[ aquarius records — Rock Pop Krautrock ]

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Showing results 151 through 200 of 403.

Faust's third album (or fourth if you count the Tony Conrad & Faust "Outside the Dream Syndicate" album), originally released in 1973, is now available for the first time on cd with the original artwork (excepting the box set) instead of the horrible cover

RealAudio clip: Exercise - With Several Hands On A Piano
RealAudio clip: Flashback Caruso
RealAudio clip: Untitled

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SORRY. Wow! Krautrock/Faust fans have had a lot to be thankful for these past few weeks. First we are presented with the instantly-essential "Wumme Years" 5-cd box set (see AQL #104) of old Faust classics and rarities, and now we are blessed with this double cd set of new Faust material! San Francisco Faust fans disappointed by the legendary krautrock band's last SF performance (a lackluster jam-filled session at the Great American Music Hall a year or two ago) may find their faith in Faust's live abilities renewed by this album, released on our new favorite label, Ektro (run by Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle). No, they're not doing old Faust songs from "So Far" or "Faust IV", but their current improvisational efforts are very effective in a dark and droning way. As well, they do at least two songs derived from their last studio album, 1999's pretty great "Ravvivando" -- the line-up of which, minus only one guy, performs on this set. "The Land of Ukko and Rauni" (Ukko and Rauni being ancient Finnish gods, of course) documents a Faust show in Helsinki on April 20th, 2000, beginning with sub-aquatic dirge-rumble, like music for whales -- you get the sense of large, intelligent beings moving fluidly in the darkness. Soon the band is engaged in some exploratory, but quite propulsive, psych-rock, with keys, guitar (courtesy of the Davis Redford Triad's Stephen Wray Lobdell), and Zappi's drums, augmented by additional mysterious sounds (Faust's trademark proto-industrial sound effects). The textures and rhythms of this mostly-instrumental set (there's a few moments of nonsense word-blurt but nothing much) are unmistakably Faust-ian, and worthy of a double discs' investment in listening. Faust, even thirty years on, remain a potent outfit, one from which today's crop of supposedly trend-setting spacey post-rock bands could learn a thing or two.

RealAudio clip: Wir Brauchen Dich no#7
RealAudio clip: Vagary

A 5cd box set devoted to krautrock legends Faust? We were salivating from the moment we heard about it! The output of the band from 1970-73 is truly remarkable, and their work can hardly be compared to any of their contemporaries. They transcend both psych and prog, they influenced countless acts and anticipated many musical trends, from This Heat to Nurse With Wound, New Wave and No Wave, Industrial and "Post-Rock", the Boredoms old stuff to the Boredoms new stuff. Seminal musical genius that everyone should hear. And this is both a good place to start for newcomers (I envy anyone hearing Faust for the first time!) and a necessary collection for fans. The nitty gritty details, for those who wanna know it all: Wumme refers to the schoolhouse-turned-studio that Faust producer Uwe Nettelbeck rented out at Polydor's expense (he also managed to get Polydor to buy the band all the recording gear they needed and pay for a 24-hour a day, live-in engineer.) It was under these ideal conditions that Faust recorded almost all of the material on this box set, which includes (get ready!): Faust's self-titled debut, their second album "So Far" (both of those terribly hard to find on cd, with the Japanese edition of "So Far" having been out of print for years now), the ever-popular "The Faust Tapes" (now with a track listing and indexing!) and "71 Minutes of Faust" (collecting both the "The Last LP" and "Munic and Elsewhere" LPs). And, also included in this set is an amazing disc of unreleased material, some recorded live at the BBC in 1973, plus some recently discovered & never before listened to tapes as well as the track "We Are the Hallo Men" which was originally on "Munic & Elsewhere" (though curiously credited here as having been on "The Last LP"), but previously left off of ReR's previous version of "71 Minutes of Faust". For this disc alone the set is worth the money to Faust aficionados! Then add in the 40 page booklet, illustrated with rare color photos (of them playing darts outdoors in the nude! THE NUDE!) and Super 8 stills, that features essays/memories from Faust friends/fans Chris Cutler and Peter Blegvad, and interviews with several band members as well as with their producer (the reclusive Nettelbeck) and, for the first time ever, with sound engineer Kurt Graupner! Of course, the individual discs may be issued separately at some time (or not? all we've heard is that the BBC sessions will come out individually) but then again with those first two Faust cds being so hard to come by, and so essential, there's got to be lots of you out there you not only will want this whole box, but NEED this box. Nicely presented, clearly a labor of love, with the cds in not-fancy-but-serviceable individual digipacks (and don't worry, the paintings from "So Far" are included in a color booklet with that disc).

RealAudio clip: J'ai Mal Aux Dents
RealAudio clip: Flashback Caruso

What can we say, other than that this may be the year of the Faust re-issue! Yet another (and quite cheap, all things considered) way to delve into the seminal work of these eccentric krautrock geniuses. Fairly well packaged, with reproductions of the original artwork and notes from the first album (no, not on clear plastic as the LP was) included, as well as the front and back cover images from "So Far" (but not the color prints found inside the original LP or in the previous cd reissues--if you want those, you gotta get the "Wumme Years" box). But, this disc comes with two pages of additional notes by Jason Gross of "Perfect Sound Forever" magazine.

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The quintessential Krautrock projects -- Faust, Can, Guru Guru, Amon Duul, and all things vaguely associated with Conny Plank -- had been huge influences on Nurse With Wound's catalogue. So it goes without saying that when Steven Stapleton got the call that Faust wanted him to produce a record of theirs, he enthusiastically leapt at the chance. What he didn't expect was that Faust only passed on a series of sloppy studio improvisations to Stapleton with the instructions to make a Faust album out of them. We can imagine that Jim O'Rourke had been given a similarly loose framework when he was granted the opportunity to produce Rein back in 1995. Just as O'Rourke took those sounds and sculpted an album which was remarkable in its similarity to classic '70s era Faust (e.g. Faust Tapes, Faust IV, So Far, etc.), Stapleton with his trustworthy cohort Colin Potter at his side has crafted an excellent pastiche of that obtuse Faust sound of mutant psychedelia which guided the more experimental proponents of prog rock, industrial, post-punk, and post-rock. Disconnected is filled with dynamic tumbling percussive riffs, rolling acoustic guitar nestled into clouds of vibrating distortion, unsettled sweeping driftwork, and stoned basslines. In other words, Disconnected sounds like a fucking great Faust album. Unfortunately, this has been very difficult for us to get a hold of; so don't expect it to stick around for very long. We should also let you know that this is the regular edition of Disconnected. The special edition (which we didn't get) does feature two 'bonus' tracks, the first of which is called "Silence" and features just silence (some bonus!); and the second is a live track without the presence of Nurse With Wound. Nope, those ain't here; but honestly we really don't think purchasers of this regular version are missing too much.

