today denotes a point of no return. When Froese, Franke and Baumann entered the Manor again in Jan of 1975 the set about recording an album that would establish them as masters of the electronic rhythm - what John Schaefer describes as the " chugga - chugga - chug sound of sequencers"(9) - a sound that would be adopted wholeheartedly by Ambient House groups such as The Orb in the '90s. Rubycon featured much the same instrumentation as 'Phaedra' with Franke adding a modified Elka organ and gong while Baumann introduced prepared piano and Arp synth. It also showed a disdain for the Single orientation of mainstream rock in that it was a suite in two parts taking up two entire sides of an LP.

'Rubycon Part 1' opened with some exquisite random tones which recalled some of Karlheinz Stockhausen's timbral experiments of the early 1950s . Then it broke into an aural sea of high fluted drones and synth washes, a sort of coda to the mesh-like flavour of 'Phaedra'. After about seven minutes the thick sequencer beat of the Moog began to run embroidered by all sorts of fantastical synth sounds. A dancing, unfurling rhythm this was state-of-the art electronic music with treated keyboard notes that seemed to well-up out of nowhere and disappear again in a cloud of hazy effects. 'Part 2' seemed to pay homage to Gyorgi Ligeti's spine-chilling 'Lux Aeterna' , the immortal choral piece that defined the strangeness of the film '2001 A Space Odyssey'. After four minutes the eerie chorus abated and once again the pulse of the Moog was felt as Tangerine Dream let fly with every type of sound in their electronic arsenal. The calm almost rural finale was mirrored by Monique Froese's terrific water-drop blue sleeve (Fans of the group could also find a small photo of the Froese's son Jerome hidden inside the gatefold, a touch that could be traced right back to 'Alpha Centauri'). Not surprisingly the public lapped it up and when it was released in March of 1975 it went straight to number 12 in the British chart, staying there for fourteen weeks. Edgar Froese recalls the recording of one of there most successful albums -

"When the band walked into the Manor for the second time, we were weighed down by the success of 'Phaedra'. There was a pressure to 'do it again' but one has to point out that Simon Draper and Richard Branson at Virgin did not pressure us to be commercial. The attitude was that Tangerine Dream could do whatever they wanted on record, which was a very unusual practice for a record company. The recording of 'Rubycon' was a very floating process. Unlike the 'Phaedra' production there was never a break in the creative flow. The band had been on tour for most of the previous year and was now hot to spend a month working on new music. Because of the commercial success of 'Phaedra' the sequencers could now be technically better equipped. At that time this branch of technology was fairly unknown and any technical alterations had to be custom-built. This was a very extensive undertaking and most of our 'Phaedra' earnings went into new equipment."

"I had orchestral instruments recorded by the BBC for my mellotron, at the time a very luxurious thing to do. One can hear an oboe on 'Rubycon Part 2' as well as numerous string sections and horns. The biggest problem, however, was the inconstant power supply at the Manor. At the time there were electrical problems throughout the Oxford region and sometimes the power was cut off for two to three hours at a time. We had to interrupt recording sessions when this happened or conect our synths to electrical generators. Chris's Moog often played completely random sequences because of the unstable electrical current driving the oscillators. It was a crazy situation. When we finished recording there were 12 hours of music from which to mix the final master." (10)



When 'Rubycon' was released Tangerine Dream were on an Australian tour due to the success there of 'Phaedra'. Again Peter Baumann opted out and was replaced by old Berlin chum Michael Hoenig. There were many problems including airline strikes and transit damage to Chris Franke's big Moog. When they returned in April for a sold-out Albert Hall gig, Baumann was back in the fold within two weeks of the gig. They bought new equipment and kept gigging. In August they played a Roman Amphitheatre in Southern France and in September were special guests of the 'Fete de l'Humanite' in Paris, a huge event sponsored by the French Communist Party. After their French tour they again toured Britain this time taking in Coventry and Liverpool cathedrals as well as York Minster. Tony Palmer filmed the Coventry gig for posterity.



1975 was a significant year for electronic music. Kraftwerk from Dusseldorf had expanded to a quartet and had found huge success in America with the hypnotic 'Autobahn'. Their tours of that year were prescient reminders that electro-pop did have a future. And while such behemoths of rock as The Stones and Led Zeppelin were literally trampling America underfoot the enigmatic Pink Floyd had scored a cross-Atlantic number one album with the throbbing VCS3 synth sounds of the immaculate 'Wish You Were Here'. Elsewhere Brian Eno was building on the systems music ideas of American minimalists Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. Both 'Another Green World' and 'Discreet Music' proved that an Ambient electronic sound was as accessible as any MOR ballad while his collaboration with Robert Fripp 'Evening Star' was full of shimmering beauty. Mike Oldfield released the enchanting 'Ommadawn' and back in Germany Can recorded their debut album for Virgin 'Landed' whilst Neu released the classic 'Neu '75'. Tangerine Dream finished the year by overdubbing tapes of their French and British tours and releasing the results in the form of Ricochet. Again spread over two continuous sides the album was vintage Tangerine Dream. 'Part 2' was particularly memorable with its foresty flute and acoustic piano intro which led to an extraordinary sequencer run full of exotic electronic sounds, some of which would become sample staples for such '90s House groups as The Future Sound of London. Chris Franke - "The concerts were much too long to use in one context. We had to edit about forty or fifty hours of music, kilometres of tape to find the most important parts, the most typical things of us. We were very satisfied with the results." (11)

Stratospheric Heights

The period from the beginning of 1976 to the end of 1977 was to be one of great intensity for Tangerine Dream - a period marked by dazzling success and spirit-sapping dissolution. It was a time of film music, of American tours with the latest laser technology. It was a time of brilliant studio and live albums. But it was also a time when the classic trio of Froese/Franke/Baumann split apart forever. After finishing a European tour 1976 began with the Dream retiring to Berlin to work on a soundtrack for American film-maker William Friedkin, the gritty realist director of such films as 'The French Connection' and 'The Exorcist'. 'Sorcerer' was a re-make of Clouzot's 1953 'The Wages of Fear'about risky truck transport and Friedkin was so into the Dream's music that he wanted to make the film around whatever they came up with in the studio. Though the film was no great shakes the soundtrack (licensed to MCA from Virgin) was evocative, stylish and full of economic throbs courtesy of their new customised Projeckt Electronic equipment. Froese was particularly pleased - " All our knowledge about improvising and creating very fast meant that when we sat down for the first time to compose the music for Friedkin it was so easy! We put it down in a few words - words about forms and melody lines and prism structures. We wrote it all down and then we taped the lot."(12) The soundtrack's release over a year later saw it go Top 25 and sealed Tangerine Dream's future career as in-demand film composers.

Yet back in the summer of '76 there were still problems. Baumann was uneasy about his role in the group and took time out to record his first Virgin solo album 'Romance '76', a mixture of stripped-down electro beat and strange orchestral textures. That summer Virgin re-released the early Dream records but the most important event was the August recording of Stratosfear (note the spelling!) at Audio Studios in Berlin. Possibly their most enduring album, 'Stratosfear' came wrapped in a Sci-Fi flavoured metaphysical sleeve of receding oblong slabs over a red saturated horizon. The contents involved four tracks of exceptional beauty with the usual Moogs and Mellotrons being augmented by harpsichord, acoustic guitars, grand piano and mouth organ. Peter Baumann utilised a new Projeckt Electronic Rhythm Computer which gave the percussive sequences a very dry, precise finish. The title track contained succulent guitar passages and some nice splashes of stringed mellotron. There was a lightness of touch about the album, an almost classical abstraction. 'The Big sleep in search of Hades' was formed around a harpsichord/flute motif that was Chopin-like in its delicacy. The epic '3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh from Okefenokee' began with a keyboard ping reminiscent of Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' and slowly transformed into an evocation of the Florida swamps replete with harmonica and burbling water effects. A heavily synthesized bass figure then spiralled up to propulsive sequencer passages enhanced here and there by string and bell sounds. 'Invisible Limits' completed an impeccable album with a gorgeous creamy sound, featuring Froese's electric guitar and insistent electro-rhythms which climaxed on the pastoral flute/piano sound of old. Edgar Froese -

"Looking back, this was the most complicated and nerve-wracking of any TD production. Peter had just had this huge Computer Sequencer built for him. It was technically much more comfortable to use and the tuning was more stable. However this instrument was only completed two weeks after recording had begun and it had taken the Berlin electronics company a year to build it. Peter had a lot of problems with it and anything that could go wrong, both technically and musically, did. Myself and Chris often left the studio in a bad mood. The recording time cost a fortune and the production went on for weeks. When Peter finally had his sequencer under control, both of the multi-track machines in the studio suddenly and inexplicably broke down. These were repaired after three days but then smoke started pouring out of the Dolby units in the recording room. Since these were important noise-reduction units recording was again interrupted for many days until they were repaired. And then there were a number of musical problems amongst the group about which tracks were to be chosen. When I appeared in the studio one day with a harmonica the absurdity of the situation was revealed. It was supposed to be a joke, a retort to the unpredictability of the technology, but after playing it during the beginning of '3 A.M.' everybody decided to leave it on. So much happened during those sessions - master tapes at times disappeared from the studio, finished tracks were mysteriously erased and the mixing console finally went up in smoke. The events which occurred during the making of 'Stratosfear' alone would fill an entire book!"

(13)

'Stratosfear' would go on to become the most identifiable Tangerine Dream album. One that the fans loved but the growing hoardes of punk rock revisionists labelled 'musical wallpaper'. No matter, its release in October 1976 saw it go Top 40 in Britain and within three weeks was climbing the Billboard charts. In effect Tangerine Dream had cracked the American market. But there were growing fissures behind the facade of smooth Germanic efficiency. Tensions between Baumann and Froese, noticeable during the recording of 'Stratosfear', reached a head when Baumann was rumoured to have quit the group near the end of '76, leaving Froese and Franke to sort out the important 1977 American tour. At the beginning of '77 Baumann came to London to promote 'Romance '76' and buy equipment for a studio he was building in Berlin. In interviews he was frank about how he felt -



"We are not splitting up but we are not married. It's always the same with a group, you have a common status when you start but over six years three different people cannot be expected to have the same kind of development musically and personally. Edgar is eight to nine years older than me. He is married. He has a child. I think these things do matter to the kind of music you are playing. The world has changed in the last six years.We just thought we couldn't go on with what we did in the beginning - it would be dishonest. The end was 'Ricochet' and the new beginning 'Stratosfear'. This is a time of change."(14)

It then transpired that Froese talked Baumann out of leaving by taking a "cool look". Baumann revealed quite honestly when he was in London that it was just " senseless to collect money and be ruined after a while musically. When I did the solo record I had a very strong feeling. We had long discussions before Christmas. Well, we never finished the discussions and that maybe shows that it's virtually impossible for three people to get over a certain limit. So the situation at the moment is that we plan to do the American tour and probably another record, but we know we can't get closer after six years than we are." (15)



So in the Spring / Summer of 1977, Tangerine Dream hit America for two sell-out tours. Reports from the period indicated a group huge with both black dance audiences and white hippie youth. Chris Frank bought a sizeable new Oberheim Polyphonic Synth and Martin-Audio designed an extremely loud synthesizer friendly PA. Touring with no support they relied on the visual arabesques of a Krypton gas laser which "travels through a series of optics to emerge as laser snowflakes or cloud formations suspended in space." (16) Stories of screaming girls, dry-ice, Froese's ear-splitting Gibson guitar solos and the enigma of a German group playing in near-darkess abounded. Tickets in Los Angeles,Cleveland , Washington and New York were all sold-out within days. In October 1977 a double-album document of the tour was released by Virgin in the form of Encore. Based on themes from 'Stratosfear' this four-track set revealed how accomplished Froese/Franke & Baumann had become in merging captivating melodic fragments with a continually changing electronic backdrop and both 'Cherokee Lane' and 'Monolight' were deftly executed. 'Coldwater Canyon' included Froese's longest guitar solo on record, a heavily treated sound which lay somewhere between Hendrix and Jimmy Page. 'Desert Dream' in contrast was more Ambient, for the most part consisting of spiralling electronic tones punctuated by occasional linear melodies, the best being some Spanish-sounding synthesised horns over a stately keyboard.

'Encore' would become the definitive live TG album but was to be the last featuring Peter Baumann for in Nov of '77 he bowed out of Tangerine Dream for good. According to Froese - " we played our last live concert together in Sept of 1977 at the University of Boulder in Colorado."(17) Fatigued by touring Baumann preferred to be back in Berlin and getting on with his solo career. 'Romance '76' had done well in America and got a considerable amount of FM airplay. Baumann had often talked about achieving a more "concrete theme" and was interested in getting near the "edge points of pop music".(18) What this meant was finally unveiled on Trans Harmonic Nights, recorded over six months in 1978 and released by Virgin in 1979 to critical acclaim. This was easily accessible almost danceable music whose snakey sequenced lines, compacted melodies and stripped down sound would form a blueprint for British electro-bop of the '80s. Baumann went on to work with Cluster and Robert Palmer. There's no doubt that there was a certain amount of friction in Tangerine Dream when Baumann was on board. Even today Edgar Froese admits it - " Peter was an intuitive person - with very good results in many situations. But there were many unpleasant situations when his bio-system wasn't in the right mood and that sometimes prevented work without interruption. (19) " Still, Baumann's time in Tangerine Dream was crucial , a time which produced such quintessential recordings as 'Phaedra' and 'Stratosfear'. Without him the way ahead would not be easy.

Tangerine Dream: Remembering The Dream

http://www.ambientcentury.co.uk/classic-author-writings.html

PART 2

The Second Coming

When Tangerine Dream had begun, their European techno-cool was virtually unmatched . But by the end of 1977 their position had come under fire from several quarters. David Bowie, who had gone to Berlin in the summer of 1976 had had discussions with Edgar Froese about a possible collaboration. The then 'Thin White Duke' was impressed with Froese's concept of "timeless music" and both shared an art school background. Commented Froese - " He got a flat in Berlin and every day or every second day we went out and had long conversations. But the problem was that my time plan was different from his time plan."(20) Bowie even considered working with Kraftwerk but ended up enlisting the services of studio-boffin Brian Eno and produced two stunning albums 'Low' and 'Heroes' full of icy electronic instrumentals. Kraftwerk themselves had really pushed the scales towards looped drum beats with their phenomenal 'Trans-Europe Express', a perfect electronic concept album from beginning to end. Ex-Dreamer Klaus Schulze finally cracked Britain with his electronic suite 'Mirage', a carefully constructed almost classical "winter landscape" in sound . Ashra (formerly Ash Ra Tempel) released the ethereal 'New Age Earth' and all around new wave groups like Ultravox were getting into synthesizers. Where could an innovating group like Tangerine Dream go from here?

