Motorik madness: 10 Krautrock albums that rotated my head - part one

Plus Batu, Shanti Celeste, Venetian Snares and more

"Monday's Manifesto" by @annajanemcintyre

Was zum Teufel ist Krautrock überhaupt? Or: what the hell is Krautrock, anyway?

This is a question that surely comes to all right-thinking music fans at some point in their life. And I don’t think it’s a question I can totally answer, despite listening to Krautrock - or what might be considered Krautrock - for more than three decades now.

Let’s start with the name. Most people hate the name, which came from British journalists in the 1970s using a derogatory name for German people. I asked Wolfgang Seidel, the former drummer in Eruption and the author of a new book Krautrock Eruption - An Introduction To German Electronic Music 1970-1980, about this when I interviewed him for Line Noise. His answer was that he thought the name was used as a joke, which is both true and a pretty charitable way to look at things.

Some people prefer to use the name “kosmische Musik”, which is German for “cosmic music”, precisely for this reason. And while I far prefer how that sounds, “Krautrock” is so firmly established in the musical lineage that most people still employ it. There’s the added complication, too, that I tend to think of “kosmische Musik” as the more synthesiser-based side of Krautrock, a subset of the umbrella term. And in this article I want to be as universal as possible.

So what is Krautrock? And who is Krautrock? Most people will agree than Can, Neu! and Faust are definitely Krautrock, while other names float in the ether. In the very broadest sense, Krautrock can be used to refer to German music of the late 1960s and 1970s that didn’t conform to typical rock music structures in some way or form.

More specifically, there are a few key elements to the classic Krautrock sound - although, quite frankly, no two Krautrock bands sound all that much alike. There’s the famed Motorik beat, pioneered by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger (who preferred the term “Apache beat”), that relies on a hypnotically regular four four pulse, with little fuss or flair; there’s a love of repetition and drone; extended improvisation (which perhaps seems a little contradictory to the former point); the use of synthesisers; and the influence of psychedelic music and avant-garde techniques.

Most importantly, Krautrock represented a deliberate attempt to get away from the blues-based rock music that was coming out of the US and UK at the time, an aspiration towards something genuinely new that reflected these bands’ rejection of Germany’s own recent past.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Krautrock could be all - and none - of this. But there is no doubting that it did give rise to a a world of wonderful music.

1) Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei (1969)

If no one knows that Krautrock really is, then the question of the first Krautrock album isn’t going to be any easier. But why not Phallus Dei, the debut album by Amon Düül II, an album that seems to incorporate the very free artistic and anarchistic madness of the best Krautrock?

Amon Düül was a political art commune in Munich, which formed out of the student movements of 1968. From it came two bands, Amon Düül and Amon Düül II, with the latter comprising the more musically competent members of the commune.

Some people claim that Amon Düül II’s second record, Yeti, is their best. (In fact, The Wire called it “one of the cornerstones of ... the entire Krautrock movement”). But I have gone for their debut Phallus Dei, which was recorded and released in 1969, largely for the orgasmically epic, 20-minute long title track which sounds almost exactly like the kind of song you would want from a bunch of musically proficient political art commune freaks (and I mean “freaks” in the best sense of the word).

Phallus Dei is by no means a one-song album: the high-brow scuzz of Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren and the theatrical, ever-shifting Luzifers Ghilom are both excellent, while I Want The Sun to Shine, which appears on the reissued album, is one of the most fascinatingly disperse songs the band ever recorded.

But the title song really is something else. It alternates sections of very loose and improvised-sounding instrumental drift with moments when the group locks into devastating musical movement, like the astoundingly beautiful section eight minutes in where the band introduce complex vocal arrangements, which drift around like a jazz opera in space, as the music drops to low-key freak outs and noodling. Or there’s minute 14, when a huge percussive rumble - the band had two drummers, Shrat on bongos and guest musician Holger Trülzsch on Turkish drums - suddenly mutates into a very satisfying four-chord boogie, lifting the listener off their feet.

