The Best Krautrock Albums of the '70s

Damo Suzuki had been singing on a Munich pavement when Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit hired him; months later he was fronting a double LP cut at Schloss Nörvenich. Halleluhwah is the reason people still argue about this record — eighteen minutes of Liebezeit locking one figure in place while Michael Karoli scrapes at the edges and Czukay splices the tape underneath him.

Four December nights in a Hamburg studio, Conny Plank at the desk, two men who had just quit Kraftwerk with nothing but a rhythm idea between them. Hallogallo runs ten minutes on Klaus Dinger's flat forward beat while Michael Rother lays guitar over it in slow washes. Half of post-punk and most of indie rock borrowed that pulse without crediting the source.

Afrika Bambaataa lifted the melody for Planet Rock in 1982, which tells you where the Bronx and Detroit found their blueprint. Spotify carries the German-language edition the band issued simultaneously from Kling Klang, so titles read Europa Endlos and Metall Auf Metall. Metall Auf Metall is percussion built from literal factory noise, sequenced until it swings. Border case: pop craft, not kosmische drift.

Spoon was written as the theme to a German television thriller, Das Messer, and sold roughly 300,000 copies at home — freak chart money for a group recording in a disused cinema at Weilerswist. Vitamin C is the track everyone samples: Czukay's bass hook, Suzuki hissing the title, Liebezeit flatly refusing to play a fill he does not need.

Virgin signed them and put them in the Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell, which is how a band who had been living in a converted schoolhouse made their most listenable record. Krautrock opens it — eleven minutes of fuzz drone named after the label the English press had stuck on them, half tribute and half two-fingered joke. The rest lurches into pop parody.

Conny Plank engineered his final Kraftwerk session here, and the band never used an outside producer again. The 22-minute title piece Autobahn was hacked down to three for a single that reached the American top 30, an absurd result for music about motorway hypnosis. Doppler-shifted synth traffic, a vocoder chorus, and the Düsseldorf quartet quietly stops being a rock band.

Rother drove out to Forst in 1973 to work with Cluster's Roedelius and Moebius in a farmhouse above the Weser, and Brian Eno turned up two years later calling them the world's most important rock band. Sehr kosmisch stretches ten minutes over a cheap drum box and organ drift. Border case: the exact point where kosmische starts becoming ambient.

A double LP on Liberty with the entire fourth side handed to unedited improvisation, which was the Munich commune's idea of quality control. Archangels Thunderbird sets Renate Knaup's voice against the twin guitars of John Weinzierl and Chris Karrer and comes out sounding like acid folk that got into a fight. Messier than Can, and the mess is deliberate.

Dinger and Rother had stopped speaking, so they split the sides: Rother's half drifts on piano and organ, Dinger's brings in two drummers — his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe — hammering behind a shouted vocal. Hero is that second half at full tilt, and Bowie spent the back end of the decade chasing it. Conny Plank engineered once more.

Suzuki left after these sessions to join the Jehovah's Witnesses, so the record doubles as Can's goodbye to their best singer. Bel Air fills all of side two, nineteen minutes of Liebezeit brushing a hi-hat while guitar and tape hiss drift in and out like weather. The quietest thing the band made, and the one ambient producers keep raiding.

Michael Rother produced it at Forst, and Moebius and Roedelius carved the tracks up between them rather than write jointly — the credits say who did which. Hollywood is a rickety drum machine, a detuned synth line and almost nothing else, and it predicts about thirty years of electronic pop. Brain Records put the album out to near total silence.

Florian Fricke sold his Moog and made a devotional album with piano, oboe and Conny Veit's electric guitar instead, with Korean soprano Djong Yun singing over the top. Kyrie is the clearest case: liturgical text, no percussion, guitar bending hard against the voice. Spotify dates the release 1970; it was 1972. Border case: sacred minimalism more than rock.

Polydor handed Uwe Nettelbeck, a music journalist with no production credits at all, a budget and a converted schoolhouse at Wümme, then pressed the results on clear vinyl in a clear sleeve. Why Don't You Eat Carrots opens with Satisfaction and All You Need Is Love bleeding through static before everything collapses into tape collage. Almost nobody bought it.

Manuel Göttsching was nineteen, Klaus Schulze had just walked out of Tangerine Dream, and Conny Plank recorded the pair plus bassist Hartmut Enke in one session. Amboss climbs twenty minutes from a whisper to guitar overload with no chorus anywhere in sight. Border case: Schulze's next moves turn this into Berlin School, which gets a list of its own.

Klaus Dinger took the two drummers from Neu! 75 — his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe — and built a group that sounded like Neu! playing a football stadium. Silver Cloud rides thirteen minutes of that beat under choral synth and crowd noise. Bowie called the band the soundtrack of the eighties, which was flattery and also roughly accurate.