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Ok, just in case introductions are in order: Faust is the classic Krautrock band from the '70s who resurrected themselves in the '90s, demonstrating that they still knew a thing or two about making weird and avant-garde psychedelic rock music. Dalek, meanwhile, is a genre defying, indie-rock-scene-crashing rapper from New York whose album on Ipecac two years back was a big hit 'round these parts and elsewhere. The Dalek / Faust connection first became public when a Dalek cut was included on Faust's Klangbad: First Steps compilation. We then heard rumors that the two were gonna do something together...at last, here is the fruit of that unholy union! Krautrock and rap, that's a first I guess. (Krautrap? ugh.) But it makes sense in light of Dalek's allegiance to dub and electronica and Faust's interest in the same... So, how did this collab turn out? Sounds more like a Dalek record than a Faust one overall. Dark, scary soundscapes stretch out over the first track -- percussive miasma, with somewhere in there latter-day Faust guitarist Stephen Wray Lobdell (Davis Redford Triad) generating clouds of blue-black -- before Dalek starts dropping rhymes on track two, "Hungry For Now". Beats ricochet dangerously as Dalek does the urban griot routine over the grinding of the Faust factory. It's kinda in the same illbient, claustrophobic dub-sphere as Spectre and the WordSound crew, or Techno-Animal, with whom Dalek previously has worked. Faust are certainly capable of generating some heavy duty darkness -- as they have gotten older, they seem to have delved more into the Industrial-Ambient sounds their old albums perhaps presaged. You'll find no references to the surreal pop element of Faust's '70s sound here, just some hardcore hip hop in a nightmare void.

MPEG stream: Hungry For Now
MPEG stream: Dead Lies

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The 'best of' Guru Guru's psychedelic Krautrock guitar legend Ax Genrich. Includes 2 previously unreleased *live* Guru Guru tracks, plus all of Ax's 1975 "Highdelberg" super session record, and 2 tracks from his 1994 and 1995 amazing solo records. Freak out!

German Oak isn't the only recent reissue from the murky zone of long-lost krautrock to get us frothing lately. There's also this welcome reissue of the Golem album, via excellent archival imprint Lion Productions (and their UK associates Acme Records). This one has a mysterious backstory indeed. We'll briefly try to give you the basics here, though there's lots more info in the liner notes that come with this release... During the mid '90s there was a resurgence of interest in krautrock, when all kinds of long lost kraut classics were being reissued on cd (many via the grey area Germanofon label), and Julian Cope came out with his infamous Krautrocksampler book. Virgin UK got into the act with a series of compilations called Unknown Deutschland. They featured tracks by some totally unknown bands, The Nazgul, Golem, Temple, Galactic Explorers, and others, supposedly originally released as limited edition lps (100 copies? 25?!) by an art gallery associated label called Pyramid, circa '72-'74, amazing archival stuff indeed. But were they fakes? Perhaps '90s recordings, cashing in on the krautrock boom? Some thought so, on account of how nobody had ever seen or heard of these records before. Definitely it seemed likely that all were the work of the same bunch of musicians, recording under different names. Eventually a label called Psi-Fi came out with reissues (?) of some of the individual albums, which hardly settled the question. This, one, by Golem, even deepened the mystery, as someone named "Genius P. Orridge" was credited as producer... Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV fans will find that rather curious. Who knows, maybe a coincidence. The controversy has never been definitively settled. But the general consensus is that these recordings do date from Germany in the '70s, maybe more like the late '70s. In any case it's the music that matters, and yeah by that measure there's no doubting that Golem is prime krautrock indeed, sure sounds like it to us! Freeform, all-instrumental, organ and synth heavy space rock for fans of Gila, Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel, etc. Five long tracks (including a 14 minute 3 part suite) of superbly spaced out jamming, loose and lysergic, with an edgy, throbbing pulse throughout, and blasts of fuzzed out guitar. Title track "Orion Awakes" starts the trip off right, dark and heavy, "Stellar Launch" also builds up from nervous atmospheres and propulsive motorik rhythms to sheer ecstatic chaos, "Godhead Dance" wah's it up a la Hendrix, "Jupiter & Beyond" (the suite) is suitably far out and freaky, and the repetitive riff rock finale of "The Returning" is a catchy fuzz buzz, almost pop, yet ultra distorted, that reminds us a heck of a lot of AQ garage psych faves The Heads!! Spacemen 3, too. Also could almost be something from one of J. Cope's Braindonor discs too. Super cool. Like we said, packaged with copious liner notes, this edition far superior to the long out of print one on Psi-Fi, though that did have nice silver metallic cover that this doesn't replicate. Here's hoping that Lion next reissues The Nazgul one, it's good too, how could it not be with a lineup consisting of Frodo, Gandalf, and Pippin?

MPEG stream: Orion Awakes
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You know the notion of the wise old hermit sitting on a mountaintop? You'd expect to find an Eastern guru like that up on some Himalayan peak, but of course leave it to a bunch of Swiss and German hippies in the '70s to relocate that mountaintop guru concept to the Alps, and why not? These krautrockers, organized as one of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's "Cosmic Couriers" projects, found the perfect frontman, enlisting Swiss writer/folklorist Sergius Golowin (an expert on both Alpine myths and magic mushrooms, not to mention a friend of fugitive acid maven Timothy Leary) to provide mystic recitations over the Eastern-inspired druggy kraut bliss a-sprawl on this 1973 LSD dipped/tripped/hipped "supersession" happening. Said spaced out sounds generated, via flute Mellotron bongos electronics piano tablas organ glockenspiel & guitars, by a cast of musicians including folkies Witthuser & Westrupp, members of hard progsters Wallenstein, and last but not least, he of much kosmiche cred, Klaus Schulze! Actually, Golowin's echoey German-language spoken vox, while adding to the esoteric atmosphere, really take a back seat to the trancey music found on these three long tracks, the longest and most dramatic of which is the third, "Die Hoch-Keit", at almost 20 minutes taking up all of the original vinyl's second side. It begins like an eerie interlude from a particularly psychedelic Spaghetti Western soundtrack, full of abstract percussive sputter, cascading piano, and whispered vocals, its rhythms eventually coalescing into minimalist, Reich/Reichel style pulsations, having a looping, Moolah-like aspect. It and the other two equally freaky pieces on here make for mind expanding, maybe not exactly relaxing music, having a nervous energy that might have something to do with the general drug vibe... yet some portions of this album are quite angelic. While kraut fiends will want this 'cause it was one of the first of Kaiser's post-OHR Cosmic Couriers label albums, released after Ash Ra Tempel's Seven Up and before Walter Wegmuller's Tarot, even the less obsessed might find this an interesting Astral-Alpine excursion! It's been reissued before, on Spalax, but this new edition boasts much more in the way of liner notes in the thick cd booklet, including some fairly recent interviews with the late Sergius Golowin himself, who passed away in 2006, a true hippie guru 'til the end.

