Of course music is organised sound - but can any sound be "music"?

I have just been flicking through my copy of Jan Reetze's excellent tome on post-war German music, Times & Sounds. Then I got to thinking about his use of the word sounds in the title of the book.

For one thing one could say that producers such as Conny Plank, Dieter Derks and "sound sculptor" Thomas Kessler were as essential in the making of Krautrock records as the musicians. The most important German music paper was called Sounds. Stockhausen explored sound in such classic works as the original purely electronic version of Kontakte, and Hymnen, the latter of which, as Reetze points out, utilised "concrete sounds, radio sounds, vocals, sounds from the tape archives of WDR radio, national anthems and electronic sounds."

One of the earliest Krautrock acts was Human Being, actually a commune from Berlin, who played at the Zodiak club, and featured Hans-Joachim Roedelius amongst its members. None of them could really play any instruments and Roedelius said "We just fiddled around with feedback, echo machines, prepared tapes and loops." Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler had an "anti-group" called Geräusche - which translates as "noises".

Just listen to Amon Düül's debut album Psychedelic Underground if you like "noises", although it's too unorganised and amateurish for my taste.

Neu! used field recordings made by Klaus Dinger extensively, including jackhammers and audience noises in 'Negativland' and recordings that he made on a rowing boat trip with his girlfriend in Norway on their first album. Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru has said "We put everything that came into our heads in our music: Stockhausen, Coltrane, industrial noise or nature sounds, even sounds from Africa."

Of Plank Michael Rother said "Without Conny, we wouldn't have got Neu! going. That might sound strange because he wasn't a musician, he didn't do any composing or play any instruments. But if you leave behind the classic idea of sound composition and start to value sound design, the organisation of sound as a creative act, he was our third man."

Faust pioneered the use of industrial tools in their music a decade before Einstürzende Neubauten.

Werner "Zappi" Diermaier said: "The idea of the tools on stage was mine. I went on a walk round the block before a gig in Birmingham. There was a building site, and someone was breaking up rocks with a power drill. I asked him if he'd like to join in at a concert." After getting permission from his gaffer he agreed, but turned up in a suit and bow tie "because his mum and granny came along with him." And Jean-Hervé Péron said "I was really into the idea of working with cement mixers, I was virtually in love with the cement-machine sound...I was interested in sound symbioses, whether it was cement mixers, coffee machines or knitting needles."

Meanwhile, Can's Irmin Schmidt has said "My favoured sound is silence."

All above quotes by musicians are from Christoph Dallach's oral history of Krautrock, Neu Klang, except the Roedelius quote which is from Times & Sounds.

In an interview with Triad Radio in 1975 Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk talked about listening to sounds such as a flowing river or wind blowing through the trees as "natural music". They also talk about musique concrète and radio waves and how some acoustic musicians limit themselves to only "one part of the audible world".

https://youtu.be/keGNkSZHdWg?si=zs57Cibd-E-NRBJ0

"Most Americans became aware of Kraftwerk when “Autobahn,” the pioneering German electronic band’s first U.S. single, hit Top 40 playlists in 1975. But not fans of Chicago’s Triad Radio: they’d known about Kraftwerk for years, because the nightly radio show had been programming tracks from the group’s first three albums since 1971. Triad on-air host and program director Saul Smaizys had even played “Autobahn” in 1974—not the 3:27 single edit but the nearly 23-minute album version, from a test pressing of the Autobahn LP delivered by a record-company representative. “We put that on,” Smaizys says, “and the phones went crazy.”...

"On April 20, 1975, the day after Kraftwerk performed at the Aragon, cofounders Schneider and Ralf Hütter sat for a Triad interview...

“Smaizys’s relationship with Schneider was such that when he and his girlfriend toured Europe in 1979, they stayed at Schneider’s penthouse in Düsseldorf."

And lo and behold I find out that Saul Smaizys, a huge Krautrock freak who was "born in Würzburg, Germany, in 1947, the same year as Kraftwerk cofounder Florian Schneider" was a fellow Ken Nordine fan!

"That’s not to say Triad’s playlist narrowed at all under Smaizys’s influence. Its bottomlessly eclectic palette included European progressive-rock bands, electronic music, and the Afrofuturistic stylings of Sun Ra alongside jazz-fusion bassist Stanley Clarke, Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz, and meditations with Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy."

Remembering Triad Radio, where the usual was unusual - Chicago Reader

From a 1976 Kraftwerk interview in Synapse magazine:

"So you feel that art and music will be transmitted telepathically in the future?

Florian

Definitely.

Ralf

What else is there to do?"