Froese and Franke decided to get two musicians in to replace Baumann. One was the flautist Steve Jolliffe who was briefly in the group in 1969. He had been working with film-music and animation in London and was happy to re-join old friend Froese. The other was the drummer Klaus Krieger who had known Froese since 1962. He was a member of Berlin's art and design circle and was always on intimate terms with the Dream. He had even played on one of Froese's many solo projects, 'Ages', in 1976. The new quartet went into Berlin's Audio Studios in Jan of 1978 to record Cyclone. Although the equipment list was impressive - including Roland Guitar Synths, Multi- Trigger drums and a veritable arsenal of synthesizers and sequencers the resulting music was not. A total misfire, grandiose titles like 'Rising Runner Missed By Endless Sender' and 'Madrigal Meridian' did not hide the fact that Steve Jolliffe writing lyrics and singing them was not a good idea. The usual touring followed the album's release, the group's American shows getting a real boost from Laserium Inc's customised laser effects. Back in England the press were giving the new TG the thumbs down and the NME's Paul Morley was particularly cutting. " Creatively they are static and perhaps not a little desperate. Froese has become so obsessed with the technical procedure involved in producing the noise that he seems to have lost touch with the end product. The technology has obliterated the art." (21)

The criticisms seem to have worked for Jolliffe was quickly dropped and the new trio of Froese/Franke/Krieger went into Hansa by the Wall, Berlin, and from August to September of 1978 put down the critically acclaimed Force Majeure. Its release the following June saw it go Top 30 in the U.K. and many felt it spelled the second coming of Tangerine Dream. Mellifluous ideas were now passe. In their place was a harsher landscape with eerie synths and a complex use of electronic sound that defined other dimensions. As Roger Waters once commented Pink Floyd were never about outer space but inner space. If there a group who made music for extraterrestial worlds it was Tangerine Dream and 'Force Majeure' proved their adroitness without a shred of doubt. Of course there were the usual guitar passages and sequencer runs while the acoustic guitar introduction of 'Cloudburst Flight' was almost whimsical. Yet 'Thru Metamorphic Rocks' was classic Dream - beginning with an epic guitar burst (not a million miles away from Hendrix's phased solo on 'Bold As Love') it mutated into something stranger, impatient synth strokes darted hear and there as railway track sounds , propulsive drums and howling enveloped one in an apocalyptic sound. In the year of dark cinematic visions such as Ridley Scott's 'Alien' and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' this was apt music indeed.



Because of their stature Tangerine Dream were invited to play two concerts at the Palast Der Republik on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall - a first for a western rock group. The shows took place on the 31st January 1980 with tickets eventually selling for $125 on the black market. The National Broadcast Network of the old GDR recorded the event and it was released as 'Quichotte' on the East German label Amiga. (Virgin eventually acquired the rights and re-released it as Pergamon in 1986).The event was also the live debut of new member Johannes Schmoelling who joined Froese and Franke to replace the more conventional Krieger. Again Tangerine Dream were an electronic trio. Schmoelling was 29 at the time and had a degree in electronics. He was working as a sound engineer but had a long history in piano and organ music. Froese was quite impressed when he met him - " Johannes was very professional in terms of music and studio work. He had remarkable concentration and could work for long stretches of time. He had several years experience as an audio-technician at the famous Berlin Schaubuehne theatre of Peter Stein. I visited a performance there of Robert Wilson's ' Death, Destruction & Detroit'. Johannes had created all the sound collages one could hear throughout the play. I was so enthused by the five hour performance that I asked Johannes afterwards if he wanted to join Tangerine Dream."(22) According to Schmoelling -



"I was trained as a classical piano and church organ player. During my studies at the Berlin Music University I came in contact with people who played this rock stuff like The Doobie Brothers, Santana or Steely Dan. So I learned how to play rock piano and organ - do a proper solo. In 1979 I was the sound engineer at the Schaubuehne theatre. I came in contact with Edgar because he loved this Robert Wilson play. He knew of my intention to leave the theatre and do more music recordings so one day he asked me about Tangerine Dream. It seemed to be the ideal group to work with me being a composer, performer and sound engineer all in one person. Now it could be a group of three individuals again, all with the same musical intention. Before I joined I felt the music of Tangerine Dream was basically built on sequencer loops, more or less in one key, with little harmony changes and long ongoing sessions of improvisation. When I joined we tried a mixture of more structured elements with more jazz-oriented chords. composed melodies and some synthesizer solos close to rock. Let's say we wanted a music of more dynamic." (23)

From Dawn ...To Dusk

The first real fruits of the Froese/Franke/Schmoelling line-up was Tangram, released in May of 1980. Recorded in Chris Franke's new Polygon studio complex in Berlin, the music again filled up two complete sides of an LP and was a warmer, more subtle confection than previous Dream offerings. Bright keyboard and synth melodies were to the forefront and 'Tangram Pt 1' seemed to lean in the direction of Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis - two stylists who had gained worldwide popularity with their catchy tuneful approach to synth music. 'Tangram Pt 2' was more potent with its strong synth blasts, finely mingled guitars and chugging sequencer beat. The mixture of New Age smoothness with familiar Dream elements landed the album in the British Top 40.

Froese's intense work ethic meant that Tangerine Dream didn't stop for a breath. No sooner was 'Tangram' finished than work began on the soundtrack for the Michael Mann film 'Thief' starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld. William Friedkin had recommended the Dream's music to Mann because of its raw, cutting edge character. A serious commitment, a huge GDS computer was brought in from Music Technology Inc to help with the synchronisation. Froese was especially enthusiastic - " It was a pleasure because we had a finished film to work from . When we did 'Sorcerer' we created the music before a foot of film had been shot. The exotic and shifting moods of 'Thief' fitted in perfectly with the kind of music we played. Making the soundtrack allowed us to play around in the studio a bit and create a piece of music we thought would fit the picture like a glove, yet stand on its own." (24)

Thief was released in March of '81 and again charted. A significant album it allowed the public to grasp the new trio over eight tracks. According to Schmoelling - " 'Thief' was my first experience in composing music for a movie. We were very much influenced by the director in that he wanted the music to be very loud, like a drilling noise in the brain. So we created heavy guitar sounds, combined with heavy sequencer rhythms. Contrasts were created by the use of lyric tunes like 'Beach Theme'."(25) Certainly the recording had some extraordinary noises - 'Dr Destructo' combined a Kraftwerkian beat with a terrifying guitar sound; 'Burning Bar' interloped swinging high frequency synth notes between a driving, almost military sequencer run; both 'Diamond Diary' and 'Trap Feeling' explored texture, the first from noise to melody, the second in terms of hanging spatial synth tones - a sound which would become the trademark of Brian Eno's later Ambient music. The album climaxed with the burning 'Igneous' , itself a shorter mix of 1979's 'Thru Metamorphic Rocks'.

In America the critics went wild over the soundtrack. The Village Voice likened their music to "hallucinogenic adrenalin" and the Dream themselves as "ice-cool men working with white-hot equipment."(26) The New York Times commented that " the music of Tangerine Dream sounds as if it wanted to have a life of its own."(27) The New York Daily News called it "exotically dangerous", The LA Times thought it was " as beautiful as Bach" and Newsweek even "apocalyptic".(28) The best appraisal came from the College Media Journal who felt that " the band proves once again that it reigns supreme over the often misunderstood land of space rock." (29) the film's backing by United Artists , Tangerine Dream found themselves in the odd position as Hollywood darlings with an open door to more soundtrack work. Coincidentally in the period between finishing the soundtrack and its release they had been chosen by the Berlin/L.A. committee to represent the 'neue musik' at the 1980 Los Angeles Bicentennial festival. The committee even visited Franke's prestige $1.5 million studio complex which David Bowie frequented and got a shock. Recalled Franke - " They saw all our equipment and said 'Where are we? Are we on the moon?' (30)Not surprisingly their concert at the Santa Monica Civic was a sell-out. Another concert at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre was recalled by Down Beat critic John Diliberto as having " dynamics that could move from orgiastic, rhythmic intensity into a luminous Keith Jarrett-like piano solo without losing any momentum." (31)



Beyond The North Wind

Whilst fans were digesting all this a four album boxed set entitled Tangerine Dream '70-'80 had been released by Virgin. It celebrated a decade of recording activity by including unreleased material from Froese, Franke and Baumann. 'Thief' stayed for three months on the American album charts but by the summer of 1981 Tangerine Dream had a new studio album to unveil. Remembered Froese - "We built everything around the MCI mixing console, because we needed to have all the instruments quite near. We didn't use acoustic instruments much at all and we didn't need an engineer. We just had everything around us, the same way as onstage." (32) For Schmoelling it was a further freeing of creative juices - " At this stage we had the freedom of composing in different styles, choosing different colours and different techniques. We experimented with drum-loops built out of spliced tapes achieving the same effects as rap musicians do today using sampling techniques. " (33)

Recorded over June and July 1981 Exit really showed-off the potential of the new trio for it was a stunning album in every way. A virtual soundtrack for a future cybernetic generation this could have been the score to Ridley Scott's classic 'Bladerunner' of the following year. Housed in a compelling Monique Froese sleeve the album contained six tracks full of brevity, lyrical phrasing and the resonance of the latest electronic equipment including the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument.. The opening cut 'Kiew Mission' contained a Russian actress reciting words of "elucidation" about world peace and communication. At the time Froese commented - " The words are directed at people in Russia. It's a very spiritual message we hope will help ease the situation over here. If you're in Europe right now you would see that all people talk about is the Third World War. As musicians we can use our music to say something about the positive side and hope our message gets through. "(34) Today the track sounds uncannily like the style of 'Enigma' or several other House groups who use a chanteuse reciting over an electronic back-beat. 'Pilots of Purple Twilight' had an insistent energy while the hypnotic sequence of the title track led one into endless corridors of dream music. 'Network 23' was Europa-dance and reminded one that British groups like Ultravox had studied German music closely. 'Remote Viewing' was a lenghty foray into immaculate ensemble playing - soft minimalist repetitions decorated by finely honed synth tones. Released in September of '81, 'Exit' was an innovative album whose sound was at least a decade ahead of the competition.

Froese was keenly interested in the anti-nuclear cause and had organised for thousands of copies of 'Exit' to be shipped and distributed free " to different people in Russia, people in the political power structure, in the arts and just to the ordinary Russian people too."(35) Shortly before the album's release the trio had played a special disarmament concert at Berlin's Reichstag in front of 100,000 people. After a tour of Europe and the States Tangerine Dream were back in the studio for what would be their 11th Virgin album White Eagle. A much mellower affair than its predecessor its release in March of 1982 did not cause much of a stir. Full of ethno-Ambient passages much of the record seemed directionless and the melodic material, such as that heard on 'Mojave Plan' and 'Midnight In Tula' , sounded trite. 'Convention of the 24' seemed to return to the insistent urgency of 'Exit' but it was the brief title track which saved the day. A lilting keyboard ballad with hushed, seductive voicings it went on to become the theme music for a popular German TV series 'Tatort'.

No sooner was that finished than TG took to the road again. In fact touring and recording was all the group did now. On the road Schmoelling would visit some exotic locations including Athens, Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong and Melbourne. Remembers Schmoelling - "It was always a unique way of refilling the empty batteries of our creativity. Every time we came back from a trip we went into the studio and started recording. For myself it was a great adventure, performing in front of an audience in different countries, feeling the emotion of the crowd as they reacted to the music. There are deep memories of concerts and I think you never find as much emotion when you perform in the studio."(36) One of Schmoelling's favourite albums is Logos Live , a very successful recording of a Nov '82 London, Dominion concert which came out at the beginning of 1983. Here Schmoelling's careful approach and the sheen of meticulous interaction could be heard over two entire sides. Sweet soaring melodies were to the fore while the pounding sequences of old took a back seat. Certainly texture and nuance was the key. Schmoelling considers " the live concept and the smooth transition between one idea and the next to be the key to the album's success." (37)

Tangerine Dream would be re-united with Michael Mann in Feb 1983 for the recording of the soundtrack to The Keep. A very left-field movie with X-File and supernatural overtones set in Europe during WW2; the plot consisted of a unit of German soldiers taking control of a Romanian village during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. In fact the film was shot in Wales and Shepperton Studios London where Mann was based.Recording was done in Berlin in one month and the sonic results were much better than the film.(The movie lost millions and became an obscure cult yet the music became much sought-after on bootleg until eventual release in 1997 on TDI Music.) This soundtrack was strange,haunting,eerie and very far from the hi-tech sheen they achieved on their Virgin catalogue.In fact if you weren't told it was Tangerine Dream it would be hard to guess. An indication of Schmoelling's growing interest in sound sampling and the quirky movements of automata could be immediately heard on Tangerine Dream's last proper studio album for Virgin, Hyperborea ,recorded in August of 1983. The title refers to the mythological land beyond the cold North wind, an earthly paradise of eternal sunshine. Its classical Greek symbolism and mystical cover shot fittingly recalled the debut Virgin album 'Phaedra'. Symmetrically it also had four tracks played by a trio. 'No Man's Land' was a tour de force of conception full of spirited North African pipe and drum inflections. Its oriental flavour was increased by the use of exceptionally crafted electronic sitar and tabla sounds. With its hazy Moroccan dance feel and use of additive and cyclical melodies 'No Man's Land' was an entrancing nine minutes of luminous Dream music. The title track, 'Hyperborea' proved that nobody, with the possible exception of the old Pink Floyd, could be as grandiloquent in progressive rock terms as Tangerine Dream. A rising atmosphere underpinned by a heavy ticking electronic drum sound set the stage for a stately keyboard melody ringed by heavenly synth voices. 'Sphinx Lightning' returned to the more familiar sequences and extravagant synth patterns and included a numinous flute sound a la 'Phaedra'. Schmoelling recalls the album with joy - " Like 'Logos', 'Hyperborea' was determined by the new generation of digital synthesizers and sampling technology. We were able to memorise sounds and used a lot of sampled drum sounds. We invented new rhythm structures by using a special arpeggiator technique and so on. The title 'No Man's Land' was influenced by the film 'Ghandi' and its brilliant soundtrack." (38)



'Hyperborea' was released in Nov 1983 and the following month the group played a special Warsaw concert in Poland, a move determined by Froese's solidarity with calls for democracy in the Eastern bloc. But that was not the end of the Virgin saga for TG still had soundtrack work to do. A new Tom Cruise film , 'Risky Business' needed music and the Dream were to provide the bulk of it with added selections from the likes Muddy Waters, Jeff Beck, Prince and Phil Collins. Again they proved " that they are among the best soundtrack artists in the business with an uncanny talent for flying in the face of predictability." (39) Full of surprises the Risky Business soundtrack which appeared in 1984 revealed that none of spark had gone out of the Froese/Franke/Schmoelling partnership. 'The Dream Is Always the Same' was mesmerisingly hypnotic and if 'No Future' reprised 'Exit' there were plenty of original guitar noise and melodic chordings to please anyone. 'Lana',which reprised Froese's break from 'Force Majeure', sounded like a refraction of American hot-rod guitar music. In contrast 'Love on A Real Train' recalled the trance-music of Steve Reich. Said Froese of his interest in American musical forms -

"I guess I have huge American influence. Starting with early jazz, running through Gershwin sometimes even light orchestral music but also including people like John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Now it's everything from heavy metal to Top 40 radio. If you're in car what else can you listen to? It's the whole environmental sound scenery in the States which actually gives you a view of what happens mentally in the country." (40)

Still Dreaming

Though a detailed analysis of Tangerine Dream's post-Virgin career lies outside the scope of this essay there are still some salient points worth mentioning. In 1985 Virgin Germany issued the film soundtrack Heartbreakers. In the same year Virgin released a triple album compilation Dream Sequence. Between 1985 and 1987 the entire Virgin catalogue was made available on CD. After leaving Virgin Tangerine Dream went through a succession of line-ups and labels. Near the close of 1985 Johannes Schmoelling was reportedly bored by the album-tour-album routine and left the group to set up his own Riet studio in Berlin. His replacement was a young computer-whiz Paul Haslinger who Froese had met in Vienna. This line-up recorded what still stands as Tangerine Dream's best post-Virgin album in 'Underwater Sunlight' (Jive Electro 1986) which contained the anthemic ecological suite 'Song Of The Whale'. At the time it was noted that Tangerine Dream " had been the world's greatest electronic band for fifteen years" (41)and that their commitment to electronics was singular.



