The recent BBC Four documentary Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, the most thorough examination of the genre since Julian Cope’s definitive Krautrocksampler, has finally made its way onto the Interwebs. And it’s as solid as you’d expect.
From the BBC: “Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal – a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past – but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.”
I really dig John Weinzierl’s (of Amon Duul II) logic early in the film, when he says “we wanted to be international,we tried very hard to not be Anglophonic and not to be German. So… space is one solution.” And it’s totally worth mentioning that Werner Hertzog shows up for a bit. Action packed.
Gotta shout out to Evan at Swan Fungus again for locating more difficult-to-find holy relics. Today, it’s a Dead Meadow bootleg, sometimes referred to as a Live on WFMU recording, though Evan points out that it’s actually a somewhat lost Peel Session.
Dead Meadow releases some of the highest caliber Hawkwind-esque mind-melters today. Of course, in the studio, you can saturate each track with reverb and panning techniques to make anything sound pretty good. This is where Dead Meadow prove themselves as an awesome band – they absolutely smoke live. “Drifting Down Streams” is cultish. Continue reading ‘Dead Meadow Peel Sessions’
As you know, I’m super obsessed with Ghost Box, and just this week the collective dropped three delicious new tracks for their subscribers (it’s free, so you should sign up). I can’t stop, won’t stop talking about the mighty Ghost Box – who, as I’ve mentioned before, are more or less the most prolific collectors and composers “library music.” That is, all the Ghost Box artists sample, reconstruct, and rebuild the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and turn it into the springboard for their deep, spacious, glacial psychedelic electronic glitch movements. I absolutely love how each artist on Ghost Box creates a cohesive musical ambiance, and it’s always paradoxically retro and futuristic. The Focus Group in particular sounds like how the Atomic Age envisioned the future.
Ghost Box brings it heavy on the zone out times. If you love Silver Apples, Raymond Scott, or Broadcast, you need at least one Ghost Box release in your collection.
The Focus Group’s new release “We are Coming Back to Dance with You” is dense while creating a huge sonic headspace to take in each sound with profound consideration. As with most of The Focus Group’s catalogue, “We are Coming Back…” treads this weird, thin line between being tranquil and being spooky, sorta in the same vein as Music Has the Right to Children. And as prevalent on that aforementioned album, The Focus Group lays it thick on the bucolic imagery. This is pretty much the same with The Advisory Circle. “Energy in the Home” builds itself around analoge synths and what is, presumably, some public television program. Once again, futuristic in the most nostalgic sense. Some of my favorite songs feature random field recordings over vocals. It’s a good way to go, and you get plenty of that with both The Focus Group and The Advisory Circle.