These instruments - massed vocals, huge drum groups, violins and layered guitars - are the key ingredients of Phallus Dei (both album and song). But it feels like all music might be in there somewhere, if you look hard enough. All music, that is, apart from the blues-based rock of Amon Düül II’s British and American peers. Which is very Krautrock of them.

2) Organisation - Tone Float (1970)

Are Kraftwerk Krautrock? Better people than me have perished on the rocks of this question. When I asked this to Wolfgang Seidel, I was expecting an answer about the band’s musical qualities and how, perhaps, their electronic precision placed them outside of the genre. Instead, he gave a fascinating answer about how Krautrock was formed in communes and lived on independent labels and Kraftwerk’s more mainstream approach - in the book he talks of their “friendly Keynesian capitalism” - didn’t really fit.

To my mind, from 1975’s Radio-Activity onwards Kraftwerk weren’t really Krautrock (or, indeed, kosmische): they were a bit too focused for that. But Kraftwerk definitely started out in Krautrock and the band’s first three albums - Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, Ralf und Florian aka the ones you never hear and the band pretend don’t exist - bear strong evidence of Krautrock’s loose, experimental rock fashions. (During this period both Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother were members of the band, forming Neu! on their departure in 1971.)

Album number four, Autobahn, was were Kraftwerk flipped. The classic title track is more electro pop than Krautrock, although it does feature a Motorik drum section, but the record’s side B is still notably Kraut influenced. The album even features some violin.

All four albums are very worthy of your attention. But the record I have chosen here is Tone Float, the only album by Organisation, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s pre-Kraftwerk band.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Tone Float - one of the first productions by the legendary Conny Plank, a man who was vital to the Krautrock sound - doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk. Hütter plays Hammond organ; Schneider electric flute AND alto flute, as well as bell, triangle, tambourine, electro-violin and percussion; while the other members add glockenspiel, bass and a whole load of percussion instruments.

And Organisation liked to jam, improvise and paint 20-minute long psycho acoustic soundscapes, such as the album’s title track. In fact, Organisation sound a lot more like Amon Düül II than Kraftwerk, their huge and slightly jazzy musical adventures occasionally cohering into neat musical sketches, only to zoom back out again into infinite scale.

Ron Trent, the legendary Chicago producer, named Organisation as an influence on his excellent 2022 album What Do the Stars Say to You, when I interviewed him for Disco Pogo in 2022. “It’s a more psychedelic kind thing,” he explained. The record’s title track, he added, is the kind of record a DJ could play during “a long set somewhere in Japan, or if I'm playing by myself for a long period of time”.

“It’s travelling music, it’s very visual, highly textured, also abstract, for sure,” Trent said. “I quite like those kinds of things, it allows the mind to have its own travelling session, if you will.” Which sounds pretty perfectly Krautrock to me.

3) Ash Ra Tempel: Ash Ra Tempel (1971)

Krautrock got closest to typical rock mores in its occasional embrace of the fiddly guitar solo. This tendency found an early apotheosis in the eponymous debut album from Ash Ra Tempel, a band formed out of the ashes of Eruption.

The album is home to a number of the typical Krautrock elements, as mentioned above. It is big on drone and repetition and Klaus Schulze's drums sound a little Motorik in their pulse. But it is the guitars that dominate on an album that comprises two long jams, Amboss (“anvil”) and Traummaschine (“dream machine”.

In truth, the guitar heavy side of Krautrock isn't my favourite take on the genre. But if you’re going to have axe histrionics, than who better to do them than Manuel Göttsching, the West Berlin guitar legend who would go on to record the classic E2-E4 a decade later, an album that could easily have been on this list but isn’t? (This is for reasons of space and also because I am not 100% sure if E2-E4 counts as a Krautrock album. But it is a total classic so do give it a spin, in the unlikely event that you don’t already know it.)