Chris Franke, who had been experimenting with modular synthesis, samplers and computer software left the group in 1988 to devote himself to studio-experiment and composition. Today he lives in Los Angeles and is a prolific soundtrack composer. That year also brought Froese back into contact with Peter Baumann who was now based in New York. Baumann had founded Private Music, a label devoted to instrumental music, and signed Tangerine Dream up in the blink of an eye. Commented Froese at the time - " It was a logical choice. Peter and I worked together for about six years and whatever Tangerine Dream wanted to be, he was part of it for a long time." (42)



Another computer musician, Ralf Wadephal replaced Franke but he only lasted one album and one U.S. tour. Tangerine Dream were a duo of Froese and Haslinger before Froese's son Jerome joined his father's band in 1990. From being on the group's album covers to travelling around the world with it to being a fully-fledged member must have been some experience. In 1991 Haslinger left and by 1992 Froese had a new Tangerine Dream which again featured Klaus Krieger from the 'Force Majeure' days. Together with a saxophonist Linda Spa, an ex-model from Vienna, and guitarist Zlatko Perica, Tangerine Dream became a more American rock-oriented band, scoring high in the Billboard charts and even getting Grammy nominations. In deference to his sixties past Froese even included a version of Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' in the live sets.



In their history the most significant aspect of Tangerine Dream was their accessible approach to electronic music. Instead of making a load of unlistenable blips and hisses the Dream invested long and hard in making the sounds human and have worked closely with synth and computer manaufacturers in the development of both hardware and software. Back in the days of analogue equipment their early Virgin tours involved the whole stage full of hefty gear. Said Froese - " When first we performed in 1974 with the Modular Moog system the press ridiculed us. We said at the time that in about ten years everybody would be using synthesizers onstage but they didn't believe us."(43) If the pioneering approach of working on the latest equipment and bringing its sound to the widest audience was a mainstay of the Virgin years and after, Tangerine Dream were one of the cleverest in making it sound emotional and hummably melodic. Commented Froese - " Electronic hardware or software is only a way of transporting things, not more or not less. You should not take your car into your bedroom just because it has brought you a long way to your house. It is nothing you should make more noise about than is necessary." (44)

After the rise of Ambient House in the '90s, Tangerine Dream became hip again amongst the youth. Their albums regularly featured in Top 10 Ambient lists in the English music press while DJs sampled choice bits from their Virgin-era albums. In a strange twist of fate Peter Baumann and Paul Haslinger formed 'The Blue Room Project' in Los Angeles in 1993 - a sort of tribute to Ambient House group The Orb's famous single 'The Blue Room'. Asked if he liked the new wave of instrumental music Froese answered that it was " symbolic...and a necessity. It's nothing to criticise." (45) Not a man who likes looking back he still remembers the Virgin years with fondness, as a time when brave experimental music could be made and appreciated by millions the world over - " Since Virgin gave TD complete freedom regarding the choice of music, it was possible at any time to experiment beyond all possible borders. The goal and fascination of Tangerine Dream Music was always to create sounds and structures that had never been heard before. The group often succeeded in an inimitable way. A whole generation of pop and rock musicians were influenced by this style a long time before anyone had come up with the idea of calling it New Age Music. The aim of the music during the Virgin period was to paint surreal pictures with musical instruments." (46)

Mark Prendergast , London, c. 1993-1994 Mark J. Prendergast. A version of this essay first appeared in Tangents (Virgin Records CDBox 4 1994) and then again in their slim-box version (Virgin CDBOXY4 2003). Copyright and other Rights asserted on the 21st October 2004 by Mark J. Prendergast.Further copyright notice to new edition above c. 2013, Mark J. Prendergast. No portion of this essay in part or full can be copied,downloaded or used unless the author gives strict permission (all rights reserved.)

The writer wishes to thank the following who helped in the preparation of this essay - Simon Hopkins, Julia Snyder, Edgar Froese, Johannes Schmoelling and Record Collector Magazine. Also thanks to Niall Dew who runs the UK Tangerine Dream Magazine "Voyager" for his valuable documentation.

Notes on Sources

1. Rich Shupe, Reflex, Vol1,Issue 9, 1988.

2. Miles, tour programme, Jan 1978.

3. In conversation with the writer, Dec 1991.

4. Miles, tour programme, Jan 1978.

5. Pascal Bussy 'Kraftwerk - Man, Machine & Music' (S.A.F 1993)p.40

6. John Schaefer 'New Sounds' (Virgin 1987) p. 6.

7. Interview with the writer Jan 1994.

8. All quotes Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, April 1974.

9. John Schaefer 'New Sounds' p. 9.

10. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

11. Miles, tour programme, Jan 1978.

12.Adapted from Miles interview,NME July 1977

13. Interview with the writer,Jan 1994.

14. Adapted from Miles interview, NME, July 1977.

15. Karl Dallas, Melody Maker,Jan 1977.

16. Laserium press release, Jan 1978.

17. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

18. Miles, NME, July 1977.

19. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

20. Miles, NME, July 1977.

21. Paul Morley, NME, May 1978.

22. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

23. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

24. Elektra/Asylum press release, Sept 1981.

25. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

26. Carrie Rickey, Village Voice, March 1981.

27. Vincent Canby, New York Times , March 1981.

28. Los Angeles Times / Newsweek , March 1981.

29. College Media Journal, April 1981.

30. Elektra/Asylum press release, Sept 1981.

31. John Diliberto, Down Beat, March 1981.

32. Elektra/Asylum press release, Sept 1981.

33. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

34. Elektra/Asylum press release, Sept 1981.

35. Ibid.

36. Interview with the writer , Jan 1994.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Rich Shupe, Reflex, Vol 1, Issue 9,1988.

40. Simon Trask, Music Technology, Jan 1991.

41. Annabel Scott, Electronics & Music Maker, May 1986.

42. Rich Shupe, Reflex, Vol 1, Issue 9,1988.

43. Simon Trask, Music Technology, Jan 1991.

44. Rich Shupe, Reflex, Vol 1, Issue 9,1988.

45. Simon Trask, Music Technology, Jan 1991.

46. Interview with the writer, Jan 1994.

Virgin's Dream Discography - in chronological sequence.

Phaedra(V 2010 / 1974)

Rubycon(V 2025 / 1975)

Ricochet(V 2044 / 1975)

Electronic Meditation(2401 722 / 1976)

Zeit (VD 2503 / 1976)

Alpha Centauri / Atem (VD 2504 / 1976)

Stratosfear(V 2068 / 1976)

Encore (V 2506 / 1977)

Cyclone(V 2097 / 1978)

Force Majeure(V 2111 / 1979)

Tangram (V 2147 / 1980)

Tangerine Dream '70-'80(V Box 2 / 1980)

Thief (V 2198 / 1981)

Exit (V 2212 / 1981)

White Eagle (V 2226 / 1982)

Logos Live (V 2257 / 1983)

Hyperborea (V 2292 / 1983)

Risky Business (ST)(V 2302 / 1984)

Heartbreakers (ST)(207212620 / 1985)

Dream Sequence(302686 / 1985)

Pergamon Live (207684620 / 1986)

Note - Sorcerer (MCF 2806 / 1977) was licensed by Virgin to MCA.

....................

Edgar Froese's Top 11 Virgin Tracks !

1. Phaedra.

2. Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares.

3. Ricochet Part 2.

4. Rubycon Part 2.

5. 3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh from Okefenokee.

6. Stratosfear.

7. Logos

8. Kiew Mission.

9. Pilots of Purple Twilight.

10. Force Majeure.

11. Tangram Part 1.

Popol Vuh is the freakin' best in my book.

Founder Edgar Froese - "There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address". R.I.P, the 70 year old multi-instrumentalist passed away suddenly and unexpectedly January from a pulmony embolism in Germany.

The Virgin Years PART 1

Phaedra ('74)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peCO8A1npJI

Rubycon ('75)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTzs2TjwQo

Ricochet ('75 - their first live album, contains elements of Rubycon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuN12dVmsT0

Stratosfear ('76)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73mrtLt9FDU

Encore ('77 - second live album, contains elements of Stratosfear)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiVptLQDY-8

Abrantes said:

Popol Vuh is the freakin' best in my book.

Click to expand...

Florian Fricke played on Tangerine Dream's Zeit (penultimate pre-Virgin album), and later gave his Moog synthesizer to Klaus Schulze once he renounced electronic music. He was first a pioneer in space rock (Kosmische Musik), and later what we would now call ambient and world music.

Improv (VIDEO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DON-CogKcfk

Popol Vuh was perhaps best known by some for their association with Werner Herzog scoring about a half dozen of his movies.

Aguirre (arguably their greatest score and Herzog collaboration)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdeIN3sYcfk

In The Gardens Of Pharao (second album in two parts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrk-YpGQcBY

Vuh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbQ1v-nCFjA

From his Wiki bio - Together with former Popol Vuh member Frank Fiedler, who was a competent cameraman, Fricke produced a series of films of spiritual inspiration set in the Sinai desert, Israel, Lebanon, Mesopotamia, Morocco, Afghanistan, Tibet and Nepal.[1][5]

Fricke died of a stroke in Munich in 2001, at the age of 57.

In October 2003 Klaus Schulze wrote:

"Florian was and remains an important forerunner of contemporary ethnic and religious music. He chose electronic music and his big Moog to free himself from the restraints of traditional music, but soon discovered that he didn't get a lot out of it and opted for the acoustic path instead. Here, he went on to create a new world, which Werner Herzog loves so much, transforming the thought patterns of electronic music into the language of acoustic ethno music."

Leroy Hoard said:

Bob Magaw said:

I was listening to Timewind and X again the past few days, they include some sweeping, massive soundscapes, and were even better than I remembered (I tended to listen to Tangerine Dream back in the day, and discovered Schulze relatively later). I need to give the earlier Cyborg (second album?) another listen. Any others you would recommend?

Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ATeFGN2Ss

Click to expand...

I had a chance to listen to this (not yet Moondawn). Outstanding, I can understand what the fuss was about, and why all the electronica genre critical accolades and historical standing/cache, thanks for the suggestion. I need to listen to them more, so far, I prefer Timewind and X, and have also come to the conclusion that the pinnacle of Klaus Schulze's work is at least the equal, and possibly surpasses the same for Tangerine Dream (as it stands for me now, the first Virgin period with the classic Froese/Franke/Baumann lineup, Phaedra, Rubycon, Stratosfear, and especially the live albums Ricochet and Encore).*

I like the below site, which has descriptions for many classic Schulze and Tangerine Dream albums.

Irrlicht, Schulze's solo debut - '72

http://surfingtheodyssey.blogspot.com/2015/01/klaus-schulze-1972-irrlicht.html

Aqua & Epsilon In Malaysian Pale, Froese's first two (and reportedly best) solo albums - '74 & '75.

http://surfingtheodyssey.blogspot.com/2015/01/edgar-froese-1974-aqua.html

http://surfingtheodyssey.blogspot.com/2015/01/edgar-froese-1975-epsilon-in-malaysian.html

* Duly noted in the thread title addition of Schulze.

Tangerine Dream's iconic sound may have been partly inspired by the confluence of several pivotal events in co-founder (and sole musician who remained until he died in 2015) Edgar Froese's life, which nudged him in the direction of pushing the boundaries of the possibilities and potential of the then-embryonic, still nascent and developing electronic music form. He once backed Hendrix in the late '60s, and realized he would never have any chance or hope of competing with him as a conventional rock guitarist (he talked about how Germany had no blues/rock tradition relative to their Anglo-American peers and counterparts). Also, he played a gig around the same time at Dali's villa in Spain, and later got a chance to meet him personally and know him better. Dali's surrealism had a profound impact on Froese's musical sensibilities, and his desire to create a sonic equivalent or parallell.

Tangerine Dream fun fact - In their prime, they were considered one of the loudest bands in the world.

German TV compilation, '69-'05 (VIDEO 40 minutes)

Speaking of guitar, once in a while TD would feature some almost Gilmour style solos. My favorite might be from later period where they went with a somewhat more commercial sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu261-AZ8mw

Leroy Hoard said:

Speaking of guitar, once in a while TD would feature some almost Gilmour style solos. My favorite might be from later period where they went with a somewhat more commercial sound:

Click to expand...

Very nice, thanks. If that is from Optical Race ('88), it is the only concert I ever saw by them.* At one time I was actually a lot more familiar with their later, as you said, more commercial stuff, but I haven't listened to it in a while, it brings back memories. Sometimes I learn new things as I go with these threads (by myself hunting up information and old videos, or through exchanges like this - which is one reason I do them). I had the Virgin Dream Sequence and pre/post-Virgin Journey Through A Burning Brain compilations, a box set called Tangents (but that had contemporary "overdubs", which I guess he was big on in later years), both volumes of the Bootleg sets and the Sorceror and Thief scores, but only recently heard those classic early Virgin albums in full. The last non-compilation or film score CDs I had bought by them were probably Underwater Sunlight and Le Parc, and the so called Melrose Years (Private Music, founded by former TD keyboardist Peter Baumann), around the time they were released, which the discography** lists as only three albums: Optical Race, Lily On The Beach and Melrose. Actually, I just got the Zeitgeist concert at the Royal Albert Hall, '10 (video in post #31 upthread).

Just because Froese correctly observed, realistically critiqued and self-appraised his guitar prowess as not up to a genius and legend like Hendrix, he could still play a mean guitar. Schmoelling had a relatively brief, recent video interview on the Criterion edition for Thief. He talked about how he was recruited for his piano, organ, synth and keys expertise (Baumann doppleganger?), Franke's specialty was the electronic percussive element (former drummer specialist turned electronic/synth generalist, like Schulze) and Froese's guitar riding on top gave the score specifically and their sound in general during that era a dynamic and edge it would have otherwise lacked without his talent and instrumental contribution.

* I think I saw the TD Optical Race tour at the Wiltern. Andy Summers (solo) was the opening act. He had been working with Fripp, and built a wall of sound with echo/delay/repeat effects (different but related to Frippertronics solo like Let The Power Fall, and in collaboration with Eno). Comparable era show below.

Andy Summers live, '88 (AUDIO 40 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBGbzrpQpwo

** Tangerine Dream Discography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Dream_discography

A bio and short career spanning history of Can.

http://www.spoonrecords.com/history/can.php

June 2011 marked the 43rd anniversary of the founding of Can when Holger Czukay (bass), David Johnson (flute), jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit and beat guitar player Michael Karoli met in classical conductor and piano player Irmin Schmidt's Cologne apartment in 1968. Their first gig, a collage of rock music and tape samples, took place at Schloss Nörvenich (Castle Nörvenich, near Cologne). The show is documented on the audio cassette Prehistoric Future.

The nameless collective had established its first studio, Inner Space, at the castle when American sculptor Malcolm Mooney, visiting Irmin and Hildegard Schmidt, joined the band. His intuitive drive led the musicians toward a unique take on rock music and the track Father Cannot Yell originated from one of these early sessions. David Johnson, who by then had become the band's sound engineer, left at the end of 1968. Around this period, the lack of a name was solved by Mooney and Liebezeit who came up with The Can.

The first Can album, Monster Movie (1969), defined Can music. Played and recorded spontaneously and driven by repetitive rhythms, the album was recorded directly on to a 2-track machine and then extensively edited. Soundtracks featuring film scores from 1969 and 1970, was the next album. Just after the record was released, Malcolm Mooney left the band and returned to the U.S. The Mooney era is extensively documented on Can - Delay, released in 1982.

In May 1970, Japanese singer Kenji "Damo" Suzuki joined Can after being spotted by Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit busking in Munich. The very same evening he performed with the band at the Blow Up club.