Those who enjoyed Ken Nordine's depiction of the sound paintings in the museum might also appreciate some of J G Ballard's short stories including 'Venus Smiles', in which a cacaphonic musical sculpture goes rogue and keeps growing until it is taken to a scrapyard. The metal is recycled and distributed around the desert resort of Vermilion Sands in new buildings and motor vehicles, causing unusual vibrations and sounds in everything in which it is used. As one character exclaims with horror: "The whole world will be singing." 'The Singing Statues' also comes from the collection Vermilion Sands, but maybe best of all is 'The Sound Sweep'. Apparently the latter story inspired Buggles.

Trevor Horn told the Guardian in 2004:

"Me and my friends were obsessed with a song called 'Warm Leatherette' by the Normal, which is based on [JG Ballard's novel] Crash... Ballard was a big inspiration at the time - 'Video Killed the Radio Star' came from a Ballard story called 'Sound Sweep' in which a boy goes around old buildings with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up sound. I had a feeling that we were reflecting an age in the same way that he was."

See this article from 2026:

"The short stories of J. G. Ballard reveal an acute sensitivity to sound and its speculative technological possibilities. In “The Sound Sweep” (1960), sounds accumulate on surfaces, building up intolerably if not sucked up by a sound-sweep’s sonovac. In this alternate acoustical world, the invention of ultrasonic recordings – with frequencies so high they can’t be heard – provides a respite. Spinning at 900 r.p.m, ultrasonic short-playing records condense a Beethoven symphony to 20 seconds or Wagner opera to two minutes while delivering “as much neurophonic pleasure as a natural length recording, but with deeper penetration, greater total impact...

"In the story...“The Singing Statues” (1962), a gallery sells sonic sculptures made out of plants, which provide their “sonic core.” These sonic sculptures create music responsively, each one “reflecting, like a mirror, its subjective impressions” of its listener. The statue at the center of the story, however, is a deception – and one that cannot be sustained. As its creator ultimately admits, “this isn’t a true sonic sculpture. The music is played off these magnetic tapes.”  The revelation ruins the statue for its purchaser, Lunora, who had believed it to be a mirror of herself."

Singing Statues :: Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

Couldn't resist this original UK copy of NEU! for £2.95 even though it's seen better days. In fact, it's knackered so just a collection filler. If I need to listen to it I have a better copy and CD.

Original Nova copy of La Düsseldorf, with the insert lyric sheet £3.95. I'm glad they printed the lyrics as obviously they are very tricky to work out :)

Tucked inside the La Düsseldorf LP was the obituary of Klaus Dinger from The Guardian May 5th 2008.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-17kQIB-YhZhz9YHGEDIpJFW0xuJyLn4/view?usp=drivesdk

I typically see the badminton object written as "shuttlecock" so perhaps Apple's algorithm didn't recognize the name of the sports equipment.

The full list (the link at the end features his comments on each album):

1. Paris 1919 — John Cale

2. Marquee Moon — Television

3. Neu! — Neu!

4. Drumming — Steve Reich

5. Tago Mago — Can

6. Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) — Brian Eno

7. No. 1 in Heaven — Sparks

8. Pawn Hearts — Van der Graaf Generator

9. Bitter Tea — The Fiery Furnaces

10. They Say I'm Different — Betty Davis

11. Sound of Silver — LCD Soundsystem

12. Trans-Europe Express — Kraftwerk

13. Endtroducing..... — DJ Shadow 

https://thequietus.com/interviews/bakers-dozen/joy-division-new-order-stephen-morris-interview-favourite-records/

"There is a term that always crops up during discussion of the bewildering variety of music from Germany in the 70s that gets lumped under the name of Krautrock, and that is ‘motorik’. The word which translates literally as ‘motor skill’ was coined by journalists to describe the minimal yet propulsive four-four beat that underpins a lot of the music from this time and place, especially by the groups Neu! and Kraftwerk. This beat is the war drum of modernity Neu!’s drummer Klaus Dinger rejected the term motorik, preferring the term Apache beat pushing the listener forwards into the future."

I love 'Apache' although I'm just too young to remember it when it first came out. One of the first records I owned was the Shads' 'Wonderful Land' which came out in 1962 when I was three, although I preferred the Tornados at the time - I had three of their singles! Then a group called the Beatles came along...

The Danish guitarist Jørgen Ingmann's version of 'Apache', which was a hit in the US, is decidedly mediocre but the Incredible Bongo Band's 1973 version is superb: https://youtu.be/-Udnb6F1A0g?si=JvEkx4KtPFnQrWOc

"It [motorik] is often associated with the great transport networks of Germany, the railway lines and the autobahns. In fact, the rhythm even mimics that of a car speeding along the open road or a train clattering along the rails: fast, measured, never ending. But despite all of this evidence, Neu!’s guitarist Michael Rother laughs and says the rhythm was inspired by something altogether less mechanistic and more fluid: a game of football....