Göttsching’s playing here reminds me a little of Jimi Hendrix's wildfire abandon. But whereas Hendrix was notably influenced by the blues, Ash Ra Tempel tie Göttsching’s guitar to a steadily building layer of drone and driving, hypnotic percussion, alongside rudimentary electronics, creating a mixture that was as fiery as it was far out. (Incidentally, Klaus Schulze’s incredible solo career is also well worth your attention.)

4) Can - Tago Mago (1971)

Can are one of the giants of Krautrock, their Vitamin C possibly the genre’s best known song, endlessly sampled, covered and referenced. The band’s 1969 debut album Monster Movie could make a claim to be the first Krautrock album and Prepared to Meet Thy PNOOM, which they recorded in 1968, almost certainly would have been, if they could have persuaded anyone to release it at the time. (It eventually came out in 1981 as Delay 1968.)

The best Can album is a coin toss between Tago Mago, the band’s second studio LP, and Ege Bamyasi, their third. People will argue passionately for each, with Geoff Barrow, Stephen Malkmus and Thurston Moore all in camp Bamyasi and John Lydon, Bobby Gillespie, Mark Hollis and Radiohead going for Tago Mago.

With due apologies to Ege Bamyasi I am going for Tago Mago, one of the few rock music albums that can look Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew squarely in the eye. Key to this decision is the monstrous Halleluhwah, perhaps the pivotal Can track and an absolute drumming tour de force from Jaki Liebeziet.

Liebeziet lays down a super solid - and yet somehow also twisted - drum beat, to which Holger Czukay adds the perfect bass line, the two anchoring a rolling, swelling groove, over which Michael Karoli and Irmin Schmidt unleash all kinds of sonic adventure and Damo Suzuki, the busker Can recruited into the band in 1970 to replace Malcolm Mooney, lays down a vocal of proto Shaun Ryder poetry.

It is, for me, the moment where Can sound inevitable, where the group’s unusual working methods, improvising live in the studio ever day from midday to midnight and editing together the results, pay irrevocable dividend; when the band sound how they do because how else are they going to sound? Which is quite an achievement for a band as weird and wonderful as Can.

And, yes, Ege Bamyasi might hold together a bit better as an album and Tago Mago also has the eerie, creeping funk of Mushroom, one of my favourite Can tracks; but Halleluhwah and Tago Mago win for today.

5) Neu! - Neu! (1972)

From one amazing drummer, we pass to another. Neu! was the project formed by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother after they departed Kraftwerk in 1971, with Conny Plank’s production being a key part of their classic trio of records, Neu!, Neu!2 and Neu! 75.

Neu!, the group’s 1972 debut album, may well be the peak of the hypnotic, Motorik wing of the Krautrock sound. Dinger lays down an absolutely irresistible Apache beat on songs like Hallogallo and Negativland, over which Rother layers a series of drones, tones, glides and percussive guitar scratches, the result being rock music almost totally removed from its traditional blues roots.

Described like this the album sounds almost cold, like rock with the heart ripped out and two brains installed in its place. But this couldn’t be further from the truth: oceans of emotion are found in Rother’s understated ideas, while Dinger’s drums would re-animate the heart of a frozen corpse. Dinger himself called the Motorik groove “very much a human beat”: ”It's essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion,” he added.

There’s more to the album than Motorik, too: Sonderangebot and Im Glück are precious ambient sketches that seem to curl in on the fog, while Lieber Honig (“dear honey”) is an unlikely love song.

Neu! would be hugely influential on musicians such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who said that Dinger had “found a way of freeing himself of the stupid tyranny of blues, rock, all the conventions I’ve ever heard”. And Stereolab were definitely listening: Hallogallo sounds like a musical blueprint for the band’s first five years of life.

(And, if I may, a shout out here for La Düsseldorf, the band Klaus Dinger formed with his brother Thomas and his friend Hans Lampe, whose eponymous debut album took the Neu! sound into a kind of electronic-tinged proto punk / disco that sounds WAY ahead of its time.)