In December 1971, Can founded the Can Studio - known as Inner Space until 1978 when Can soundman René Tinner took over running the operation - in a former cinema in Weilerswist, close to Cologne. All subsequent Can albums were produced there except Rite Time. The studio has now been painstakingly disassembled and is being reconstructed to scale as a working exhibit at the German Rock'n'Pop Museum in Gronau, near the Dutch border.

The period 1970-2 was a breakthrough time for the band with Tago Mago (1971) impressing critics in England and France as well as Germany. Ege Bamyasi, released in 1972, featured the track Spoon, the theme tune for the crime thriller Das Messer and also the band's first chart success in Germany. The track, which was the first time that Can used an early version of a drum machine, led to a Goldene Europa TV award in recognition of Can's soundtrack work. Ege Bamyasi also included the music from another TV crime series in the form of Vitamin C.

The success of Spoon inspired the band to try to reach a wider audience which led to the Can Free Concert. The event was filmed by Martin Schäfer, Robbie Müller and Egon Mann for director Peter Przygodda at the Cologne Sporthalle on February 3rd, 1972. British music weekly Melody Maker wrote: "Can are without doubt the most talented and most consistent experimental rock band in Europe, England included." French magazine Rock & Folk portrayed Can's music as "one of the most impressive musical experiments offered by contemporary bands."

Future Days (1973) was the last Can album with Damo Suzuki. First Michael Karoli took over the vocal duties, followed by short interludes with a succession of singers, among them Tim Hardin. The recording of Soon Over Babaluma that same year marked the end of the era of recording straight onto 2-track. Landed (1975), was the first Can LP to be produced using multi-track technology. The album led Melody Maker to call them "the most advanced rock unit on the planet."

Double album Unlimited Edition (1976) was an extended version of a release that had quickly sold out as Limited Edition two years earlier. Among the tracks were the multi-facetted experiments known as the Ethnological Forgery Series (EFS). Flow Motion, also released in 1976, featured the disco hit I Want More and saw the band performing on UK primetime hitshow Top Of The Pops. The following year Can was augmented by ex-Traffic rhythm duo Rosko Gee (bass) and Reebop Kwaku Baah on percussion.

Holger Czukay had retired as a bass player and on Saw Delight was in charge of "special sounds". His new instrument was a shortwave radio receiver; while his idea to create new impulses for the musical process via radio signals didn't fit within the new Can structure, it became the basis for his first solo album, Movies (1979). The next Can album, Out of Reach (1978), was recorded without Czukay, who had left the band in May 1977, during the final Can tour. On the last show of the tour, in Lisbon at the end of May, Can performed in front of 10,000 fans. The double album Cannibalism (1978) was not just a "Best of ...." compilation, it was in fact, an early indication that Can's reputation would continue to grow.

The British avant-garde and several punk acts were deeply inspired by Can. Speaking for many, Pete Shelley (Buzzcocks) is quoted on the Cannibalism cover: "I never would have played guitar if not for Marc Bolan and Michael Karoli of Can". At the end of 1978 the band released Can. Meanwhile Michael Karoli built the Outer Space Studio studio in France, close to Nice. It was there in November 1986 that the original Monster Movie line-up got together again, with vocalist Malcolm Mooney to record Rite Time. The album was released in 1988. The band assembled again at the Can Studio with the same line-up minus Holger to record the track Last Night Sleep for Wim Wenders' film Until the End of the World.

In May 1997, the remix CD Sacrilege provided further evidence of the durability of Can's music. For this tribute, prominent representatives of the techno, dance and ambient scene reworked 15 classic Can tracks. Ironically, the importance of Can's contribution to the wider musical pantheon was summed up by Andrew Weatherall who refused an offer to remix a Can track for Sacrilege: "I love to remix other people's work. But Can? No way. You don't touch music that perfect. There is nothing to add or take away."

The band's chosen means of celebrating its 30th anniversary in 1999 was characteristically original. Eschewing a reunion tour as too obvious, and, more importantly, as being against the spirit of the group, the Can Box and the Can-Solo-Projects tour were the ways in which the group marked the occasion.Can Box includes recordings from the period 1971-77, a tri-lingual book featuring a comprehensive group history, interviews, reviews and photos by Hildegard Schmidt and Wolf Kampmann plus a video with both the Can Free Concert film by Peter Przygodda, and the Can Documentary by DoRo-film.

The Can-Solo-Projects tour, which featured Holger Czukay & U-She, Jaki Liebezeit's Club Off Chaos, Irmin Schmidt & Kumo plus Michael Karoli's Sofortkontakt!, started on March 19th 1999 in Berlin at the Columbia Halle. The tour was so well received that a second leg was organised for September 1999. This went ahead without Holger Czukay who was obliged to pull out at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances.

Can worked together for the last time in August 1999 at Irmin's studio in Provence with Jono Podmore, to record a cover-version of The Third Man theme (from the film of the same name) for the Pop 2000 compilation released on Herbert Grönemeyer's label Grönland/EMI.

On November 17th, 2001, Michael Karoli died after a long fight against cancer.

In March 2003 Can received the most prestigious prize that the German music industry can offer: the Echo award for lifetime achievement was presented at an awards ceremony in Berlin. Herbert Grönemeyer, one of Germany's most famous artists, made the official speech while Brian Eno sent in a short, witty film about the group. The prize was handed over by the Red Hot Chili Peppers whose guitarist John Frusciante also spoke of his appreciation and respect for Can's music.

The remaining members of Can are all active as both solo artists and collaborators.

By Gary Smith

Another review by a Quietus writer of Can's 2012 three disc The Lost Tapes compilation (see also post #11 above).

Excerpt - Jono Podmore: "The biggest shock and surprise on listening to the tapes for the first time can be summed up in one word: Malcolm. Not only were the tracks featuring him absolutely wicked but the reason why Can weren't this horrible, academic, German, up its own #### collective was because they had an African American singer who lit the fuse and gave them a proper sense of grit. He wasn't just any African American either, he was a proper artist and bonkers to boot. When we played the tapes at home my daughter, who was five at the time, would be jumping up and down singing along to 'Waiting For The Street Car'. That was a hit in our house. When I heard that for the first time, I knew we were on to something."

The Lost Tapes By Can: An Oral History
http://thequietus.com/articles/09376-can-the-lost-tapes-interview

John Doran, July 18th, 2012

Can and Jono Podmore talk us through their excellent anthology of previously unreleased material, The Lost Tapes which topped the Quietus' recent mid year chart. As told to John Doran

The players...
Holger Czukay: Can founder, engineer, composer and bass player.
Jaki Liebezeit: Can member and one of the most outstanding drummers of the second half of the 20th Century.
Jono Podmore: Compiler and producer of The Lost Tapes. Irmin and Hildegard Schmidt's son in law.
Irmin Schmidt: Can founder, conceptualist, composer and keyboard player.

The background...

Jono Podmore: My first involvement was way before The Lost Tapes project had been suggested. I'd been aware of the tapes since '98 when I had a tour of Can's studio in Weilerswist. I first saw all of the tapes together around 2003 when my daughter was born. The full collection of tapes filled up three of those large, four drawer, office filing cabinets. A lot of it was bollocks. Tapes of radio shows, practice sessions... Quarter inch tape in those days was also used in the same way that cassettes were used, for all kinds of things not just for recording masters. The notation was total drivel. It bore no relation to what was on the tapes... mostly because they were always being reused.

Irmin Schmidt: My role was to make the choice. My job was to take this huge amount of material and choose the pieces that were worth putting on an album. After I made this choice I discussed it with Jono. In my first, big selection, there were a few pieces that I was unsure about. There were some that together we decided were really not worth it but then there were other pieces that Jono really fought for which I wasn't sure about. So my first selection was bigger than the amount that is on the record but it would have been even smaller if Jono hadn't fought to keep three or four extra pieces. We did that final choice together and then we had two afternoons playing it through with Daniel Miller and he totally agreed. The pieces that I had doubts about that Jono wanted, Daniel wanted too.

Jono Podmore: My life is massively intertwined with Can. Hildegard and Irmin are my parents-in-law and their daughter my wife is now a co-director of Spoon records. We run the mail order from our house. I was involved in this project very early on. Hildegard came up to me and asked me very formally to be involved. We obviously spend a lot of time together, eating, drinking and making merry and all the rest of it. I lived with them for a couple of years while I was working with Irmin on the opera Gormenghast. Hildegard asked me to do the editing on the basis that not only did she trust me musically and artistically but I was neutral in the whole ancient political structure of Can. She couldn't ask Holger as that would piss Irmin off. She couldn't ask X because that would piss off Y and so on. I get on well with Jaki. I get on well with Holger and Irmin's family... So she asked me and I said yes.

Holger Czukay: Our system for archiving stuff was quite chaotic. We had a lot of tapes getting stored in a climate controlled room. And by 'climate controlled room' what I am actually referring to is the basement but the system was quite chaotic... yes.

Jono Podmore: Hildegard got the tapes transferred to digital and then sent copies of everything on CD and DVD to me and then another set to Irmin. I spent two days a week for months lying in bed with headphones on, listening to this stuff, making notes in a Word document, thinking about what could be done...

Jaki Liebezeit: I first heard about the project when Jono gave me some copies [of The Lost Tapes]. He's teaches at the music high school in Cologne at least once a month where he's a professor. So he gave me these copies of The Lost Tapes album when he was in town - which was quite a surprise for me.

CD ONE

'Millionenspiel'
Holger Czukay: I think we needed to change from when we were recording as Inner Space in 1968 as at first we were just students and going in a different direction. The first of these tracks 'Millionenspiel' was recorded because some people wanted theme music for a TV show that was quite science fiction. A lot of people thought the show was true - like War Of The Worlds. It's quite hard to explain though. It didn't make any sense. This was one of the first pieces we ever recorded and I'm quite surprised at how professional Can made it sound. It was a bit more difficult when we first started playing concerts live. The concerts could be good but also they could go down on the other side. The studio we used later on was sold to the German pop and rock museum but the first studio, The Inner Space studio, I still own. It is a very good studio.

Irmin Schmidt: When we recorded 'Millionenspiel' we still didn't have the name Can. When I originally approached everybody to say to them, 'Would you like to form a group', my idea was to bring together musicians who came from totally different fields which were all new forms of music in the 20th Century. David Johnson [flute], Holger and me came from the academic tradition of classical performers and composers. At the time this had its newest incarnation in the music of Stockhausen, who we were studying along with similar composers. And then I wanted a real jazz musician and a real rock musician. When I asked Holger if he would be interested in a group like this and he said, 'Oh yes I would and I will bring Michael Karoli to meet you as well, he's a young rock guitarist.' When we met, we liked one another he was a brilliant guitarist. So that was the idea, to cover all these fields. David was very much a new classical music composer, and after a certain amount of time, Can was turning into a rock group - even if it was very experimental and very avant garde rock group. David didn't like the rock element that much; he thought it would stay more on the experimental side of things, like on 'Blind Mirror Surf'. And when it became more rock he didn't like it very much so he stepped out.

Holger Czukay: In the beginning we tried to offer our first album to a record company but it was denied, so we made a private pressing and then that private pressing sold out immediately. And that is why the record company came to us and said, 'Perhaps you would like to make a record for us after all.'

'Waiting For The Streetcar'
Irmin Schmidt: Sometimes we had an influence on [original Can singer] Malcolm Mooney's lyrics. 'Waiting for the streetcar' was something Michael said during a performance at the castle near Cologne where we practised, Schloss Nörvenich. During this performance, Michael said, 'Malcolm, just wait a minute, there is somebody waiting for a streetcar.' And he just used it and continued saying it over and over again. In a way this is pop art. These lyrics are like Warhol putting Brillo cartons on top of one another. All of the sudden the banality of the Brillo carton becomes art and the banality of this sentence repeated in this context of music all of a sudden becomes something more than just a sentence. It becomes pop art. It is the same as Jaki repeating one beat for a long long time. It has the same aspect.

Holger Czukay: 'Waiting For The Streetcar' was one of the first recordings we ever did with Malcolm Mooney It's quite long.

Jono Podmore: The biggest shock and surprise on listening to the tapes for the first time can be summed up in one word: Malcolm. Not only were the tracks featuring him absolutely wicked but the reason why Can weren't this horrible, academic, German, up its own #### collective was because they had an African American singer who lit the fuse and gave them a proper sense of grit. He wasn't just any African American either, he was a proper artist and bonkers to boot. When we played the tapes at home my daughter, who was five at the time, would be jumping up and down singing along to 'Waiting For The Street Car'. That was a hit in our house. When I heard that for the first time, I knew we were on to something.

'Evening All Day'
Holger Czukay: When we had our first concert in the castle Schloss Nörvenich we were preparing for a Picasso exhibition. They wanted a band in the gallery, surrounding the exhibition but we were not experienced at all, we'd never really played together. So we started playing and Malcolm started going up and down the grand staircase in the castle and singing "Upstairs Downstairs Upstairs Downstairs" It was very much like 'Waiting For The Streetcar'. It went on for quarter of an hour, maybe half an hour. It was so monotonous and repetitive, that even these days with repetition in lyrics and phrases [in house music and techno] people would have found his performance very odd.

Irmin Schmidt: Malcolm never discussed his lyrics, either before or after we recorded the song. Sometimes we agreed that it should be a sentence repeated over and over. Sometimes he would say, 'I have other lyrics!' And we would say, 'Well, why not save the other lyric for another song!' But sometimes he would like a lyric so much he would become really obsessive about it.

Jaki Liebezeit: The castle belonged to a rich man who collected art. He had poor artists in and there were also some classical musicians who came to stay there. He had some grand pianos that the pianists would practice on. And also a sculptor, Ulrich Rückriem, who became very famous in Germany, also worked in the castle. There was a big room that was free and it was given to us, and we made a studio there. It was a very primitive studio in the beginning. We had very little equipment but we worked there every day, and we recorded as much as we could.

'Deadly Doris'
Irmin Schmidt: I was very surprised and pleased to find 'Waiting For The Streetcar'. I remembered recoring the song and that was great because it's a kind of a nice and joyful memory. Some of them I don't remember at all like 'Deadly Doris'.

Jaki Liebezeit: When Can started we had a little studio. One day Malcolm Mooney appeared... I think somebody must have told him to come and meet us. [It was actually Hildegard who invited him to visit, Ed] Mooney was on his way back from India where he was looking for his school. He didn't find it because it was actually in the USA [laughs]. On the way back from India Mooney visited some countries in Europe and somebody from the art scene I think must have told him to meet us in Cologne. So one day he came to us and it was a big success... so he started singing with us and he stayed with us. The band was very fresh and we had no singer, so we were very happy to meet him.

'Graublau'
Irmin Schmidt: My sense for nostalgic sentimentality is extremely limited... I was looking for and was very happy to find this track because I remembered making this Graublau film music because I was very much into the sound design and recording. We used short wave radios and stuff. I remembered making it and being very happy with it at the time. I rememberd that we had the idea to put it on the record once at the time but then Tago Mago came up and it didn't find its way on this record and then later it got sunk into the archive and we didn't find it again. So I was very happy to find this one because I remembered it so well.

Holger Czukay: "'Graublau Vogel' was a title track for this science fiction movie which had nice colours but didn't really have any action in it."

'When Darkness Comes'
Irmin Schmidt: It was necessary for Malcolm to leave the band when he did. Definitely. He suffered from the situation he was in. He had an incredible fear of being drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam. And on top of that, he had an even greater fear that maybe he would get sent to prison because he'd been in so many different countries, not just Germany but India as well and there was a worry that when they got him they would arrest him for desertion. The military, I think, had already been to his New York home. He was full of fear and this troubled him a lot. Living with these difficulties in a country where you don't know the language doesn't make it better. You can't express your feelings totally in a foreign language, even if we did speak English. And he got very fragile so he had to leave. He was in a psychically fragile state, which was very understandable, although we would have loved to have kept him. But it was necessary for him to go to the States and sort the whole thing including his state of mind out. And yes, on 'Darkness In Mind', this all comes out. He expresses the deep desperate state of his life for a moment. We could only help him by sending him back. Which we did and it did help him. We are still friends. I speak to Malcolm at least once a month.