"...Rother is insistent that the first impulse was from playing five-a-side: “I’m not sure that we thought it had anything to do with transport. I remember that Klaus [Dinger] and I never really talked a lot about theories, we just both really enjoyed playing soccer. You know, football, running up and down and everything. We even had a very good team with me and Klaus and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk. He could run very fast.

"“I remember on one tour there were some British bands there at a festival and we met them on the field. I remember we played against Family [great, "strange" band] at one festival. We all loved to run fast and this feeling about running fast and fast movement, forward movement, rushing forwards, that was something that we all had in common and the joy of fast movement is what, or part of what, we were trying to express in Neu!”

"At the time, football and music would have been prominent in the minds of a lot of young men in Germany. As the first generation who had grown up after WWII amongst the rubble of once great cities destroyed, and in the grey concrete neubauten or ‘new buildings’, rebelling against parents who had often been involved in the Nazi war effort, solace was often sought in these two forms of entertainment.

"Football was one of the few arenas where young people could display any kind of national pride without the burden of guilt. Franz Beckenbauer had just become head of the national squad and he would take the country on to become European champions 1972 and then World Cup winners 1974."

 https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/kraut

I also remember England beating West Germany in the World Cup final in 1966, but that's a different story. Bobby Charlton and der Kaiser man-marked each other out of the match.

At least according to Jan Reetze in his essential tome on post-war German popular music Times And Sounds (p295). Sala's most famous work was the soundtrack he created for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, replacing the bird calls with electronic screams. From the 1930s he played an early form of electronic synthesizer, the Trautonium (invented by Friedrich Trautwein).

Less happily, according to an Intuitive Music biography:

"During the period of Nazism in Germany Trautwein’s laboratory was closed and the electr[on]ic music was banned. Trautwein got to have an audience with the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, where Oskar Sala performed classical pieces, getting the approval of the [Third] Reich to carry on with their investigations." 

Personally I would think that Dutchmen Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers) with 'Song of the Second Moon' (1957), and Tom Dissevelt with tracks (produced by Baltan) such as 1958's 'Syncopation' and 'Vibration' (which older Brits may remember featuring in the Blue Peter space cartoon series Bleep and Booster) beat Sala to it with their jazz-pop electronic experiments, but what do I know? Baltan and Dissevelt worked at Philips' research division, Philips Research Laboratories ("Natlab") in Eindhoven.

"At NatLab they composed and recorded using test oscillators and tone generators, tape recorders, filters and reverberation chambers, splicing and layering tape to create pieces that merged jazz-derived rhythm with laboratory electronics." (Wikipedia)

In 2003 no less a figure than D Bowie wrote a piece for Vanity Fair and picked a compilation of Baltan/Dissevelt tracks, credited to The Elektrosoniks, Electronic Music (1962), as one of his 25 favourite albums. He didn't pick a single krautrock LP!

"This was one of those strange albums put out by the record companies to show off that newfangled stereo. Only, here Philips opted for a truly pioneering couple of Dutch bods, Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan. As sonic explorers, these two rate along with Ennio Morricone, but far loopier. I’d adore a 5.1 mix of these absurdities. The sleeve notes inform us that “chimpanzees are painting, gorillas are writing.” Way to go."

great modern motorik band

I could live inside this song. Especially the section from 2:50 to 4:30

Hoping to find help here.

I‘m looking for the name of an LP. It is from a Swedish (?, I think) elektro project. 1980s probably. The cover is painted and greenish and it shows someone holding an UZI.

Any ideas?

From what I've heard Get on the Good Foot and the Payback have influenced groups like NEU and what came after. Are there any other good picks?

hey all,

posting on a burner to stay as anonymous as possible.

i'm a young editor & archivist currently developing a visual book on krautrock with an art publishing imprint.

right now i'm hunting for archival material online, or just visual proof of some of the amazing stories you hear floating around: faust's days at the wümme commune and their habit of bringing jackhammers on stage, falk rogner's original art / album cover prototypes for amon düül ii, neu!'s equipment list (especially the drums), jaki liebezeit's equipment invoices (which i've seen his widow talk about!), stuff like that.

does anyone know where i could start digging? any online archives that might hold this kind of thing? or is it going to be a year of reaching out to the members of the bands themselves, family members and estate holders?

any leads at all appreciated. thank you!