MPEG stream: Der Reigen
MPEG stream: Die Hoch-Zeit (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: Die Hoch-Zeit (excerpt 2)

At last, a nicely done new cd reissue of this renowned early '80s krautrock / proto-techno classic! We've actually never before reviewed E2-E4 because the previous reissues were expensive and kinda hard to come by, though we DID once list a double cd tribute to this record, imported from Japan, featuring tracks by the likes of Rovo, Buffalo Daughter, and Eye from the Boredoms, who took up the entire 2nd disc with his extended mix (wish we still had that, but it's long gone). Better, though, to have this, the actual album that inspired the tribute. Here's some of what we said about it when we reviewed that Japanese tribute disc: German guitar guru Manuel Gottsching, founder of legendary krautrock pioneers Ash Ra Temple (which morphed into the new-age-ier Ashra), made a few records in the eighties under his own name. E2-E4, recorded in Berlin in 1981, and released in '84, was first and foremost among them. It's rightly hailed as a classic and was a great inspiration for early Detroit techno artists like Derrick May and Carl Craig. The resonant timelessness of E2-E4 has extended beyond many other albums of the era and its influence has continuously popped up in more recent minimalist techno circles - most noticeably within the Cologne scene. We went on to say that while the reinterpretations on the tribute disc were cool, you should check out the real deal, and now here it is. It's one loooong track, approximately one hour in length, with nine titled and timed subdivisions indicated on the cover (suggestive of a chess match: "Quiet Nervousness", "Queen A Pawn", "Draw"...), that flows and flows and flows, Gottsching's guitar and electronics drifting and dancing beautifully over the continuous, pulsating, subtly-shifting proto-techno beat. It's so very pleasant and airy, also soooo hypnotic and ahead of its time. An hour you won't want to end, once it has lulled you into trance. Listening to this, it's easy to see why the Boredoms' Eye would revere it, and of course those abovementioned Detroit legends too. This "30th Anniversary" edition comes packaged in a nice embossed miniature lp style sleeve showing off its iconic chess-board cover design.

MPEG stream: E2-E4 excerpt 1
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We reviewed Harald Grosskopf's effervescent 1980 solo debut, Synthesist, a few lists back, an album inspired by LSD and heartbreak in equal measure. Along with that new reissue, Bureau B has also reissued Grosskopf's follow-up from six years later, Oceanheart, with a remastered sound and new cover art, and it's equally effervescent if slightly more tranquil than its predecessor. Is there a more new-ageish title than Oceanheart? The change in cover art too had us scrambling to Google to see what the original cover looked like, and there it was in all of it's new age glory, a softly painted ocean vista as viewed from behind a strange rock wall, not bad really. But then that FONT! Not even a good terrible eighties font, but that more pretentious bookstore font that was so overused in the later eighties. Ugh! Glad they changed the cover. The thing is Oceanheart is not really that new agey. Apart from the title song that is the only true ambient track, most of Oceanheart is very percussive and propulsive, apt for someone who began his career as one of Krautrock's foremost percussionists. Most of the tracks carry minimal driving uptempo rhythms that suggest a flowing stasis with built-up melodic nuances. Even when the tracks slow down to mid or even no tempo, there is still a strong Teutonic vibe that reminds us of a more ambient Kraftwerk, or more rhythmic Manuel Gottsching. In fact it's VERY reminiscent of Gottsching's New Age of Earth, and as that is one of our favorite ambient kraut records ever, that is not a bad thing whatsoever!

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Previously reissued via the RVNG label in 2011, Bureau B reissues this kraut-synth rarity once again with its original cover. Here's what we wrote about it previously: Before 1979, Harald Grosskopf was mostly known as a percussionist for Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers and Klaus Schulze. But during one bleak summer where his longtime girlfriend left him, he fortuitously met up with two musicians who he would later collaborate with in the band You (whose 2 releases have also been reissued on Bureau B). One of them lent Grosskopf his flat for the summer and a mini-Moog and sequencers to work on a solo record. With a reel to reel and eight track recorder he received from Schulze as compensation for his contribution on some recordings, Grosskopf then had to teach himself how to use all the new equipment, which was no easy task. But his perseverance paid off as the result is one of the finer synth outings we've heard from the era. There is a nice percolating exuberance to the tracks aided with the forwarding momentum of percussion that keeps things moving along, while other tracks show a deep space ambient side. Definitely a precursor for what much of what Jonas Reinhardt and Zombi are doing nowadays. Highly Recommended!!!! Bureau B has also reissued Grosskopf's more new agey follow-up, Oceanheart, which we also have in stock, and will review soon too, probably when the cd versions of both show up...

We've been wanting to list this for awhile, but the first pressing went out of print rather quickly that it took us awhile to get enough to list from the second pressing. And you can see why it's been so popular, what with all the love for rare kosmische music, and this one is a stunner! Before 1979, Harald Grosskopf was mostly known as a percussionist for Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers and Klaus Schulze. But during one bleak summer where his girlfriend left him, he fortuitously met up with two musicians who he would later collaborate with in the band You (whose 2 releases are soon to be reissued on Bureau B!). One of them lent Grosskopf his flat for the summer and a mini-Moog and sequencers to work on a solo record. With a reel to reel and eight track recorder he received from Schulze as compensation for his contribution on some recordings, Grosskopf then had to teach himself how to use all the new equipment, which was no easy task. But his perseverance paid off as the result is one of the finer synth outings we've heard from the era. There is a nice percolating exuberance to the tracks aided with the forwarding momentum of percussion that keeps things moving along, while other tracks show a deep space ambient side. Definitely a precursor for what much of what Jonas Reinhardt and Zombi are doing nowadays. In fact, included with the lp is a cd of 11 reworkings of Synthesist by the newer vanguard of electronic artists including: Oneohtrix Point Never, Arp, James Ferraro, Pink Skull, Bronze and Stellar Om Source. Highly Recommended!!!!

Here's an excellent live soundboard recording from this classic Krautrock power trio, performing at their early, uber-heavy peak. It's all drugged-out, mostly-instrumental cosmic stoner guitar jams, of course. You get versions of "Stone In" and "Der LSD-Marsch" from their spacey first album UFO, and "Bo Diddley" from their anarchic second album Hinten (which hadn't yet been released with this concert took place). Fans won't be disappointed -- it all sounds pretty great considering that these tapes were never originally meant for release, and the Garden Of Delights packaging job is superior as always, with a thick booklet of notes and photos. Guru Guru have always been one of our favorite '70s German groups, definitely among the heaviest and freakiest in their early days, as documented here. Former free jazzers Mani Neumeier (drums, lots of drums) and Uli Trepte (bass), together with ex-Agitation Free axeman Ax Genrich, went on some heavy psychedelic improv trips yet to be exceeded. Perhaps Caspar Brotzmann heard these guys whilst but a toddler, years before he began his Massaker trio?

RealAudio clip: Stone In

What it is exactly that constitutes "Krautrock" is definitely up for debate. It seems often largely construed to be the insistent, motorik pulses of Neu! and Can. But to limit the genre to just that would be a mistake. Bands like Guru Guru and Ash Ra Tempel were also present, bringing some of the heaviest psychedlia ever recorded. Hinten is the former band's second album, and a classic. Free range guitars grazing on open, organic jams. It is more evidently structured than their debut, UFO, while still retaining an improvisational feel that is as playful as it is crushingly acidic. This is one of both Allan and Cameron's favorites within the genre. Halfway between killer rock riffs and complete psychedelic blow-out. Essential, though an expensive Japanese import in its current incarnation.