… Part one of my guide ends here. Part two will arrive next week. So why not sign up to receive Line Noise straight to your inbox, here?

Some listening

Batu - Clump

There’s a real swagger to the new Batu single, Clump, which rests its metallic head on an irresistibly rounded bass line, the rollicking undercurrent pushing the listener gently onward, like a warm body in a lazy river. The rest of the track operates at an almost subliminal level: the brain, occupied by the bass, knows the stannic stutter of the drums is there, acknowledges the presence of rhythmic production chatter in the background; but it is the bass that will move body and soul.

Shanti Celeste - Thinking About You

With Ice Cream Dream Boy - one of the songs of 2024 - Shanti Celeste perfected the art of making dance music that enveloped a soft core in hard outer casing, like some kind of house music Mars Bar Ice Cream. Thinking About You, the first taste of her new album Romance, pulls off a similarly antithetical trick, with a beautifully dreamy vocal (inspired by the memories of a late friend) powered along by a heart-rushing bass drum and hi-hat pattern.

Venetian Snares - Drums

Do the best IDM producers have the greatest sense of humour? Drums, the first new solo material from Venetian Snares in 11 years, certainly does, combining an 11/8 time signature with dystopian stabs, chattering acid and a nameless vocal giving a tongue-in-cheek meta commentary on the electronic madness unfurling. All together now: “This is my kit / I am going to impose it on the music!” Drums is taken from a compilation celebrating 30 years (!) of Planet Mu, which seems to misunderstand the whole direction of gift giving. But I’m not going to complain, particularly when the record includes a brilliant new song from reigning Line Noise album of the year winner Xylitol.

WITCH - Queenless King

The ongoing reunion of WITCH has been a joy to observe, with their 2023 album Zango seeing the Zamrock icons back to their majestic heights. And now we have Queenless King, the first single from their next album SOGOLO, a song that sits on the funkily sinister line somewhere between disco, funk and heavy rock, like Black Sabbath hopped up on African Guinness. You will believe a bass line can save lives.

Oliver & The Black Spirits - Anoshereketa

From Zambia we hop to neighbouring Zimbabwe for a new compilation from Analog Africa, the self explanatory Roots Rocking Zimbabwe - The Modern Sound of Harare Townships 1975-1980. Honestly, I don’t know a great deal abut Oliver & The Black Spirits, the band led by Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi, a legendary figure in Zimbabwe. But the lilting grooves of Anoshereketa, which play out over a pulsing triplet rhythm, the combination beautifully set between pleasure and pain, makes me want to learn a lot more. And the compilation is stunning.

Beirut - Tuanaki Atoll

A Study of Losses, Beirut’s seventh studio album, was commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff for an acrobatic stage show of the same name, which doesn’t sound like an auspicious start. Zach Condon initially felt the same, explaining that when the idea first came up “a certain amount of Elephant Gun era trauma initially came rushing up”. “I had been pigeon-holed for years as a whimsical circus waif, full of sepia-toned images of penny farthings and perhaps lion tamers with handlebar moustaches,” he added. And, well, guilty as charged. But something about recording in such ridiculous circumstances appears to have flipped a switch in Condon, who has made what sounds like his most effortless - and perhaps best - album in ages. Some of it - stand forward Tuanaki Atoll - is pure Beirut, all swooping, drooping melodies, acoustic rushes and joyful melancholia. And by GOD can Condon write a melody.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise Podcast - With Seefeel

This week on the Line Noise podcast I bring you an old - or shall we say classic? - interview with Mark Clifford from Seefeel, which I did for Radio Primavera Sound in 2018 when the band were in Barcelona, performing Quique at the Mira festival. With the news that Seefeel are performing at this year's Primavera Sound festival still relatively fresh in my ears, I thought it was high time to bring back this interview with one of the most charming men in electronic music.

The playlists

Play is the beginning of knowledge, according to George Dorsey. To which I can only reply, yes but playlists are the very peak of knowing. So here are my two: my best new music of 2025 playlist. And my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.