Jaki Liebezeit: We only made one record with Malcolm - Monster Movie - after that I don't know what happened to him, he had some psychological problems... maybe it was just homesickness. So he went home to the USA.

'Blind Mirror Surf'
Irmin Schmidt: 'Blind Mirror Surf' was recorded in a totally different room from normal in Schloss Nörvenich. You will notice that there is nearly no reverb on it. It was recorded in quite a big room which was really just a building site. All the garbage from the renovation work being done on the building, whatever it was, went into this room. We became fascinated by the atmosphere in this room, especially in the evening or first thing in the morning with all this garbage and these old columns, and broken glass everywhere. So one day we put the microphones in there and walked over all this garbage, all this broken glass, with everyone holding different acoustic instruments like a flute and a violin and so on. And we just recorded according to the strange atmosphere in this room. 'Blind Mirror Surf' just wouldn't fit on a record that we were doing and so it got forgotten about. I was quite surprised when I found it, there were three versions. I had to choose one, the other two were equally as good I think. But it was actually one long recording with pauses in between. It reflects a spooky, ghostly mood in this room full of garbage in a castle.

Holger Czukay: Around this time I was sitting with Jaki in a café and Damo [suzuki] came along and he was making an incantation to the sun or something strange like that. I said, 'Jaki, this man will be our new singer.' He said, 'Come on, are you being serious? You haven't even heard him and you say that?' So I went to Damo and said, 'What are your plans for tonight?' He said, 'Nothing.' So I said, 'Do you want to be a singer in a band for a sold out concert?' He asked would there be a rehearsal and I said there wouldn't. And that's what he did. And that's what he did. And during the concert he started very, very calm but then he developed into a samurai fighter and the people got so angry that they left the venue. There was only about 30 people left in a venue that holds 1,500. But one of the people who stayed to the end was David Niven. At the end we asked him what he thought of the concert and he said that he didn't know that it was music but he thought it was fascinating. He was very polite even though I don't think he liked it.

'Oscura Primavera'
Irmin Schmidt: Tracks such as 'Oscura Primavera' or even 'She Brings The Rain', are pieces which are nice in that way. Less aggressive or less complicated we didn't decide to make nice, less aggressive music. It just came out like that. It just happened. Tago Mago may be a very heavy record and maybe 'Graublau' on The Lost Tapes is a very heavy piece but we also made the record Future Days, which mostly is very light-hearted although it's very experimental and avant garde. Because in that moment that is how we felt. And that is how life goes.

Holger Czukay: What made these other sides to Can come out? We were not relying so much on a subjective theme. The songs always came up like happenings and we left them like happenings.

'Bubble Wrap'
Irmin Schmidt: I didn't think Bubble Wrap' should go on at first. I didn't think it was good enough. As simple as that. Jono said, 'This is a great piece of music. Have you gone crazy?' I had some doubts about it but it was in my original selection all the same.

CD TWO

'Your Friendly Neighbourhood Whore'
Irmin Schmidt: When we started the group, like everyone else we needed somewhere to work. We needed a room to record in and to practice in. For years I had very strong connections to the art scene because I had made speeches for painters and had curated several exhibitions of young artists. One of my gallerist friends said, 'Look I will introduce you to my friend who has a castle in Cologne, maybe he has a room for you.' Christoph [Vohwinkel] met us and said, 'This sounds very interesting, yeah! There are so many rooms that are not used in my castle. And anyway I'm only there some evenings and some weekends and when we have receptions for galleries or whatever. So you can have this room.'

'True Story'
Irmin Schmidt: So we had to convert this room to our needs acoustically. We started to work in this room. The castle also had this wonderful hallway with a staircase with an incredible wonderful reverb, like a cathedral. Really wonderful. So we used that reverb and that is what makes up part of the quality of the recordings done in Schloss Nörvenich. Because we always had speakers outside of our room in the hallway.

'The Agreement'
Jono Podmore: There's a playfulness in tracks like the 'The Agreement' and 'True Story' which doesn't usually find its way onto the Can studio albums. If you think of a track like 'Aumgn' and the trippy stuff on Tago Mago because they were given these portentous titles they're taken very seriously but some of this stuff is just lads messing around. I mean, they were a bunch of stoners! I think these tracks show that they were having a laugh. There's a lot of humour in there, which is down to a sense of fun.

Jaki Liebezeit: We made two records at Schloss Nörvenich, Monster Movie and Tago Mago. Then for some reason I think we had to move out - either it was sold, or something, I don't remember exactly what happened... and we moved to another place in a village called Weilerswist nearby which had an empty cinema which had closed because of television - nobody would go to cinema any more in the village. So we rented this old cinema and made our studio there. The room still exists there - Holger lives there!

'Midnight Sky'
Irmin Schmidt: Some of the songs show the rockier side of Can. There has always been the mixture of the very subtle and complex on one hand and the very direct, spontaneous and rocky on the other. That was what Can was all about we used all of the music of the 20th Century whether that was soul, jazz, rock and contemporary classical. Maybe we leant more toward rock when we started but I don't think so.

Holger Czukay: Can could become rock & roll, yes. The Americans like Hendrix were important to us but not so much that we became heavy metal.

Jaki Liebezeit: When we were in the studio it was more or less like playing live because in the beginning we didn't have multi-track recording so it was us recorded in stereo and we all had to play together - no overdubbing and things like that.

'Desert'
Jaki Liebezeit: We always started with some idea and then started recording - we never wrote anything down. So we worked it out in the studio, because we were one of the first groups I think who had a home studio - or an almost-home-studio. It was very primitive but it was our studio and time no longer played a role, so we could stay in our studio as long as we wanted. We didn't have to pay for it like we would a normal studio. So we had time to work out some ideas and recorded until we thought it was good enough to release. So of course, with these lost tapes, it was material we thought at the time maybe it was not good enough to release or... I don't know why it stayed in the room where all the tapes were.

'Spoon' (live)
Irmin Schmidt: As it turned out 'Spoon' became a big hit here in Germany, it was a number one [actually a number six, Ed], so we ended up playing the song live a lot of the time because the people asked for it. But we never played it like it was on the record. It was always a new creation. The creation of 'Spoon' could go on and on and would always be different. This is why I thought it was good to have the different versions on the album because we always played 'Spoon' differently live and this is captured here.

Holger Czukay: My favourite track on the album was recorded at a free concert in Cologne. It is called 'Spoon (live)'. Can went totally out of themselves as a live band. A lot of people [students] rioted in Cologne and they were storming the buildings and smashing the windows. The City of Cologne stopped hosting these kinds of concerts for some time afterwards. So I went to the City Of Cologne and said, 'Why don't you make a free concert and then people will stop smashing the windows again.' And then they let us take over this sports hall with the capacity of 10,000 people, I spent a week installing all the lines and microphones and tape recorders and especially because a film crew was expected and I had recorder switched on with only two microphones and this was what you hear now on 'Spoon Live'. This is Can live through two microphones with no mixer or anything else like overdubs.

'Dead Pigeon Suite'
Irmin Schmidt: With the suites such as the one that was originally called 'Dead Pigeon On Beethoven Street' [the name of the film it was originally written for, Ed], there are pieces in development which are very near to the final title songs, in this case 'Vitamin C'. 'Vitamin C' was the title song and you find all the elements there. I'm not sure if this ended up getting used or not but it is on the way to becoming the final version. But only 'Vitamin C' made it onto Ege Bamyasi, which tells you something about how this music is made.

Holger Czukay: With 'Dead Pigeon Suite', I remember meeting with Samuel Fuller a film director. We all met him together and he was a strange guy. He had never edited a film. Well, in Cologne he was allowed to edit a film but in Hollywood he was never allowed near the editing room. He used special film editors. So he was running from one room into another and back again when we met him. He was very excited and confused. 'Dead Pigeon Suite' fits very well into his movie.

'Abra Cada Braxas'
Jaki Liebezeit: I don't remember all these recordings. It was a surprise for me to hear this material - I honestly don't really remember it. It was a long time ago.

'A Swan Is Born'
Irmin Schmidt: I didn't like this one either. It is one of the pieces on the way to being 'Sing Swan Song'. What I like about The Lost Tapes is that you have pieces like 'A Swan Is Born' and 'On The Way To Mother Sky', you have pieces where if you compare them to the final versions on the records, you learn something about our process and how this music works and develops which I like very much."

'The Loop'
Irmin Schmidt: A loop that wanted to become a track, never quite made it and was then forgotten about.

CD THREE

'Godzilla Fragment'
Jaki Liebezeit: Holger would edit everything we did. So of course when we recorded there was a lot of material which was just useless. Usually we recorded quite long pieces, so maybe one half of the piece was quite good and the other half not so good, then we would have another recording which was also one part good, another one not so good. We would edit the things and put the good parts together. I had nothing against editing, it's quite normal - like in movies, and in music... it's a legal process to do that in the studio. It's normal... everybody would do that.

Jono Podmore: There's stuff in some of the live tracks that hasn't really appeared before. That 'Godzilla' thing of turning a polite rumination over a few ideas into a big ####### monster is something that the band have discussed doing but has never really seen the light of day before.

'On The Way To Mother Sky'
Irmin Schmidt: After we recorded we very often made collage and montage. We edited the pieces. That was really done with Holger, Michael and me. And we three decided what the architecture of a long piece would be after it was edited. And then Holger was the one who had the craft to do the edit but the decision was made by the three of us. Jaki didn't have the patience to listen to the tapes and say, 'This bit would be nice there' and so on. But Jaki had a very important role to play when we used montage because when we had done an edit, he would get really furious if we had destroyed the continuity of the groove. So he was very strongly involved in the end of making montage or collage and edits. In the end he had to be able to say, 'Yeah, that's ok you didn't destroy the groove!' So working on the architecture of the groove was very important. Say on 'Halleluwah' or 'Oh Yeah', which have a lot of edits this was important. You can hear these edits. They are sometimes very brutal but Jaki had the last word on it if the groove didn't work.

'Midnight Men'
Irmin Schmidt: Upstairs in the castle there was a whole family living there the whole time we were there. A sculptor with his wife and five year old daughter. They were about our age. This sculptor was Ulrich Rückriem who now is one of the most famous sculptors in the world. He has built huge monuments all over the planet. In New York, Toronto, Canada, Tokyo he makes very big rocks with one side polished and one side raw. Very subtle, very minimal, very beautiful. So he was living upstairs from us and our constant use of the hallway and all the noise was quite uncomfortable for them. And we played at night. So they couldn't sleep. After a year or so we had to move out because poor Ulrich and his family couldn't sleep. Then we found a huge cinema to practice in which was in another village near Cologne. We had to rebuild it for our needs by putting mattresses against the walls and all that. So we made our studio there in Weilerswist at the end of 1971 until the end.

Holger Czukay: [laughing] Are we taken seriously by the art establishment in Germany now? If this has happened it was not something we were expecting. It was not something we were counting on.

'Networks Of Foam'
Irmin Schmidt: Some of this material could have been released back in the day but at the time you just released one record per year. So when we started we released Monster Movie and still we had a lot of other pieces hanging round. Monster Movie was an album chosen from a potential 20 recordings. Then when we made Tago Mago we had recorded a lot more pieces and had to choose from then. So you know you don't put everything out or you would be putting a record out every three months. Also, when it comes time to release an album your style may have changed, you may have progressed and you don't want to put the old stuff on a new record so you put it in the archive and then it gets forgotten about. At the end of the day we're quite happy to have found this wonderful old stuff. That's nice isn't it?

'Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light'
Irmin Schmidt: It is very, very true this idea that Can songs are never finished. We even wrote a song called 'Unfinished'. You can stop the process at a certain moment but it could go on in theory. In all of our work this idea is resonant. In this case the song 'Spoon' first came at the same time as the opportunity to make the theme music for Das Messer - a German cop show, which also came along at the same time as the suite, 'Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light'. In this case, this is the actual music that's in the TV show, the elements of which in the end we made the title song from. So the title song and the TV music were parallel with each other and it was one process to make it. Elements occurred and slowly the song was gutted to make the final version while at the same time pieces of it became the incidental music. The incidental music disappeared in the archive.

'Barnacles'
Irmin Schmidt: A lot of the time in the mid-70s we felt quite funky.
Holger Czukay: We didn't jam. We were not jamming in Can. We were not even improvising. We were instant composing. 'Barnacles' is an example of this but not so symptomatic of that many other Can tracks even if they were all essentially starting in exactly the same way. With each separate track it always depended on the mood we were in.

'EFS 108'
Holger Czukay: 'EFS no. 108' was one of our Ethnological Forgery Series. Can was only interested in music that people were currently doing and this was exotic for us, it was completely new. When the project first started we pretty much only listened to European music but then we began to imitate this ethnological way of singing. Irmin was doing a Japanese voice singer. Especially from my point of view I had started this musical access which was really combining this international music with the European music.

'Private Nocturnal'
Irmin Schmidt: We never said, let's play like this or that. We just started to play then an idea came up during improvisation and then we really started to concentrate to get the nucleus, the groove of an idea, by listening really carefully to each other and playing it again and again and again so we could get nearer to the essence of the idea. And it was always a strange subtle balance between spontaneity and highly disciplined
concentration.

'Alice'
Irmin Schmidt: One evening Wim Wenders called, asking if we could make a film score overnight. He thought his film Alice In The Cities wouldn't need music, but his editor Peter Przygodda convinced him otherwise: music was needed and it had to be by Can. Three hours later he was there and made it the next morning on time to the mixing studio, with the music.

'Mushroom' (live)
Holger Czukay: Damo was always constantly good. It would be hard to say which was his best performance but my favourites include 'A Swan Is Born' and 'On The Way To Mother Sky' but most of all, 'Mushroom (live)'.
Irmin Schmidt: You cannot avoid bootlegs. There are pieces that are on this that have been released on many bootlegs before now, but the quality of this is much better because they are mastered much better from the original tape. There was some guy in Israel who collects Can bootlegs who collects them from all over the planet and he offered us over 200 of these things but I'm not really interested in that. You can't fight them so just relax and forget about it!

'One More Saturday Night' (live)
Holger Czukay: Personally I hadn't forgotten any of these pieces of music as I started carrying out research into my own version of these albums about 20 years ago. My idea for this was to make completely new versions. My idea was completely different versions. I didn't want to just take stuff out of the archive and present it, I wanted that everyone remaining in Can was to get creative and represent them for the modern day.

Jaki Liebezeit: I think Can's music doesn't have any style...I think Can had no real style, you cannot classify it to say it's rock or funk. People were discussing it then asking, 'Is it rock or is it not rock?' But I don't care actually. It's not real rock because it doesn't come from blues.

Insightful interview of Can's Irmin Schmidt, by Max Dax of Electronic Beats. The third photo in the below link is of Can's studio, and you can see where they nailed surplus army cots to the walls of the former theatre for acoustic properties. He also compares the acoustic properties to their previous living space/"recording studio", a castle owned by a wealthy art and music patron, where the first three albums (Monster Movie, Soundtracks and Tago Mago) were recorded. It had a medieval stairwell that acted as a purpose-built reverb chamber. The band was very sensitive to their surroundings and environment (as well as each other's sound), and not only accounted for but actually incorporated this into both their studio albums and live performances.