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After a few years of unavailability, now this krautrock classic has been reissued again, as a domestically priced digipak on Revisited, as part of their Brain label reissue campaign. This was the 3rd album from Guru Guru, recorded in 1972 with producer Conny Plank, and it was the the last of theirs to really be about the power trio heavy rock (as opposed to the lighter, jazzier stuff they got into later on), and boy do they let it rip on a lot of this. At the same time, Guru Guru's goofier tendencies are also to the fore, as you can see from the picture on the sleeve of a leaping, why-be-normal Mani Neumeier (the drummer), which despite being on the back cover has become one of the iconic krautrock album art images, along with Kraftwerk's traffic cones, Faust's X-ray fist, and Amon Duul II's Shrat-the-reaper... There's four long songs on Kanguru, none under 10 minutes, one of 'em over 15. And you'll quickly hear why, for instance, Makoto Kawabata and all the Acid Mothers Temple folks are so into this band. Psychedelic freakiness that's HEAVY, yet playful. "Oxymoron" is a trippy groove, featuring treated vocals chanting "smelled like shit, but it wasn't it" (presumably a drug reference). High or not, guitarist Ax Genrich gets let loose to slay it up on his axe, Hendrix-like. "Immer Lustig", "Baby Cake Walk" and "Ooga Booga" also all feature plenty of complex, burnin' guitar/bass/drums interplay, with the latter boasting the doomiest fuzz riffage. Wild stuff, it must have been a blast to see these guys play! Guru Guru's previous album, Hinten, had a track called "Bo Diddley". Kanguru's songs are also suggestive of primal '50s rock n' roll influences - although stretched waaaaay out, and given a hippified, improvisatory, drugged-up makeover! Hmm, have you ever seen the live video of early Black Sabbath covering "Blue Suede Shoes" on a European TV show? Maybe the Guru guys had seen that too and it got 'em thinking...

MPEG stream: Oxymoron
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Neumeier's legendary krautrock band returns with a new record for '98, the Japan-themed Moshi Moshi...not a whole lot like their stuff from the early seventies, but inventive and rockin' nonetheless--similar to 1995's Wah Wah.

What it is exactly that constitutes Krautrock is definitely up for debate. It seems often largely construed to be the insistent, motorik pulses of Neu! and Can. But to limit the genre to just that would be a mistake. Bands like Guru Guru and Ash Ra Tempel were also present, bringing some of the heaviest psychedlia ever recorded. UFO is the former band's debut effort. Fans of heavy psych, German rock of the '70s, and free improv jams will consider this absolutely essential. And chances are, those fans already own this, or they simply haven't found a copy yet... here's the currently in print, Japanese mini-LP sleeve version. Repetitive, hypnotic, transcendent. And at the same time jarring. This is a fist full of mushrooms being shoved through the speakers. Embrace it.

MPEG stream: Stone In
MPEG stream: Der LSD - Marsch

Like a blast from the krautrock past, Bureau B brings us the debut album from Gurumaniax. But, unlike a lot of the German label's releases, this ISN'T a reissue - it's a brand new album featuring the two surviving members of krautrock legends Guru Guru, drummer Mani Neumeier and guitarist Ax Genrich. Hence the name, GuruManiAx, get it? Sadly, original bass player Uli Trepte passed away last year, so the trio is rounded out by new bassist Guy Segers from veteran art proggers Univers Zero (with guest Mario Engelter performing bass duties on two of the tracks as well). The final track here is entitled "For Uli T." but it's as if the whole thing is dedicated to his memory, doubtless he'd approve 'cause Gurumaniax is about the closest thing to ye olde Guru Guru as could be imagined, really it sounds like they went way back to the earliest albums by the original trio for inspiration (UFO, Hinten, and Kanguru, circa 1970-72). Dunno if they dropped some acid too, to get into the mood, we wouldn't be surprised... It's card-carrying krautrock all right, freaky and psychedelic, meandering and mesmeric, mostly instrumental. Psy Valley Hill is full of lengthy, pulsating jams and drifting, echoing FX, with just enough (but not too much) of Guru Guru's trademark goofiness / weirdness (ferinstance, "Telefonladies", with the voices of telephone operators mixed into the music). Much of it is super spacey, with swirling electronics in all the nooks and crannies. Their MO seemingly involves lots and lots of improvisational freedom, yet each song finds structure and identity. Results range from the jauntily spaced-out free-rock-abilly of "Voodoo Touch" to, on the very next track, the chain-rattling abstract soundscape of "Electrosaurus", that could be something by Absolut Null Punkt. Gurumaniax are good natured and generally mellowed out, but still venturesome, traipsing to the edge of the void and sometimes beyond. The splatter of Mani's percussion and the echoed unfurling of Ax's axe is often slow and steady, even somnolent or sedate, but elsewhere utterly urgent and agitated... Quite obviously, these guys know what they're doing, heck it was about 40 years ago they first started making these sort of sounds, now the bread and butter of bands like LSD-march, Circle, and of course Acid Mothers Temple, with whom the ever-energetic Neumeier has collaborated. And, speaking of Circle, we're really reminded of that Scandinavian band by track four, "Ghost Of Odin", a lazy almost dubbed-out jam, blissfully hypnotic, with occasional quirky vocal mutter, eventually building to a loud, distorted climax... nice!! Mani is always making records, but it's especially exciting to hear again from Ax, whose last solo album back in 1995, Wave Cut, was quite fine. It's commendable that, without T., they decided not to officially bill this as a Guru Guru reunion. But, listening to it, they certainly could have. Gurumaniax is the real deal. Recommended! And not only to krautrock heads, but also to post rock types who like Tortoise and stuff like that, check this out and see if it's not too hippy for you!

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Does that name sound familiar to you? It should. After all, "Hallo Gallo" was the opening track on Neu!'s legendary debut album. So who would have the gall to name their band after a Neu! track (besides Negativland we mean), well, Hallo Gallo 2010 just so happens to be the new band of Neu!'s Michael Rother, who is joined by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley (whose Vampire Blues label released this) and Aaron Mullen from Tall Firs, for some modern day krautrocking, Neu! style, and somehow it does manage to channel the classic sound and spirit of the original with something more dense and psychedelic. Motorik and rhythmic (of course), "Blinkgurtel" is gorgeous and hazy and washed out and mesmerizing, Shelley's simple solid drumming perfectly locked in with Mullen's warm fluid basslines, and Rothers's incendiary guitars, thick thrumming riffs, soaring psychedelic melodies, all gently phased and flanged into something gorgeously trippy and otherworldly, getting downright rocking near the end. "Drone Schlager" is much more muted and restrained, a simple pulse like groove, with little rhythmic flurries here and there, the bass a deep throb, the guitars, cyclical and looped, strange production has the guitars dropping out and swooping into the foreground, totally stripped down and utterly mesmerizing, another one of those tracks that could go on forever, but instead, winds down after 5 minutes, pretty much ensuring you'll have to play it again. So good, and not just past laurels good, this is as dark and mesmerizing and hypnotic as anything out today. Circle fans especially will probably go nuts for this. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, housed in hand screened covers, comes with a download card too!

