Reading David Stubb’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2017). He’s a British music journalist that goes back to the 1980s; Melody Maker, good buddy of music writer Simon Reynolds. I read Stubb's electronics book, Mars by 1980 (2018), a few years back and learned a lot from it.
Especially appreciated the pre-1980 stuff, a history of electronic music in the 20th century. Stockhausen, etc. I knew virtually nothing outside the pop/rock electronic music that I heard on the radio in the 1970s; Kraftwerk and Moroder/Donna Summer, basically. I didn’t always entirely agree with Stubbs on the later stuff I already knew, Aphex Twin, ambient EDM, but I learned so much about the early history of electronic music in the 20th century from his book that I thought it was time to get his take on Krautrock. Or what the Germans originally called Kosmiche Musik, or "Cosmic Music," a German musical style of psychedelia, or progressive rock, that thrived for about a decade beginning in 1968.
I'm a late-adopter to Krautrock, let it be known, and so in that sense my new found interest I must confess is at least in part an extension of my advancing geezerdom. I knew a little bit, the aforementioned ‘70s pop stuff, and I owned a few cherished Can, Faust, and Neu albums, but never started listening to a lot of Krautrock before this century. Reflecting on that now, like several other semi-recent music listening enthusiasms (minimalism, spiritual jazz, and various ambient and EDM sounds), an undoubtably big draw for me with Krautrock is that it is predominantly instrumental music. I used to listen to a lot of pop or rock music, with their wordy lead singers, singer-songwriter music, while reading magazines or whatever, but anymore my preferred music programming when I’m reading is predominantly instrumental music. Words, English words (languages I don’t understand aren’t a problem; love French rap in the background, for instance), but I find English words too distracting. But I really enjoy listening to a lot of Krautrock while I'm reading.
Amon Duul aren't in heavy rotation in my reading listening sessions, however. Too many vocals; not enough droney Motorik tempos. But they are undeniably giants of the genre and their first album, Phallus Dei (1969), 'Erection God,' basically, and their song, "Archangels Thunderbird," hold firm positions, ahem, in my growing Krautrock pantheon.
At any rate, the first chapter in Future Days is devoted to Amon Duul. Amon refers to the “sun” god in ancient Egypt and Duul is either a nonsense word or a derivation of a Turkish word that means “moon.” An early theme in the book is that Krautrock is a cultural outgrowth of 1968 political protests in Germany, so why not start with the Krautrock band most associated with the counter-cultural hippie communes in this period? As the story goes Amon Duul were members of a commune in Berlin in the late ‘60s (with little to no contact with the Red Army Faction or any other violent terrorist groups often associated with those communes, I'll hasten to add). A large, revolving, group of members of the commune, hippies, derided by most everybody outside their commune, get together and do these psychedelically charged drum circles and improv musical jams. Very DIY and very loose and unorganized. Amon Duul ii were a small group of the better musicians in the original AD commune who felt held back by the drum circle ethos and wanted to do something more ambitious. Make high-octane psychedelic riff-rock jams into hit records or at least this was the plan anyway. The rule of thumb I learned was that Amon Duul ii were good, sometimes great, and the original AD were always bad, and in my early samplings of the two this rule seemed to moreorless hold true. And this take is also moreorless reinforced here by Stubbs.
But I’ve learned semi-recently that Julian Cope, singer in post-punk band Teardrop Explodes, and gonzo Krautrock expert in his own right, swears by this third original Amon Duul album called Paradieswarts Duul (1970), or ‘towards paradise’ Duul. I was hoping Stubbs might weigh in on this heretofore unknown to me original AD album but not a word.
Pardieswarts scales down the commune drum circle of the first couple of AD albums to seven musicians, including two couples, and adds back on AD ii guitarist John Weinzierl and percussionist Chris “Shrat” Thiele.
Krautrock toggles between an art rock formalism (minimalism, electronics) and a pastoral psychedelic ideal (ambient serenity, musique concrete). Think of Can or Faust holing up in some rural makeshift DIY studio outpost, incorporating the ambient pastoral sounds and/or tempos of nature into their electronic experimentation and cut-ups. Think of Popol Vuh’s spooky pastoralism or the spacious serenity of the album Eno makes with Cluster shacked up together somewhere in rural Germany. If I were to hazard a guess as to why Stubbs overlooks Paradieswarts I’d guess it is because it is a hippie folkie pastoral with very little artistic pretensions. No electronics. Stubbs exults about AD ii’s very Stockhausen, 18-minute-long “The Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church,” the third side of their 1971 double-album Tanz der Lemminge (English: Dance of the Lemmings). Not much Stockhausen in Pardieswarts. It is a very traditional sounding album, actually. Stubbs might just find Paradieswarts musically conservative and a little too hippy-dippy sloppy. The vocals are definitely a weakness but even they have grown on me with repeated plays.
Anyway, Paradieswarts is definitely on the acoustic and traditional instruments side of the Krautrock spectrum; no tape-splicing, just roll the tape and some jamming hippies trying to come together right now. Or right then. Exquisite filigrees of guitars, piano, flute, harp, and bongos, slow building, noodling, interweaving individual players and a rough chorus of singers into these beautiful sad crests of communal hippy love. Works for me, and right at home with pastoral psychedelic greats like early Pink Floyd or Neil Young.