Worth pointing out that a potential key component of their alchemical sound and mythical legacy may be related to the fact that they may have been among the first bands (at least in Germany) that, like Hendrix in the US, owned their own studio. This completely took time out of the equation. Being able to take as long as they wanted perfecting their songs and albums may have something to do with the timeless nature of their interlocking rhythms, and the surgical precision with which in-house engineer/producer, bassist Holger Czukay, was able to edit and stitch together myriad jam sessions into seamless "compositions".

http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/interviews/max-dax-interviews-irmin-schmidt/

"1968 was the year in the Federal Republic Germany that would define a generation. The leftist “68ers” as they came to be known, stood at the apex of a post-war cultural revolution in which confronting the country’s Nazi past and protesting Western military aggression went hand-in-hand with the melding of pop culture and the avant-garde. 1968 was also the year that young composer Irmin Schmidt, a former student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Györgi Ligeti, would form legendary krautrock collective Can—a band whose members’ contrasting musical backgrounds coalesced to stretch the boundaries of improvisation in rock. Indeed, making “new” music had always been Schmidt’s obsession, but only after visiting New York City and witnessing the fateful hybrid of rock and roll and Fluxus that was the Velvet Underground did he begin to see the possibilities. More than forty years and some two dozen albums later, Schmidt remains the gatekeeper to Can’s wealth of archive material, which he recently poured through to put together the epic three-volume The Lost Tapes, released this past May. Max Dax visited Schmidt in his studio in the south of France to learn more about Can’s alchemic mix of improvisation and composition.

Irmin Schmidt, you recently released the critically acclaimed compilation CAN—The Lost Tapes. Almost all of the tracks were recorded in the legendary Can Studio in Weilerswist. I’ve always been interested in geography and connections between art and where it was made. What was the importance of the Can Studio and how did that particular space influence the music?

Actually, there were two studios. The first one was located in Schloss Nörvenich. That one we only used for a little less than two years—from 1968 until 1969. We made three records there: Monster Movie, Soundtracks and Tago Mago. Schloss Nörvenich had a wonderful late medieval stairway that, as a space, had fabulous reverb. This particular reverb chamber left a big mark on these first three Can records. Unfortunately, we had to leave the castle for the, uh, excessive use of this incredible space. One of our housemates in the castle, the sculptor Ulrich Rückriem, had his bedroom at the end of the staircase and we used to record only during the night. So, after a while, he complained that he couldn’t sleep anymore and we had to look for a new recording studio.

Which is when you found the old discarded cinema.

Actually, it was one of those typical cinemas that you could find all over in small German villages at the time. It had “normal” measurements—twenty by ten meters—but the special thing was that the ceiling was eight meters high. It was nothing less than immense. You could really say that by remodeling it here and there we made this place our space.

What did remodeling involve?

First, we nailed mattresses onto the walls for acoustic reasons and for thermal insulation. Then, in a second step, Jaki Liebezeit’s girlfriend started to decorate these mattress walls with beautiful tapestry. It just looked so great! The Can Studio was a space where you could spread out in every respect. It was so huge that it was almost impossible to get on each other’s nerves; we could easily keep a comfortable distance from one another.



You appropriated the room and acoustic space by altering it according to your specific needs?

Absolutely! We made it ours. We created an atmosphere in that particular room that applied to us and us only. And surely this room had a huge impact on the music that was being recorded there.

Did every musician have his own territory?

Yes. Everybody had his corner. In the far left corner was Jaki with his minimalist drum set. Opposite to him in the far right corner you’d have found me. I needed a lot of space for my grand piano and all the synthesizers that I had. In the center of the room Michael Karoli had his realm. As a guitarist who only owned two or three guitars, he didn’t need that much space. Damo [suzuki, Can’s vocalist] always roamed. Holger Czukay finally was mostly working on the upper end of the room where the mixing console was located. In the first five years he basically was responsible for the sound. He would be in charge of the recording and bass at the same time, so he actually played bass mostly behind the mixing console, far away from the rest of the group. And when we didn’t play but were listening to recordings that we just had made, we used to sit on a sofa together in yet another section of the old cinema. I remember it as a kind of saloon sofa. Basically, we’d be playing music far away from each other but listening to music very close together. That’s a very specific process, I would say.

Today, most studios offer a variety of ways to take your mind off the recording process. You can watch films or cook or read a book. How intensely did you work in the studio?

On a normal working day—or should I say working night—we’d arrive at the studio around 3 or 4 p.m. and leave the place again twelve hours later. Sometimes in winter, it led to the almost poetic situation that we felt we were “allowed” to go to bed after a long working night, and while driving home through the snow we’d see all the working people freezing at the bus stop . . . We had a regular eighty-four hour week in the studio.

When you’d record for, say, twelve hours at a time, how important was the editing process that followed?

There was no rule to it. The way tracks evolved into their final form was always different. Sometimes a song would record itself effortlessly. Other times the process of collectively writing a song happened in two stages: first came hours of spontaneous “improvisation”—a tricky term, if you ask me. That then turned into a new situation in which we would really listen closely to what everybody else was actually playing. Then, if we’d hear a good moment or idea in it, we’d focus on it consciously and very, very closely. And from that moment on, the improvisation ends and the hard work begins. At this stage of composing, we’d try to find the “key” to a given track. This process often took days or even weeks. We’d start over and over again from zero, and every time it would sound completely different. But as a collective we’d come closer to the idea of a song with every version we’d try out. The French poet Paul Valéry said that the first line of a poem might just fall from the sky into your mind, but the rest is hard work. It’s often the same with music. The first idea defines how the music has to turn out in the process, but there is a process. Jaki always said that a groove is defined by its first four bars. From then on you have to obey this . . . law. I’m talking about a certain kind of discipline. You basically know that you’re getting closer and closer with every attempt. The initial idea or the starting point often is nothing more than an atmosphere. A groove isn’t necessarily just a rhythmical pattern; a groove can be something much more complex.

Your day began in the late afternoon, which means you were mostly working in night shifts. How important was natural or artificial light for your music?

Today, the sunlight has a completely different importance for me when it comes to making music. Back then I embraced the darkness and the artificial light that comes with it. Don’t forget, the old cinema only had one small window and a door that opened towards the garden. Can was a real night band, with one exception. The album Future Days was recorded mostly during the daytime. The door that led to the garden was open almost all the time. Compared to the others, this album has a completely different atmosphere—you can also quietly hear the birds tweeting and children yelling in a nearby swimming pool through the open door. Whatever sound came through the open door, we’d incorporate it into our music.

Why didn’t you record that one at night?

What the hell do I know? I suppose it was summer and we were in a good mood. We definitively woke up earlier than usual, I guess.



Was incorporating environmental noise a nod to Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète?

I’d say it was more John Cage‘s influence that we accepted the sounds of our surroundings as music. You see, we didn’t start to compose with the birds tweeting, we just accepted them hanging around with us. That’s the difference. Don’t forget that we pressed the first five hundred copies of our album Monster Movie with a sticker that said, “This record does not contain interfering noise” simply because we didn’t consider background noise as interference.

Nowadays you mostly work during the daytime. Together with Justus Köhncke and René Tinner, you do a lot of film scores. Have you become an early riser?

Not at all. I still sleep as long as I can. And when I wake up, the first thing I do is read a book for at least an hour. Only after this little ritual do I feel able to communicate with other people. I usually work in the studio from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Since the early nineties, when I started to work on my opera Gormenghast, I began again to write scores in pencil for symphony orchestras—the way music was notated over the course of centuries.

Do you hear music in your head when you read a score?

Of course. But I need space to spread out the sheet music on the tables and on the floor. It’s a lot of paperwork, you know? It’s a totally different way to work as compared to composing on the computer, which I also enjoy. Actually, when I compose scores for films, I always do it on Pro Tools.

Was the whole band capable of hearing music before playing it when you formed in ’68?

You don’t need to be an academic to hear music when there is no sound. Holger Czukay and I had studied music in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s class, but none of the others in the band had that background. Jaki always understood composing as an act of playing music, and so did Michael and Damo

With Can, Jaki Liebezeit played the drums hypnotically and machine-like, even though he had a background in free jazz. Did you ever see this as a musical contradiction?

Everybody in Can felt this was a contradiction. But the band was by definition a contradiction. We all agreed that we wanted to contribute to Can, but in a totally different way compared to what we’d done before. Previously, I had been a conductor and a classically trained pianist, and I was ready to end that career by starting Can. Jaki didn’t want to play free jazz anymore, he wanted to lose himself in grooves instead. Contrariness was one of the band’s driving forces. I was the one who put the band together, and I saw a high potential in a group that consisted of musicians that came from extremely different backgrounds. For me it was important to have a young rookie playing rock guitar and that he was confronted with musicians who had studied under György Ligeti and Stockhausen.

It wasn’t only that you came from different backgrounds and that you were willing to leave behind other interests or even careers. On a human level, you were dealing with vastly different personalities.

But this was our agenda. We basically had two choices: Either we’d create something wonderful or we’d fail big time. I’ve always loved and still do love taking risks. Looking back, I’d say I was right. I gave up a career as a conductor for Can, then I gave up Can for new adventures. I was lucky, though: I had married a woman who wasn’t afraid of taking risks either.

Let’s talk about one of Can’s landmark albums, Tago Mago. How did the the personalities, the contradictions merge in the studio?

Good choice of an album. We recorded Tago Mago in the second year of Can’s existence. The album is a prime example of how it all came together. Every single track on the album had a completely different genesis. And taken in its entirety, Tago Mago shows almost every aspect of what this whole adventure was about. Probably the most important thing when it comes to playing and recording music is to build and to think in structures. Our structural approach was the collage, which is one of the central stylistic principles of the twentieth century, especially in literature, film and visual arts. Perhaps less so in music, but nevertheless . . . We were film lovers. If you watch movies frequently, you sooner or later get used to the concept of editing and harsh cuts. The same goes for the modern contemporary classical music that’s my background. Take the central track of Tago Mago, “Halleluhwah”—this one is almost twenty minutes long. It took ages until we had the groove finalized. When we had agreed on it, we started to record tunes that were based on this groove—some of them good, some of them bad. The final version that you can hear on Tago Mago is a collage of several late takes. Holger, Michael and I had built this architecture together, whereas Jaki just wanted to play.

You mean he didn’t get the idea of the collage?

No, not at all! He just wanted to play, play play. But every time we presented him the cut-ups we’d made, he’d listen extra carefully. How often he rejected an edit that we had painfully cut together because he heard a rhythmic blip here or a dragging groove there . . . But considering that “Halleluhwah” is one of our most well-known songs, I suppose he was right to say no to the results of so many sleepless nights.

Let’s talk a bit about the importance of what you call architecture in music.

Thanks to our studies under Stockhausen, Holger and I had quite a similar understanding of music as architecture. It was a common practice in so-called “new music” to create bricolages by cutting up the tape. Stockhausen encouraged us to do so, and we often reassembled at the Studio für elektronische Musik in Cologne.

Who did the cut-ups?

Holger Czukay was the most gifted of us all when it came to editing the tapes. The audio collages he did for Can were simply far ahead of their time. Like with some of the pieces by Miles Davis, you wouldn’t hear that they were edits.

You mentioned “Halleluhwah”, which has one of the most incisive and impressive breaks in the history of pop music. Was this the result of such an editing process?

Yes. And you can find an equally radical cut in the song “Mother Sky”. Or take “Oh Yeah”—you hear Damo Suzuki’s voice played backwards at the beginning . . . like Sergei Eisenstein sometimes edited his films radically, as if he was using a sword. But all the thinking and all the theory is worth nothing at all if you don’t have someone like Holger Czukay, someone who knows the deep secrets of editing. As for Can, I would go so far as to call the collage formative. You could even consider the band itself a collage of people that don’t quite fit together.

Can was a collective at a time when collectives could be seen as a political statement. How political was Can?

We weren’t considered political. And we didn’t take sides, so I guess you could call the band non-political. But in a wider Beuys-like sense, coming together the way we did and forming and working as the collective that we were was a political action. For example, as a collective, we rejected the role of the author, as well as every form of hierarchy. We even split the royalties when one of us hadn’t even played on a song. Jaki once famously said: “Not to play is a musical decision, too!” Even the decision to own the studio you work in I would consider a conscious political act because it made us independent in the truest sense of the word. You have to remember that nobody had ever worked like that before us. And back then the idea of claiming independence was on nobody’s agenda. At the end of the day we said no to the industrial exploitation of our art. No record company could ever tell us the slightest thing. There always was dialogue, yes, but nobody could tell us what to do. We were totally aware of the importance of owning our means of production, and we were in full control of all the processes that led to musical results. Of course, this is very political. But we refused to comment on daily politics.

Coming from that background, what risk does a film director take in that respect when he or she commissions you to write a score?

That’s a funny question. He’d maybe get something quite different than what he expects or thinks he’d get. And even though I’d call myself erratic and incalculable, you’ll certainly notice a common thread in the scores I’ve delivered through the years. Besides that I’ve always been a very cooperative fellow when it comes to films. The score has to serve the film and not vice versa. I see myself as a hiree in that regard. Of course, I want to contribute to whatever film I’ve agreed to work on, and I actually quite like discussing a score together with the director in depth. We watch the film together and we always talk about the purposes and the reasons for having music in particular. It sometimes even happens that I try to persuade a director to not have music in a certain shot, knowing full well that I’d get less royalties if he listened to me.

Can you name a score that you’d consider especially fitting?

I’d say all the films of Jean-Pierre Melville. I think he is just a genius when it comes to using music to push the narrative of a film. In Le Samouraï, he goes to the limits of what a film score can achieve. The tweeting of Alain Delon’s little bird for instance is an integral part of that score, and I pay him the biggest respect for allowing this. Henry Mancini is another very good example. I don’t remember the title of the film anymore, but in one of his scores he makes intense use of a piano—but the key of G is out of tune. And I love the scores Oskar Sala wrote for Hitchcock, and how he sometimes was able to build up an atmosphere of almost hysterical suspension, especially with The Birds, where he used only electronically made bird sounds. I tip my hat when I notice details like this in a score. Suffice to say, always paying maximum attention to details is fundamental.

You were born 1937 in Berlin. You grew up in a destroyed city and came of age in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. How were these periods in history formative for you as a musician?

These were extremely formative years. I didn’t experience the war and the bomb attacks that much, though. My family—my mother and three siblings—were evacuated in 1943, and we spent the dangerous final two years of the war in the countryside. But certainly my parents have had a major influence on me becoming a musician and deciding to study music as a young man. Both my parents were music lovers and played the piano quite well. My mother suffered very much from the fact that her parents didn’t allow her to become an opera singer. I have often accompanied my mother on the piano when she was singing arias by Puccini or Verdi. It still gives me the shivers when I recall her singing. She had such an unbelievably beautiful voice as she was enormously gifted musically. From her, by the way, I learned discipline the hard way. When I make the same mistake three times practicing the piano, she’d always manage to sneak in and stand next to me that very moment and ask: “Didn’t you notice?”

It always happened when you’d make a mistake more than once?

One mistake is always allowed. It’s not allowed to make a mistake the second time. And if it happened a third time, she’d remind me of that. It was her deep, deep wish that I’d become a professional musician. For a moment in life it looked like I’d become a singer myself. At the age of eleven I must have had an incredibly beautiful voice and people say that I was able to reach very high registers. I used to sing long arias by Händel that I had memorized. But I was a boy. And, inevitably, the day comes when your voice breaks. That was in 1950. I had to stop my career as a singer.

What about memories from the war? I can imagine that Can, as a truly post-war German band, must have had shared memories that were foundational for the group.