A few lists ago we raved about the reissue of Harmonia's first album Musik Von Harmonia and now Lilith has thankfully reissued Harmonia's follow-up release from 1975, Deluxe. Although we loved Harmonia's first album, Deluxe is, dare we say, even better!! Made up of Michael Rother from Neu! and Moebius and Rodelius from Cluster, on Deluxe they are joined on a few songs by Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru, making the line up on this record a kosmiche supergroup of epic proportions! While the first record was tipped in the balance towards the Cluster side of things in terms of sound and the improvised process in which it was made, Deluxe has more of a Neu! feel as the tracks are more composed and song oriented, and for the first time contain vocal elements. Plus the motorik grooves are more rocking, with a real drum kit used more often than the drum machines creating a pulsating drive on par with Neu! 75, recorded that same year. But that's not to say Deluxe doesn't have its Cluster moments, as the two final tracks bring us down into some beautiful pastoral territory with the sounds of a stream with ducks and frogs near the Cluster studio in Forst can be heard amongst the warm and percolating analog synths. This is beautifully packaged tri-fold digipak with liner notes by Asmus Tietchens, who still owns some of Cluster's original analog equipment, and lots of photos including the awesome back cover of the trio lounging by the river in an obvious nod to Neil Young's On the Beach. Absolutely Essential!!!!!!!!

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MPEG stream: Monza (Rauf Und Runter)

Record covers like this one just aren't fair. Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius hiply dressed on a platform in an abandoned train station with their backs turned to the audience playing all manner of amazing looking analog electrical equipment: synths, farfisas, banks of tone generators, oscillators, patch bays, stacks of amps, leaning guitars, and cords everywhere, amongst racks of machines with all sorts of knobs and levels. It just makes us soooo jealous. Not only for such beautiful equipment, but also nostalgic for this period of time in Germany in the early seventies when so much thoughtful and incredibly inventive music was being produced. First Amon Duul II, Can and Faust then Kraftwerk, Cluster, and, Neu!, with Harmonia being the perfect synthesis of the latter three bands both in sound and personnel. Especially when you see the back cover and you get a closer look at the band and you can tell the trio just have this alchemical connection with each other and the sounds they make. Each member is focused but self-assuredly calm. Not exactly what you would expect from a band whom Brian Eno once called "the world's most important rock band". Not that much of the world had ever heard of them. Nor is it what most folks consider rock music to be. So this is it! We've been reading about this for months, and it's finally here: a live document of a now legendary show on March 23rd, 1974 at Penny Station in Griessem, Germany. Not that it really matters that this is live, as their is no applause or chatter to clue you in, just bits of mumbled talking as the songs wind down at the very end. Harmonia members attribute this to there being only 50 or so people in the audience most of which were either too stoned to clap or too unsure at what points the songs begin and end. Doesn't seem to matter to the band anyway as we've already seen their backs were to the audience the entire time. But for a live document the sound quality is impeccable and what's even better all of the tracks performed weren't on any of their recordings, giving us, thirty-three years later, 5 new vintage Harmonia tracks to pore over. Most of which are over 9 minutes long. Recorded between Harmonia's woozy debut, Musik Von Harmonia, and its more rock-leaning follow-up, Deluxe, Live 1974 is the logical conglomeration of both sounds, sort of like the merging of Terry Riley-ish repetitions with Robert Fripp's or Heldon's spacey and searing guitar extrapolations. But unlike conventional rock bands, Harmonia's music doesn't climax or necessarily change all that much, making their deceptively simple musical structures more akin to trance, electronica and slow disco. Beginning with the slow burn of "Schaumberg", an 11 minute epic of Rother's sinewy guitar lines that build and loop over gentle pulses of Moebius's programmed percussion and Roedelius' repetitive tonal keyboard patterns merging into a more sped-up and hypnotic version with bass rhythms on "Veteranissimo", an extended 17 minute meditation on "Veterano" from Musik Von Harmonia that breaks down to quiet heartbeats before slowly building again. "Arabesque", the shortest track at five minutes, does away with the percussive elements altogether, instead focussing on overlapping patterns of melodic synth and guitar before slamming into the loping quarter-hour stoner lurch of "Holta-Polta", then finally culminating in the blissful pastoralism of "Ueber Ottenstein". It's been a stellar year or two for krautrock reissues as most of the Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Harmonia, Popol Vuh and Michael Rother catalogs have been reissued, re-introducing to the world the proto-new age realms of seventies German kosmiche music at a time when we can easily see its influence weaving through so many new bands like Arp, The Alps, White Rainbow, Lichens and Sylvain Chaveau. Always timeless, and never dated, Harmonia, like most of their German contemporaries mentioned above, were the most important rock band in the world simply because they cared about what they did, kept it simple, never indulged, and always left us wanting more.

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MPEG stream: Holta Polta

All right! One of our favorite album covers and probably the best kosmiche supergroup ever finally see the light of day once again. Called the "world's most important rock group" by Brian Eno, Harmonia consisted of Neu founder, Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster. Michel Rother, after contributing to Cluster's breakthrough record, Zuckerzeit, which heralded a new direction in sound from their earlier dark and cavernous analog synthscapes to a more pastorally melodic and motorik driven percussive vibe, decided to take a breather from Neu. He moved into Cluster's newly built studio in the German countryside where they began collaborating on a more combined sound. While each member still continued to focus on their own main projects Harmonia was never considered a sideline affair, recording two stellar albums plus a series of recordings with Brian Eno that didn't see the light of day until twenty years later. Connecting the aesthetics of Pop and Minimalism, the first Harmonia album is a product of their source bands but with a fresh twist on the motorik ideal. Less clinical than Kraftwerk, less funky than Can, each member's multi-instrumentalist abilities are employed in a variety of approaches at once playful and murky, steady and mechanical, using electronic beats, distorted rhythms, warm keyboard shimmers, drifting piano, and gliding electric guitars. Its no wonder Brian Eno was a fan. Fans of Boards of Canada, Susumu Yokota and electronica-heads of all types should check this out too. They even coined the term "hausmusik"! Totally Recommended!!

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Well, it's about time that this artifact showed itself again, what with all the Cluster, Kluster, Michael Rother, Kraftwerk, and Fripp & Eno reissues popping up all over the place, finally we have this last piece of the Harmonia puzzle, and it's never sounded better! Tracks and Traces is one of those curious krautrock documents, mainly because it was recorded in 1976, but never released until the late nineties. Its late release was always rather inexplicable, as there were no liner notes, but with this new reissue that bookends the original release with three previously unreleased bonus tracks and poetically expository liner notes, its former relegation as an "odds and sods" collection of sketches, can with all confidence be considered now to be one of the great lost krautrock records! If you bought this when it was first released, you may need to buy it again for the extra tracks that change the whole flow and feel of the album considerably. Harmonia as a group was always meant to be temporary. When Eno went to see them live in 1974, he ended up on stage with them and was invited to come out to Forst to experience Moebius and Roedellius's placid countryside studio first hand. But it took Eno two years to make good on that invitation, and by then Harmonia had essentially disbanded. Michael Rother was working on his first solo material (Flammende Herzen), as was Roedelius (Durch Die Wuste), while Moebius was working on the Liliental sessions. But they were all there in Forst for eleven days, experiencing the wind, river, trees and sun, casually improvising music, but really just treating the sounds they made as a meditation on process and time together without a goal to make a product. Eno was eventually called away by Bowie to work on Low, and the recordings of their time together lay dormant for two decades. It's easy to think that without the benefit of returning to the original recordings for overdubs, that these might be shrugged off as sketches, but the starker quality of these recordings are really what set them apart from the pastoral sweetness of the Cluster & Eno collaborations, and give them a distinctive expansiveness into the more shadowy and vague corners of their sound. Lots of ideas are explored, from rockish extrapolations, and baroque dirges to sinister and angular abstractions (Eno even sings on one track) but it never feels forced or indulgent. The sound just flows naturally. Essential!

