The year was 1968. West Germany was two decades past a war that had left the country culturally flattened, politically occupied, and deeply suspicious of its own national identity. The generation that had grown up in that shadow — too young to have fought, old enough to ask questions — was at university, in the streets, and in rehearsal rooms.
They had access to American music through the occupation — jazz, soul, rock and roll — but they had also absorbed the European avant-garde: Stockhausen, Cage, the tape experiments of Pierre Schaeffer. What emerged when these two currents collided was something neither tradition could have produced alone.
The Düsseldorf Sound
Kraftwerk and Neu! both came out of the same Düsseldorf circle. Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger had briefly been in Kraftwerk before leaving to form Neu! in 1971. What they developed — sometimes called the "motorik" beat, though they never used the word — was a stripped-down, metronomic 4/4 pulse that felt less like rock drumming and more like a road disappearing into the horizon. Relentless. Hypnotic. Forward.
Neu!'s self-titled debut album contains one of the most influential drum patterns in the history of popular music. It can be heard, decades later, in post-punk, in house music, in krautrock's own grandchildren — Stereolab, Primal Scream, LCD Soundsystem. The influence is structural rather than stylistic. It's a way of thinking about rhythm.
Cologne: The Electronic Wing
While Düsseldorf was building rock music from the ground up, Can — based in Cologne — were approaching from the other direction. Holger Czukay had studied under Stockhausen. Irmin Schmidt was a classically trained composer. What held these intellectuals together was their rhythm section: Michael Karoli on guitar, Jaki Liebezeit on drums.
Liebezeit was perhaps the most sophisticated drummer in rock music at the time. His playing had the precision of a machine and the feel of a human being — exactly the tension that defined Can's music. Their mid-period albums, Tago Mago (1971) and Ege Bamyasi (1972), still sound modern in a way that most music from that year does not.
Tangerine Dream, also based in Berlin via Cologne, were doing something different again: synthesiser music before synthesisers were standard instruments, building enormous landscapes from oscillators, sequencers, and tape loops. Their early records — Phaedra, Rubycon — are extended pieces with no fixed tempo, no verse-chorus structure, no reference point in anything that had come before.
Munich: Cosmic Rock
Amon Düül II came out of the Munich commune scene — a collective of artists, activists, and musicians living together on the edge of the city. Their music was heavier, more psychedelic, more chaotic than the Düsseldorf minimalism. Albums like Yeti and Tanz der Lemminge are closer to the English prog tradition — side-long pieces, complex arrangements, a certain grandeur — but filtered through a specifically German sensibility.
Faust, from Hamburg, were arguably the most confrontational of all. Their records were collages — studio experiments, noise, found sounds, fragments of melody — that challenged the very idea of what a record was supposed to be. The Faust Tapes, released for 49 pence in the UK in 1973, sold extraordinarily well by accident and introduced a generation of English listeners to music they had no framework to understand.
Why It Still Matters
Krautrock lasted, as a movement, perhaps seven or eight years. Most of the key records were made between 1971 and 1978. But the approach — the willingness to discard inherited forms, to treat repetition as a compositional tool, to make music that existed in time rather than through it — has never gone away.
Every decade since has produced artists working in the space krautrock opened. Some name it explicitly. Most don't need to. The motorik pulse, the sequencer loop, the long-form structure that rewards patience — these are vocabulary items now, available to anyone. The German bands of the early seventies put them there.
RetroForge Records exists somewhere in this tradition — not as imitation, but as continuation. Music from a timeline where these ideas were never abandoned. Where the road that Neu! pointed to was followed all the way to the end.