After the war, my family didn’t return to Berlin. We lived the first post-war years in Dortmund, which was reduced to rubble. Of course, these ruins have had a huge impact upon me. My whole life I had a reoccurring dream: In a golden twilight, I walked through a mysterious city in ruins, but I wasn’t allowed to enter the destroyed buildings. So I walk and walk and walk through the constantly changing silhouette of this burnt down city . . . Everybody who has experienced an air raid will carry the memories until he dies. I especially remember one attack, I must have been five years old. We had to remain in the bomb shelter for some time, after which we were eventually allowed to step back into the garden. My grandparents and my uncle were with me and some other members of the family. Two of them were militant Nazis. It was during the night. Flak spotlights were combing the black sky. At a certain point, they seemed to have located one of the attacking airplanes. My uncle applauded, and I kicked him hard in his shin. Then I cried and screamed like I was insane, because I just had realized that they were about to kill a human being, even though it was an enemy bomber pilot. I had tin soldiers and tanks, too. As a boy I played war. And I remember that specific war related terms such as Kesselschlacht—cauldron battle—sounded totally common to me. I doubt that five-year-old children nowadays know such words. Anyway, one day another uncle of mine visited us in the countryside, and he gave me a toy ambulance as a present. I remember him saying: “This is for all your wounded and dead soldiers.” These two events are the most vivid of all my war related memories.

Did it change how you played with your tin army?

Well, I drowned them all in a little creek near the house. I can still hear the trees in the wind and the water flowing when I recall this little childhood scene. I have a photographic memory when it comes to sounds that are related to spaces or people. Perhaps the most memorable was of a long journey with a night train from Berlin to Innsbruck when I was about six years old. I resisted sleep and instead listened the entire night to the sounds that I could hear lying in my bed. I hallucinated listening to these invisible distant sounds and incorporating the monotonous groove of the train beating the tracks. I loved the voices that you’d hear through the speakers when the train would stop in a village or city, only to be replaced by the monotony of the tracks that would lure you in when you picked up speed again. I listened to the train sounds as if they were music. My love for “concrète” sounds and the idea that every sound audible on tape belongs to the music must have originated from this train ride.

How consciously can a young boy listen to sounds and surrounding noise as music?

Very consciously! I know that in my head I hallucinated choirs and string sections playing harmonies to the repetitive train groove. A later song of mine which appeared on my first solo record and which I wrote together with the Swiss artist Bruno Spoerri has the title “Rapido de Noir”. In this particular track I took one of Bruno’s field recordings from a train ride, edited it, and gave it a structure. Then I played the Prophet 5 synthesizer over it, which I heavily treated with guitar distortion and wah-wah. Even though this childhood memory is actually quite a sweet one, the song itself turned out rather dark.

One of the beautiful things about train noise is its sound spectrum. A moving train features almost all the frequencies audible to the human ear. I don’t know any other machine that has such a rich sound.

There is another aspect that fascinates me when it comes to trains, which is that every moment sounds different. It’s like watching a river flow: you’ll never see the same river as you never hear the same train sound twice. The other day, I lingered under a railway bridge. Hell, it was a moment of beauty whenever a train passed."

Can: A Critical Discography by Barry Walters

http://www.wonderingsound.com/icon/icon-can/

If you made a list of bands whose cultural influence and current stature outweigh its original popularity and sales, Can would show up somewhere near the top. But unlike most other cult acts that wowed rock critics, the U.S. media profile of this pioneering German band of the late ’60s and ’70s was nearly nonexistent: Until Can’s 1997 Sacrilege remix album, Rolling Stone only once reviewed the quintet, and it was briefly and negatively; the word “Krautrock” — the genre Can epitomized — didn’t appear in the magazine’s pages until the 21st Century, and the band itself rarely got even a mention.

In the U.K., things were different: Its early-to-mid-’70s output routinely received raves and radio play, and just as Can was splitting near the decade’s end, its influence was manifesting itself in countless post-punk acts: Joy Division, for one, owes its existence at least partially to Can. Inspired by the conservatory-schooled “new music” of the classical avant-garde as well as contemporary groups like Sly and the Family Stone and the Velvet Underground, this Cologne ensemble rooted itself in spontaneous composition, aiming not to generate the showy solos of jazz and jam rock but a collective sonic unity that reflected the social revolution and revolutionary politics of postwar Europe.

Can sounds contemporary today because it embraced rhythm as enthusiastically as it pursued noise. While British and American progressive rock bands flaunted virtuoso guitar and keyboard chops, Can showcased its drummer Jaki Liebezeit, an exceptionally syncopated and steady player. This meant that Can was a dance band as much it was a “head” band. At the same time, Can was just as heavy as the Black Sabbaths of its era, yet way more arty and abstract: It’s difficult to imagine a Sonic Youth without a Can. Years before world music became a buzz phrase, Can drew from the Middle and Far East in what it wryly christened its “Ethnological Forgery Series.” Stressing sound over words, Can presented the rock vocalist as one instrument among many, an approach that would show up in shoegaze and chillwave decades later.

Can’s near-invisible American status of its past helped it become an act of the future — follow its evolution below.

In Chronological Order

Monster Movie
Crude keyboard electronics, circular bass guitar riffage, nervous one-chord guitar drones, steady non-syncopated drumming, and stream-of-consciousness poetry signifying everything and nothing: The first few seconds of Can's debut album present a laundry list of Krautrock signifiers. But what's amazing on this 1969 disc is hearing the band essentially inventing a genre. Having been exposed to the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol's Factory art bunker on a trip to Manhattan the year before, keyboardist and classical composer Irmin Schmidt leads his band to take on rock with the radicalness of the contemporary avant-garde.

Like bassist Holger Czukay, Schmidt was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the 20th century's most theoretical and controversial composers. Guitarist Michael Karoli studied under Czukay. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit had previously played free jazz. American ex-pat sculptor Malcolm Mooney struggled with mental illness. Monster Movie is larger than the sum of this unlikely combination; it's essentially brutal, psychedelicized garage rock, but fueled by ideas, chops, and chemistry that far exceed the stoner norm.

Its four tracks contain only a suggestion of melody. Instead, there's propulsion, and the anxiousness that came with making it up as they went along. Where their contemporaries pursued harmoniousness in collective spontaneous composition, Can finds anxiety and, paradoxically, the fearlessness of the groove in its aptly named Monster Movie. "You made a believer out of me," the key line in the sprawling 20-minute-plus behemoth "You Doo Right" is elevated from throwaway line to manifesto through repetition, keen dynamics, and sheer force of will. Can believes in the artfulness of savagery, and it pursues both here in equal measure.

Soundtracks

Can's 1970 release captures the most important transition in an ever-evolving band. It contains the final material from the quintet's original singer Malcolm Mooney until the band's 1989 reunion disc Rite Time, as well as the recorded debut of his successor, definitive Can vocalist Damo Suzuki. Although it's ostensibly a collection of cuts created for European cinema, Soundtracks plays out like a quintessential acid rock LP: Michael Karoli's shrieking guitar is the album's featured instrument, and although keyboardist Irmin Schmidt called the shots, there's little of his atmospheric keys that the album's title suggests; only the brief, über-Gothic instrumental "Deadlock" resembles a traditional soundtrack.

Just as producer Teo Macero edited the work of Miles Davis and his musicians into trailblazing compositions, bassist Holger Czukay structured hours of Can improvisation in a way that predated sampling. On Soundtracks, his editing is remarkably brusque: "Deadlock" and "Tango Whiskyman" fade abruptly; "Soul Desert" ends with a dead stop, and the epic "Mother Sky" starts full-tilt, as if in mid-jam. The edits throughout its 14-and-a-half minutes are obvious, but they give the sprawl its pacing and crucial dynamics; without them, the repetition would be unbearable. Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit lock themselves into in a severe, dead-simple dance groove that suggests disco, post-punk, and all points between while Karoli throws a fit and Suzuki mumbles and cries cosmic soul. This is the first time that Can truly becomes itself, a fitting precursor to the band's most mountainous milestone, 1971's Tago Mago.

Tago Mago

A major leap beyond the Cologne band's earliest output, Can's 1971 double album is radical as it is large. Recorded at its newly assembled Inner Space studio, Tago Mago marks the beginning of Can's communal creative peak: Each member's contributions mesh so seamlessly into an organic, interactive whole that they're almost unimaginable in a different context. Many albums of the era were created in revolutionary hippie enclaves, but this is one of the few that truly feels democratic and is all the better for it.

Inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley, Tago Mago is Can's most foreboding work, and although the band intended it as a journey from light to dark and back, it's mostly crepuscular and distinctly autumnal; Halloween without the candy. Ominous opening track "Paperhouse" repeatedly creeps and climaxes like a serial killer stalking and violating its prey. Suddenly it caps, subsides, and segues into "Mushroom," an anguished, astonishing dance cut that links James Brown beats to Can's successor, Public Image Ltd. Singing "I saw skies are red/ I was born and I was dead" in an unmistakably Japanese accent, Damo Suzuki suggests the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit manage to be both funereal and funky while guitarist Michael Karoli picks slowly stinging notes and Irmin Schmidt plies grim organ chords. "Oh Yeah" follows with what's either bomb blasts or cracks of thunder. Suzuki sings backwards, and then in Japanese as propulsive rhythms hasten.

"Halleluhwah" brings Godzilla-sized psych-funk that fades into a gentle but fleeting interlude then starts up again, building steadily and more menacing until it roars and then slinks off. The drones and dissonance of "Aumgn" evokes ritual sacrifice before culminating in a tribal drum circle jerk. "Peking O" showcases Czukay's most unpredictable jump cuts; it's more collage than composition. Suggesting a mystical Indian raga, "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" supplies a relatively cloudless coda to an otherwise turbulent journey. While most other '70s double albums dawdle, Tago Mago tramples into tomorrow.

Ege Bamyasi
If you're new to Can, this is the best and easiest place to start. Containing an actual Top 10 single (in West Germany, of course) with peaks akin to Tago Mago's most pointed cuts, yet with little of that sprawling double album's excess, 1972's Ege Bamyasi is the German band's most solid and groove-intensive work. Given that this is Can, there's still plenty of weirdness. Opening track "Pinch" announces this set's sinister funk tone with a feedback shriek and one of drummer Jaki Liebezeit's most frenzied syncopations. While he rattles full-tilt, bassist Holger Czukay creates tension by holding back as guitarist Michael Karoli applies shards of broken chords; keyboardist Irmin Schmidt adds nearly imperceptible drones, and singer Damo Suzuki growls equally incomprehensible Beat babble. The result is an interlocking puzzle of rhythm and noise.

Post-punk and no-wave groups like Gang of Four and the Contortions, as well as countless current indie bands, would follow Ege Bamyasi's template, but this was supremely/uniquely freaky stuff at a time when the Carpenters ruled the airwaves. While most progressive rock peers supplied head trips to stoned fans who couldn't get up from their bean-bag chairs, Can created full-body psychedelia for the discos of tomorrow. "Sing Swan Song" provides a respite ballad and the second half of "Soup" thoroughly freaks out, but the rest ranks among the most radical dance music of the '70s — so radical that it would take decades to find sympathetic club DJs beyond German boarders. The first Can album to get a US release, Ege Bamyasi nevertheless ended up in bargain bins.

This is Liebezeit's greatest work, and while he plays like the maestro that he is, the others seem bent on unlearning their chops, although few of the non-musicians Can inspired could ever summon the restraint of "One More Night." Like Picasso approximating a caveman's scrawl, Can's savagery is rendered with skill. The guitars, the keyboards, even Suzuki's feral vocals are rendered as if they were percussion. In "Vitamin C," everything becomes a drum, and while "I'm So Green" introduces the Madchester sound nearly two decades before Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, the German gangster TV show theme and resulting pop hit "Spoon" takes Sly Stone's contemporaneous experimentation with crude early drum machines and marries it to pseudo-Arabic rock exotica — the beginnings of what Can would later name its Ethnological Forgery Series.

Future Days
If 1972's Ege Bamyasi is Can's most extroverted and eager-to-please work, their next offering is the German band's most introverted and alluringly aloof. 1973's Future Days isn't the proto-ambient work that some critics have claimed it is: Drummer Jaki Liebezeit still hammers like a funky octopus; singer Damo Suzuki gets as close as he ever could to crooning conventional pop-rock melodies, and there's way too much tension played far too in-the-pocket for Can to comfortably recede into the background. But there's a palpable, sexy sense of restraint here, and although it doesn't approach Brian Eno's subsequent Spartan random drones, it points in that direction. A sleeper album that reveals its nuanced depths over time, this is Can at its coolest.

The minimalism Irmin Schmidt learned from Steve Reich and Terry Riley comes to the fore: It takes bassist Holger Czukay six minutes to deviate from the one note he plays through most of the introductory title track. Although the band is still generating most of this stuff live in the studio and capturing it with simple stereo recording, there's much more sound manipulation: The volume drops suddenly on "Future Days" to build back up, and that chugging hum throughout remains a mystery. (Is it a guitar pedal? A crude synth? A mechanical ghost?) The free-form jams of Tago Mago's second half are here refined into the far more structured "Spray," which accelerates, switches into languid 6/8 time, then speeds up again. "Moonshake" similarly untangles Ege Bamyasi's lunar discothèque funk. While those records boil, Future Days simmers.

Nowhere is this shift into subtlety more apparent than on its opus, "Bel Air." Where Can's other side-long cuts sprawl, this one is arranged as a symphonic suite of related movements, one that ends as it begins. "Spinning down alone, you spin alive," Suzuki chants enigmatically as his cohorts achieve multiple orgasms of Krautrock lava love. Despite its reserve, Future Days radiates a tenderness that Can would never recapture: This was Suzuki's swan song; he'd soon become a Jehovah's Witness and retire from music for years. There's a sense of finality here, but also a gentle spirituality. Can's five members here synchronize as if their limbs were strings plucked by the same cosmic deity.

Soon Over Babaluma
1973's Future Days marked the end of the band's stretch with singer Damo Suzuki, but '74's Soon Over Babaluma extends Can's golden era for one more disc. Reduced to a quartet, its members shift duties and stretch psychedelia further from its source: When he isn't augmenting his guitar with violin, Michael Karoli plays it as if it were one. He and Irmin Schmidt — who uncharacteristically pounds a regular piano on a couple of cuts — contribute vocals that recede to the background after the first two tracks. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit's beats deviate from their usual funk, and bassist Holger Czukay holds back even more than usual, giving to the band's space rock additional spaciousness. Can has never been cluttered, but here it's finely defined.

Opening track and single "Dizzy Dizzy" begins Can's recurring excursions into reggae so unconventional it's rarely recognized as such. Karoli takes the mic to twist James Brown catchphrases into abstract pillow talk, but his violin — popularized in contemporaneous rock by Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel and ELO — is the focal point. He plays it in gypsy style while his bandmates swoop and skank as if the Jamaica of their dreams lacked gravity. "Come sta, La Luna" merges their galactic reggae with tango; guitar remains in a supporting role, waves of rhythm float in and out, and the undulating sonics mimic dub. "Splash" and "Chain Reaction" presage Can's near-thorough immersion into jazz-rock fusion that would soon grow standard; here it's wild and foreboding. "Quantum Physics" mutes where Future Days left off: Still too nervous and percussive for true ambient music, it feels as though it's taking place on a distant planet. Brian Eno would soon smooth these drones for himself; Factory and 4AD Records would later fetishize their dislocation. This is the last time Can would be unquestionably influential.

Landed
Although Can's previous work, 1974's Soon After Bamaluma, debuted the German group as a quartet after the departure of its most essential singer Damo Suzuki, this 1975 album signals a more significant shift. This was the band's debut for England's Virgin Records, initially a prog-rock indie that generated U.K. hits with resolutely non-commercial releases from Can's Krautrock brethren Tangerine Dream and Faust. This was also Can's first album recorded with a 16-track console, which meant that the band didn't need to sing and play most of its parts at the same time in the same room; now it could fix, overdub, or trash individual performances as needed.