MPEG stream: Vamos Companeros
MPEG stream: By The Riverside
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SORRY. Wow! Long-lost (or neglected) tapes starring electronic krautrock luminaries Moebius and Roedelius (of Cluster) and Michael Rother (of Neu!), and Brian Eno!

Great group name, and an album title that really says it all! This mysterious 1968 exploito-psych album of disputed provenance, newly reissued on cd, lives up to its Supreme Psychedelic Underground billing, all right. It's really doesn't even matter if it's the pseudonymic work of a young Deep Purple, as some Purple fans are convinced. Others will tell you that while maybe the guitar neck wringing sounds a lot like Blackmore, and the bombastic organ pounding sounds a lot like Lord, it's not them - instead, it's dudes from krautrock proto-metallers Lucifers Friend! Which as far as we're concerned is an equally appealing theory. We don't know what to believe, are they or aren't they? You decide, we'll just groove to these crazy sounds, man. With wild organ and wah wah guitar up the wazoo, the tracks here range from instrumental freakouts ("Time Race") to novelty tribal weirdness ("We Like The White Man") to baroque prog hoedowns ("Courante") to, well, there's all sorts of swingin' acid rock action here folks! A few faves to mention would be the Eastern-tinged "Shalom", which is infused with all kinds of weird noises and sound FX as well, the super groovy shake-and-shimmy "Let Me Shoot You", and definitely the awesomely Bo Diddley-ish "Turn Turn", probably what would be this record's hit, if it had one. It's interesting that these days, actually, we've kinda gotten to the point where it almost makes more sense to say that a '60s psych artifact like this one was "ahead of its time" and compare it to today's crop of psychedelic freeks, instead of the other way around. Certainly there's moments here, when the pulsating, wailing sounds get really far out, that we could think for a second we were listening to, say, a Sun Araw album. At other times, of course, it's VERY "of its times", and that's rad (in a kitschy way) too. The jarringly tripped out "Spy In Space" could only have been made in the '60s we're pretty sure, woah. Certainly fans of MK1 Deep Purple ought to check this out, even though the theory that it's a German studio project, featuring ex-members of beat groups The Rattles and The German Bonds (who would eventually form Lucifer's Friend) seems fairly likely to be the correct one, since those very same folks cut another similar exploito-psych album under the "band" name Bokaj Retsiem around the very same time. That album was simply titled Psychedelic Underground, so maybe they thought they did an even better job as Hell Preachers, Inc.!

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Like Robert Fripp and Manuel Gottsching, the UK's Steve Hillage is a stellar guitarist who came out of the prog era (Arzachel, Khan, Gong) to mine his own unique cosmic territory that could be the blueprint for latter day ambient techno. His amazing guitar work on Gong's Radio Invisible trilogy, especially the epically spacious "You", was just the first stepping stone toward this 1979 avant-new age masterpiece, Rainbow Dome Musick, originally recorded for an on-site installation at an actual Rainbow Dome in London. While it must have been -really- an experience inside the Dome, it's even now a fantastic listen at home on headphones. Two 20-minute, side-long tracks built from the sequenced filtering of guitars, piano, synths and bells, that organically glide from phased rhythmic passages to expansive cloud-like washes of sound.�It's definitely much more ambient than Hillage's other albums up to that point, but as blissed out and new agey as it is, with the sounds of gurgling water (starting side one) and shimmering drones, you won't forget he's a killer electric guitarist either. Obviously,�a heavy influence on The Orb, who later collaborated with Hillage, after they met in an club where to Hillage's surprise, Alex Patterson of the Orb was spinning Rainbow Dome Musick in the chill-out lounge, so the story goes! Another essential entry of cosmic proto-new age sounds for fans of Fripp and Eno, Cluster, Ariel Kalma, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Eberhard Schoener and Ashra. We recently got into this album, ordered it for the store on cd, and heartily recommend it - though it seems to sell itself anyway when people see the cover, something about that hypnotic vibrating rainbow dome image...

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Krautrock and weird music fans all around the world MUST being living right, to earn up the good karma required for something this cool and unexpected and downright uber-historic to drop into our laps. A previously unreleased, live concert recording from a pre-Cluster (and pre-Kluster) krautrock ensemble featuring Hans-Joachim Roedelius, from way back in 1968. Wow. Who knew? Maybe not even Roedelius, who apparently not long ago just received a tape of this in the mail from an "anonymous donor", someone who'd lugged recording equipment to the underground (literally) music club Zodiak several decades earlier and captured this show, then filed it away like a sonic time capsule of late '60s Berlin freakdom, i.e. Human Being, an amorphous collective of (mostly) non-musicians, a sort of "noise orchestra" that found a home at the Zodiak (a club co-organized by Roedelius's comrade Conrad Schnitzler), touring also all the way to Morocco we're told, but never releasing a record... until now! This rare document consists of one lengthy track, 56 and a half minutes long, of utter loud "early industrial" featuring guitar, organ, drums, saxophone, cello... and tons and tons of electronic FX, lots of echo and delay, feedback and tape loops, and what sounds like shortwave radio static... proving that there's nothing new under the sun, once again, THIS WAS DONE OVER 40 YEARS AGO FOLKS! Sounds like something we'd be selling on a cd-r from some floorcore noise-drone outfit nowadays! 20th century avant garde meets the anarchic spirit of the freeform psychedelic rock scene, with murky droning pulsations and percussive clatter building building into an insistent heavy throb by the end of the piece. It's abstract out-there stuff indeed, difficult to describe (the deep foghorn like rumbles remind us of Yoshi Wada's Earth Horns, if that helps). But you should experience it for yourself, especially if you're into the more droned out, free improv, experimental side of krautrock (or of anything)! Given that it's cool this is available at all, we really shouldn't complain about anything, but we will say the digipack doesn't look quite the way we'd like it to... the cover illustration and cd booklet frankly seem a bit cheesy to us, in fact we almost ignored this as a result when we first saw it (don't judge a book by its cover, all right all right) just 'cause, well, it's too modern generic computery designy lookin', those fonts, that art, yuck. But, the text of the extensive liner notes is informative anyway, and besides it's really the music that STILL matters, 40+ years on from when Human Being originally hit the scene, now thanks to this release more than just an obscure footnote to the career of the very much still musically active (in Cluster, solo, and other collaborations) Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