Landed is still a strange record by 1975 standards, but when measured against Can's previous output, much of it is far more straightforward. Jaki Liebezeit's previously masterful drums are usually buried in the mix, and what can be heard is much simpler than his usual polyrhythmic funk. Minimalism had served the band well, but now guitarist Michael Karoli plays many more notes, and when coupled with casual two-chord compositions like "Vernal Equinox," the resulting lopsidedness suggests jam bands like Santana where the soloist is king. If it weren't for Holger Czukay's studio tricks, "Full Moon on the Highway" would nearly be generic boogie. Only the concluding beat-less collage "Unfinished" ties this relatively conventional Can to its freak-form past.

Flow Motion
After the relatively regular jam-band fare of the previous year's Landed, Can's 1976 album takes a 180-degree turn away from rock. Ramping up the space reggae introduced on '74's Soon Over Babaluma, Flow Motion opts for a far cleaner sound while returning to the German band's polyrhythmic approach. It yielded the band's U.K. hit (and sole success outside Germany), "I Want More," which splits the difference between Roxy Music's glam proto-disco and Kraftwerk's pioneering synth-pop. The band's unison vocals suggest a menacing male counterpart to the breathy babes of fellow German disco act Silver Convention, while the fuzz guitars and dreamlike keyboards play Can's prettiest melody by far. "I Want More" (and the track's second half, "… And More," a nod to James Brown's many two-part singles) is a little piece of perfection, and although the rest isn't as tightly focused, Flow Motion is easily the band's most welcoming record in the '70s second half.

As suggested by song titles like "Laugh Till You Cry, Live Till You Die," it's also distinctly lighter. Although the droning Bali-esque drums of "Smoke (E.F.S. No. 59)" link Can's then-current incarnation to its far darker Tago Mago past, there's a tropical, even sunny vibe to cuts like "Cascade Waltz" and "Babylonian Pearl," trifles that may trip up fans of its previous work yet clearly rejuvenate the group. Bassist Holger Czukay's sonic manipulation now figures nearly as prominently as the instruments themselves: Flow Motion was engineered using "Artificial Head," a recording technique employed so that headphone listeners could perceive a three-dimensional effect. Once again Can is an experimental band, only this time the musical trials yield merrier results.

Saw Delight [Remastered]
Here's where the Can discography truly deviates. The addition of latter-day members of the otherwise British psych/prog/fusion band Traffic — Jamaican bassist/vocalist Rosko Gee and Ghanaian percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah — together with Holger Czukay abandoning his bass to focus on production and sound effects means that the Can-ness of this 1977 record is distinctly diminished. The best of the Rosko/Rebop era, Can's ninth album boasts some forward-thinking thrills: Opening cut "Don't Say No" suggests what Talking Heads would sound like in their expanded '80s incarnations, while the sprawling "Animal Waves" similarly suggests King Crimson's future transformation with Adrian Belew. "Sunshine Day and Night" even beats Paul Simon to the Afrobeat punch.

Can/Out of Reach
Combining Can's 1978 disc Out of Reach, with its 1979 album Can aka Inner Space, this twofer release captures the German band at its least Can-ish.

Out of Reach (tracks 9 through 15) isn't even included in the band's own official discography. Both latter-day ex-Traffic members, Saw Delight additions Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee do all the singing here, and founding member Holger Czukay isn't involved at all; he quit the band in '77. Rebop is a dexterous player, but his percussion often overwhelms Jaki Liebezeit's drums rather than augmenting them. Bassist Gee is similarly aggressive and technique-intensive, a sharp contrast to Czukay's minimal yet empathetic previous basslines. Out of Reach is far more akin to the virtuoso flash of American jazz-rock groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra than to the intellectual, intrinsically Germanic Krautrock of yore.

The third and final album Can album recorded with Gee and Rebop, Inner Space (tracks 1 through 8) improves upon 1978's Out of Reach by dropping much of that album's frantic jazz-rock excess, restoring guitarist Michael Karoli as vocalist, and employing Holger Czukay's editing skills. 1979's Can (issued here as Inner Space) nevertheless comes cluttered with filler: A goofy fuzz-tone cover of the melody from Jacques Offenbach's opera Orpheus in the Underworld most associated with the can-can illustrates how far the band had ventured from its avant-garde beginnings. But the strongest material — particularly "Aspectacle," a menacing quasi-disco track akin to contemporaneous cuts by James White and the Blacks — restores that essential mystery in Can's core.

Rite Time
Can's remaining members went their separate ways after recording Can (aka Inner Space) in 1978. In late '86, the original lineup briefly reunited in sessions that would three years later yield the band's 12th and final studio album. For a loose unit that could tighten up righteously if it saw fit, this quintet goes distinctly off-kilter on 1989's Rite Time: Few elements in opening cut "On the Beautiful Side of a Romance" fully synchronize, and reinstated vocalist Malcolm Mooney evokes Captain Beefheart's lunacy without the wit. On brooding tracks such as "Like a New Child," the gated drums, brittle guitar, and liquid bass suggest the '80s productions of kindred jazz fusionist Bill Laswell. Elsewhere, Can picks up where it left off in the late '70s — lighthearted and untethered.

The Lost Tapes
Can's relationship to contemporary alt-rock and pop is so elemental that they have penetrated the DNA of acts as diverse as Happy Mondays, Wilco and Radiohead, plus innumerable others who have worshipped at their groovy altar rather more cravenly over the past 44 years. Frankly, it would be easier to name those that hadn't soaked up Can's stew of psychedelia, free jazz, prog rock, funk, avant-electronica, African high-life and musique concrete.

Following on from the reissue last year of Tago Mago comes this three-CD box set of previously unreleased material, the master tapes of which were rediscovered when Can's Weilerswist studio was dismantled prior to sale. Thirty hours of music — recorded between 1968-77 — were edited and co-compiled by original member Irmin Schmidt, providing further evidence of Can's unclassifiable genius.

Given their disregard for boundaries, The Lost Tapes is as rampantly diverse as you'd expect. Alongside "Blind Mirror Surf" — where smashing glass, a sound like mooing cows and unintelligible muttering suggest an episode of The Goon Show taped in Bedlam — sit groovy raga "Your Friendly Neighborhood Whore", pastoral sci-fi epic "Dead Pigeon Suite" and the live "Mushroom," where a distressed vocal and needling guitar subtly shift its gears by thrillingly malevolent increments.

Three discs is a lot to digest in one sitting, but to plunge into The Lost Tapes at any point is to be rewarded with a reason to rhapsodize afresh about Can's everlasting, inspirationally bonkers vision. — Sharon O'Connell

Kraftwerk - Minimum Maximum, '04 tour (VIDEO 2 hours)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM6B5j378T8

Can - Live at University of Essex, Colchester 5-17-75 (AUDIO 2+ hours)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6t2m2QI_F8

Bob Magaw said:

Kraftwerk - Minimum Maximum, '04 tour (VIDEO 2 hours)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM6B5j378T8

Click to expand...

Big fan, production perfection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEXDjuazXE

The best description of Can I've read, from Rolling Stone's '97 review of the Sacrilege Remix compilation.

"Even in the wild whorl of kraut rock — as Germany's progressive psychedelia of the late '60s and '70s was known — Can stood apart. As older academics steeped in neoclassical, free jazz and electronics, they came at rock from the outside; with a healthy disregard for convention, Can played rock music as if it were a fascinating toy to be taken apart, fiddled with and then cleverly reassembled to new specifications."

Something from Cluster & Eno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwGrO70Gy38

Thanks, Leroy.

Former CLE RB great digs Krautrock. Who knew?

BTW, the long (3 hr.) doc on Krautrock and Kraftwerk was a revelation for me. I put it off, not just for the length, but thinking it was almost exclusively on Kraftwerk. There was actually pretty good general coverage of the genre, though definitely the thrust was Kraftwerk's development and increasingly expanding global influence specifically (especially British, as it seems to be from that perspective, but includes Europe and even American). I only knew them from Autobahn. They had some really cool stuff in the beginning that sounded completely different from how their style later evolved. Especially the driving "motorik" beat, which sounded somewhat like Neu! (and another revelation for me), and I guess there was some personnel overlap with early incarnations of Kraftwerk.

In the doc, my favorite talking head (Mark Prendergrast, who wrote the long liner notes from the Tangents Tangerine Dream box posted upthread), said Trans-Europe Express is in his opinion a masterpiece, one of the greatest albums ever, and probably his personal favorite, not just for Kraftwerk or even Krautrock, but period. I listened to samples, and even though it was more like Autobahn than the earlier style (which as El Floppo noted, was actually pre-synth and largely analog, using repetitive flute passages, treated sounds, lots of echo, delay and reverb for effect) which impressed me so much, I got a sense of why Prendergrast was so high on it (some of my favorites would have to include titles like Revolver and Abbey Road, Kind of Blue and On The Corner by Miles, Riot by Sly and now Tago Mago by Can), both for what he points out as it's thematic coherence, and for what you did, their machine-like production precision and perfection.

Appreciate the links and suggestions to the thread.

Can fun fact: John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon of the Sex Pistols wanted to replace Damo Suzuki as Can's vocalist, and was a big fan of the group. He co-founded the post-Pistols ensemble PIL (Public Image, Ltd.) with bassist Jah Wobble. Post-PIL, Wobble has since worked with Can bassist, engineer/sonic editor and studio wizard Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebzeit in various formations.

Wobble has also worked with American bassist and producer/engineer Bill Laswell (Material, etc.), one of the most "important" and influential champions of Can in the States. He has worked on remixes of Bob Marley, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana/John McLughlin and Funkadelic. Laswell worked on another interesting project called Ekstasis, led by guitarist Nicky Skopelitis. Among other musicians, they had a "murderer's row" of drummers, with Liebezeit and Ziggy Modeliste of the Meters alternating tracks.

The album Ekstasis by Nicky Skopelitis and Bill Laswell (personnel listed below, three songs underneath that, as well as video of a European concert)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekstasis_(album)

Meet Your Maker (AUDIO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVS59oXUx3Q&list=PL18E96AF015C0FADB

Tarab (AUDIO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfr8PSyPssQ&list=PL18E96AF015C0FADB&index=2

One Eye Open (AUDIO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jo9KhQ2950&index=6&list=PL18E96AF015C0FADB

Ekstasis* live in Warsaw, Poland 6-20-98 (VIDEO 70+ minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZAo69APjO4&index=7&list=PL18E96AF015C0FADB

* Personnel

Nicky Skopelitis - guitar
Raoul Bjorkenheim - guitar
Bill Laswell - bass
Graham Haynes - cornet
Amina Claudine Myers - Hammond organ
Ayib Dieng - percussion
Hamid Drake - drums

** A similar Laswell-led project with Skopelitis under Material's name, titled Hallucination Engine. It contains members of P-Funk such as Bootsy and keys/synth genius Bernie Worrell, Wayne Shorter of Miles Davis and Weather Report and various world class African, Indian and Middle Eastern percussionists and musicians. Can's early so called EFS (Ethnological Forgery Series) experiments predated music later known as world music by a decade or more, and may have been an influence here.

Incidentally, Laswell was I think on the seminal Eno/Byrne My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts sessions, which preceded the Eno produced Talking Heads Remain In Light (in the concert film Stop Making Sense, Worrell was an integral part of the overall sound), both ahead of their time and influential in incorporating funk and African rhythms within the pop/rock genre. The radio broadcast snippets (evangelists, etc.) included on the former was definitely anticipated by Czukay. He was unsuccessful in bringing this radically new conception of a musical cutup form to the band (though I think Can's keyboardist Irmin Schmidt might have been aesthetically sympathetic, characterizeing *COLLAGE* as the hallmark of art across the board in the 20th century), but realized it himself when he went solo. BTW, Eno wrote in the liner notes to his ambient work On Land, how he was highly influenced by Teo Macero's skillful editing/looping on Miles mid-'70s Get Up With It (particularly the track He Loved Him Madly, dedicated to and in memory of his idol Duke Ellington).

One of the most seminal influences and practitioners of the cut up and collage method in LITERATURE (Klimt and Magritte might have been analogues in the visual arts, among others) was William S. Burroughs, such as in Naked Lunch, the David Cronenberg film adaptation is in the Criterion collection. Burroughs gets to rap on Words Of Advice, the second song (NSFW lyrics). Eventually everything folds into itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_Engine

Cucumber Slumber, my favorite track from the album, which is I think a Weather Report cover (AUDIO)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXrYh4k1bEk&list=PLXSeUIV-fsAzL5-oQifggrs62qUTyAr3i

Words Of Advice (featuring William S. Burroughs rap)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZ8OCT3a8M&list=PLXSeUIV-fsAzL5-oQifggrs62qUTyAr3i&index=5

Manuel Göttsching - e2-e4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtMVpL3B_6Y

Never heard of this record until I ran across this list on the innernets:

http://listology.com/barry20/story/top-electronic-music-albums-1960s-present

Bob Magaw said:

Thanks, Leroy.

Former CLE RB great digs Krautrock. Who knew?

BTW, the long (3 hr.) doc on Krautrock and Kraftwerk was a revelation for me. I put it off, not just for the length, but thinking it was almost exclusively on Kraftwerk. There was actually pretty good general coverage of the genre, though definitely the thrust was Kraftwerk's development and increasingly expanding global influence specifically (especially British, as it seems to be from that perspective, but includes Europe and even American). I only knew them from Autobahn. They had some really cool stuff in the beginning that sounded completely different from how their style later evolved. Especially the driving "motorik" beat, which sounded somewhat like Neu! (and another revelation for me), and I guess there was some personnel overlap with early incarnations of Kraftwerk.

In the doc, my favorite talking head (Mark Prendergrast, who wrote the long liner notes from the Tangents Tangerine Dream box posted upthread), said Trans-Europe Express is in his opinion a masterpiece, one of the greatest albums ever, and probably his personal favorite, not just for Kraftwerk or even Krautrock, but period. I listened to samples, and even though it was more like Autobahn than the earlier style (which as El Floppo noted, was actually pre-synth and largely analog, using repetitive flute passages, treated sounds, lots of echo, delay and reverb for effect) which impressed me so much, I got a sense of why Prendergrast was so high on it (some of my favorites would have to include titles like Revolver and Abbey Road, Kind of Blue and On The Corner by Miles, Riot by Sly and now Tago Mago by Can), both for what he points out as it's thematic coherence, and for what you did, their machine-like production precision and perfection.

Appreciate the links and suggestions to the thread.

Click to expand...

I'm in the TEE is a masterpiece camp. Absolutely seminal, paradigm shift of an album.

Reading a great MOJO magazine, maybe the only issue devoted to a Krautrock feature article (April '97).

Just started on Faust, also covers Amon Duul, Tangerine Dream, Can and Kraftwerk.

Not sure this is the best thread for the below, but closest I could come up with rather than start a new one, undoubtedly some overlap and mutual, interconnected influences with bands such as Tangerine Dream

Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene Concert (VIDEO 1 hour)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HJ2Q8GQwts

Another Oxygene Concert (VIDEO 90 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su6MRe95FA8

Monaco Concert (VIDEO 2+ hours)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhrOkO3naaI

* Oxygene 1-13 Studio Album (AUDIO 78 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE9jShG9sD0

Equinoxe Studio Album (AUDIO 39 minutes), my favorite movement starts about the 19:30 mark, not sure this form of symphonic analog synths has ever been surpassed, possibly by Vangleis? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAhgz9aLukk