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This is one of those records that we always thought we were just going to hear about, maybe hear a song or two on some compilation, but never actually get to hear in its entirety. So we're THRILLED to see this pre-CAN album, a soundtrack to a film that never came out (how come those are always the best?!), finally seeing the light of day. And what a tripped out, acid soaked, free-pop-jazz-rock odyssey it is! Recorded in 1968 by a lineup that included Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit who a year later would make their debut as Can with the release of Monster Movie, listening to these sounds one for sure can hear the seeds of what would become Can's distinctive krautrock sound, but this also displays a much more fried, disjointed and mind altering side to these way ahead of their time music makers. While mostly an instrumental affair that at times reminds us of the equally colorful and fucked up Jean Claude Vannier concept album L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, there are a few tracks which have vocals courtesy of Irmin Schmidt, but the true show stopper is when Rosy Rosy, a film actress in Germany at the time, takes the mic for "Kamerasong", a track we imagine folks like Broadcast and Stereolab have played on repeat a billion times (like we have now!). While plenty of the songs here hint at the more song based Can records to come, lots of Agilok & Blubbo is much more about sprawling, scrappy, tripped out and fucked up delight, the kind of sounds modern day colorful noise makers like Kemialliset Ystavat and Sunburned Hand Of The Man would bow down to. What makes the record so enjoyable is how its paced, just when things have gotten way deconstructed and abstract they snap into more of a catchy, driving melody and then continue on in more bizarre directions and into outer dimensions. Warped, damaged and engaging in all the right ways!

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Album number two for San Francisco kraut groove channelers, Jonas Reinhardt, who continue to mine krautrock, prog and cosmic gold with their spaced out and now sometimes even rocking sound. Powers Of Audition finds JR mastermind Jesse Reiner opening up his project as a full fledged band with members of Mi Ami, Trans Am and 3 Leafs hopping on board. While the sound is still very much steeped in the same sort of kosmiche aura as their debut, there are new sides to Jonas Reinhardt that have emerged with this sophomore outing. A few tracks even get very uptempo and rocking, like "Atomic Bomb Living" which sounds like some awesome lost car chase theme from a John Carpenter movie or a Giorgio Moroder score from the late '70s, and we for sure hear the contribution of Trans Am's Phil Manley there, as its a track that would have been right at home on one of those great Trans Am records like Futureworld or the Red Line. Meanwhile, title track "Powers Of Audition" is full on new-Neu done so spot on, motorik and and so totally entrancing. We even hear a bit of the soaring sound of Citay which makes sense as Reiner was once a member of that band. There are also more prog undertones that bring to mind Jesse's other old band Crime In Choir. But it's still the more spaced out, kosmiche side of the group that hits the hardest. One of the few modern groops worthy of carrying on the tradition of Conrad Schnitzler, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Goblin, Manuel Gottsching, and Cluster. So damn good!

MPEG stream: Only You Can Achive Nitrogen
MPEG stream: Atomic Bomb Living
MPEG stream: Wastrel Eyelid

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The flood of compact disc reissues of obscure krautrock albums has been constant and overwhelming in recent years, but few discs are truly as cosmic and inspired as collector hype claims make them out to be. Usually an album's rarity is confused with "classic" status. But every once in a while, we get pleasantly blown away by an unexpected unknown. Kalacakra is one such album that deserves its mythical, mystical reputation (and $300 price tag on the collector's market). Reissued in 2001 (but not heard by us until more recently, due to the glut of such reissues alluded to above), Kalacakra's "Crawling To Lhasa" contains eight tracks of mantric acid-folk self-released in 1972 by the apparently drugged-out duo of Claus Rauschenbach ("guitars, kongas, percussions, vocals, harmonica, slentem") and Heinz Martin ("electr. guitars, flute, piano, vibraphon, schalmi, cello, violin, synthesizer"). Their strange, hippie sense of humor and obsession with the culture of Tibet (the name Kalacakra is the Tibetan term for "wheel of time") results in some fantastically nonsensical, eastern-influenced psychedelia (nonsensical? well, that "slentem" that Claus plays is in fact a non-existent, made-up instrument!). The album begins with the dark, hypnotic "Nearby Shiras", a song about a plague-ravaged town in olden Persia, which features some totally sinister and maniacal whispered German-language vocals, reminding us a bit even of Comus. As their crawl to Lhasa continues, Kalacakra venture into zones of lovely folk-strum and raga-rock as well, before the album wraps up with a a deranged and damaged blues stumble called "Tante Olga". Oh, then there's two "bonus" tracks, recorded by Heinz in 1993, that are perhaps best ignored: electronic "world music" unfortunately lacking the mystery and insanity of his 1972 output, inoffensive but an unnecessary addition to this reissue for sure. Claus, we're told, still lives (on social security) in Kalacakra's home town of Duisburg, but does no recording. Good for him. Some folks we know (who often make music under the name Thuja) got so inspired upon hearing this disc that they determined to start their own hippie psych side project, to be called "The Ways Of God To Man", drawing upon Kalacakra as well as the similar sounds of Yahowah 13 and Maru Sankaku Shikaku and Faust's "Tapes" as influences. We'll let you know if they manage to actually record anything! Garden of Delights did their usual thorough job with this reissue, which boasts a thick booklet full of liner notes (in German and English), reproductions of label art from the original LP *and* from bootleg versions, plus photos of Claus and Heinz looking about as weird and long-haired and hippie-ish as it's possible to get! Albums like this make us worry about overlooking other hidden gems amid the multitude of kraut/psych/prog reissues that we're blessed/cursed with every month, so we'll do our best to try and check 'em all out, eventually...whew...

RealAudio clip: Nearby Shiras
RealAudio clip: Raga No. 11
RealAudio clip: Tante Olga

Now reissued on vinyl! Krautrock obscurity alert! Definitely a fave, an album deserving of its mythical, mystical reputation. Kalacakra's Crawling To Lhasa contains eight tracks of mantric acid-folk self-released in 1972 by the apparently drugged-out duo of Claus Rauschenbach ("guitars, kongas, percussions, vocals, harmonica, slentem") and Heinz Martin ("electr. guitars, flute, piano, vibraphon, schalmi, cello, violin, synthesizer"). Their strange, hippie sense of humor and obsession with the culture of Tibet (the name Kalacakra is the Tibetan term for "wheel of time") results in some fantastically nonsensical, eastern-influenced psychedelia (nonsensical? well, that "slentem" that Claus plays is in fact a non-existent, made-up instrument!). The album begins with the dark, hypnotic "Nearby Shiras", a song about a plague-ravaged town in olden Persia, which features some totally sinister and maniacal whispered German-language vocals, reminding us a bit even of Comus. As their crawl to Lhasa continues, Kalacakra venture into zones of lovely folk-strum and raga-rock as well, before the album wraps up with a deranged and damaged blues stumble called "Tante Olga".

They used to be available separately (and maybe still are, as fancy expensive Japanese imports). But if you want one, you probably want 'em all: the first three (and only, until recently, with the advent of the Vulcano and Admira cds reviewed on list #294) lps of pioneering proto-Industrial krautrock from the trio of Moebius, Roedelius, and Conrad Schnitzler. The first two of whom went on to form Cluster with a C, whose career is one of the most significant in all of krautrock -and- electronic music (and whom we were proud to recently host a performance by at our store!). Meanwhile Schnitzler also made quite a name for himself as a solo electronic experimentalist too. Together with producer Conny Plank, the trio recorded two proper studio albums, 1970's Klopfzeichen and 1971's Zwei-Osterei. Both of 'em dark and dismal soundscapes, improvised and abstract, with some sort of strange religious sermon (in German) over top of the first side of each.... apparently they cut a deal with some church or cult to pay for these records' release, and in return had to include the creepy God-talk! Which, since we don't understand much German, doesn't bother us too much. Eruption, a live recording from '71, has a similar vibe, but without the spoken word (and it's plenty spooky anyway). All of these were originally issued in incredibly small quantities (200-300 lps) and we doubt at the time that Kluster ever imagined this music would be in print, and revered, nearly 40 years later! Packaged in a fat 3-disc jewel box, with cd booklet giving much more info than we've supplied here.

MPEG stream: Klopfzeichen Part One
MPEG stream: Zwei-Osterei Part One

Attention krautrock fans! Important Records has just unearthed two rare Kluster recordings, Vulcano and Admira. Of course we're Cluster krazy here at the moment (they just played in the store!!), but the first thing that must be mentioned is that not only is this Kluster-with-a-K material, it's Kluster AFTER Moebius and Roedelius left the band (to form Cluster-with-a-C). We actually didn't know that Kluster had continued without Cluster, as it were! But apparently they did, with original third Kluster colleague Conrad Schniztler in charge, working alongside sometime Kluster accomplices Klaus Freudigmann, Wolfgang Seidel, and "friends". It's Freudigmann (who, like Schnitzler, apparently also had something to do with Tangerine Dream at some point) who found these old tapes, each one now at last released on cd in deluxe packaging (embossed gatefold sleeve similar to that of the original Kluster album Klopfzeichen), limited to 1000 copies. Although we're still surprised that these guys performed/recorded as Kluster (and it's confusing, since we know the same lineup also made music under the name Eruption), regardless of who's on it, what's important is how it sounds, so... Admira consists of twelve untitled tracks recorded in 1971, presumably in a studio, and left unreleased until now. Hmm, though we do like the fancy embossed packaging, we'd gladly trade that for some liner notes giving just a bit more information! But like we just said, what's important the music, and that's pretty cool. Definitely very Schnitzler-y, if you've heard very many of his recordings over the years, with lots of spacious synth-zap and droning abstraction. This is electronics infested krautrock on the outer fringes of freedom, ranging from meditative peacefulness to harsh noise (sometimes even over the course of one track). Admira's an experimental and eclectic set all right... ferinstance, track four is a proggy swirl of off-kilter keyboard coloration and chaotic percussion, track seven is a surreal soundscape of string sawing and outsider vocal warble. All in all, along with Vulcano, this is an excellent, if mysterious addition to the tiny Kluster (and much larger Schnitzler) discography, and a freaky footnote to the krautrock canon as a whole. Gives one hope that even now, somewhere in Germany, maybe there's more 37-year old tapes like these, under some bed or at the bottom of some closet, waiting to be dug up, worthy of release! For those interested in the Kluster-with-a-K discs proper, those with Moebius and Roedelius, note we also have a new 3cd reissue on Water, comprising the albums Klopfzeichen, Zwei-Osterei, and Eruption, we'll try to give it a write-up next time.

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SORRY. Long-awaited reissue of the third and last "Kluster with a K" album from 1971, when the "Cluster with C" duo of Moebius and Roedelius was a trio with Conrad Schnitzler, making pioneering, prehistoric ambient/industrial/ electronica. And, unlike the first two Kluster records, there's no German spoken religious narrative included (and it's plenty spooky without it).

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Pre-Cluster pioneering proto-industrial Krautrock electronics reissued.

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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Pre-Cluster pioneering proto-industrial Krautrock electronics reissued.

Housed in a sleeve decorated with strange sci-fi airbrushed bondage artwork, this 1973 Brain-label krautrock album from the relatively obscure (but collectable) Kollektiv has now been reissued on cd. First track "Rambo Zambo" starts off with some echo effected flute action in the style of early Kraftwerk classic "Ruck Zuck"... when the drums kick in it's a pretty propulsive funky flute fusion groover we've gotta say, the occasional stabs of harder guitar also doin' it for us. It's not gonna be everyone's cup of krautrock but those that like it will love it. Wild instrumental psychedelic jazzy jamming, yeah. Some songs are extended, rhythmic workouts up to 12, 20 minutes long. Others just brief wacked out interludes with vocal ravings, probably funny if you understand German. Kollektiv fits in with the likes of Exmagma, Xhol Caravan, Thirsty Moon, Kraan, and Wolfgang Dauner's Oimels album. Recommended for the krautrock connoisseur into the jazzier side of the genre, though the acid guitar soloing is definitely rock. This nicely done reissue includes four bonus cuts, almost another half-hour of material recorded with different lineup... tracks like "Pap-Jack" and "Rozz-Pop" don't sound all that different from the album proper, though we're told there was more of an influence from King Crimson's Red album on this stuff... could be, the guitar is sometimes sorta Frippy, certainly searing and spacey, throughout the disc. In any event, worthy bonus material.

MPEG stream: Rambo Zambo
MPEG stream: Gageg

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Restocks of the first two Kraftwerk records, the ones with traffic-cone covers. Both are electronic masterpieces, melodic Krautrock classics, and while far more challenging than the popular later Kraftwerk albums, all the more lovely.

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

It goes without saying that Kraftwerk is one of the most influential groups in pop music history, their influence having touched pretty much every style of music to come since. In the wake of the psychedelic explosion of the late '60s and early '70s, the group's obsessively precise music set them apart from everything else. In a sea of guitar based rock bands, the strange, machine like rhythms and pioneering use of synthesizers made clear to the world that their was nothing remotely rock n' roll about Kraftwerk's approach to music. The albums produced during their classic period (generally recognized from 1974's Autobahn to 1980's Computer World) still sound without precedent, coming across as emotionally detached, yet extremely melodic and melancholy. Of course, nobody could have just created that sound out of thin air, and before venturing into such revolutionary territory, Kraftwerk evolved from the exceptionally fertile experimental German music scene of the early 1970s. Band leaders Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider established an aesthetic that separated Kraftwerk from their contemporaries, creating a mystique that remains to this day. This well researched documentary takes a deservedly scholarly approach to Dusseldorf's legendary Man Machine, charting their path from the pre-Kraftwerk group, Organisation, to their implosion in the mid 1980s. Despite percussionist Karl Bartos being the only member of Kraftwerk open to interview, well informed journalists and key figures from the German scene are able to shed as much light as we'll probably ever see, given the group's notorious standoffishness. The downside to this film is its lack of actual Kraftwerk performances (check out YouTube for some truly remarkable footage), and at 180 minutes, it may be a bit much for the casual observer. Krautrock obsessives, however, will find much to love. ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! 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