KVR Audio

Turello · Post by **Turello** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:30 am

Also remember NEU... Great Avantgarde Band...

OK... GOODNIGHT... KO

michael2 · Post by **michael2** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 4:26 am

i don't think you'll piss anyone off. honestly a synth that like that will only be discovered/appeal to a select group of people; people who have already heard and basically accepted the term.

beyond that: i am WAY interested in this synth. will it be available in AU format? or did I read wrong and its a soundest for an existing synth?

Dunbar · Post by **Dunbar** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 6:16 am

Krautrock might have been intended as a derogatory term 40 years ago, but was playfully embraced by German bands of the day: Faust even released an album with the opening track titled "Krautrock".

The term now has entirely positive connotations, for English speakers. It's associated with a motoric style of music, that combines synthesisers and rock instruments; it gets used with reference to experimental, innovative yet, confusingly, retro music with said repetitive metre.

Here's a contemporary French band with a Kraut influence (this song sounds like Harmonia):

If you have the time, check out La Düsseldorf, an underrated Krautrock band of the '70s.

Spiritos · Post by **Spiritos** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:39 am

Nice to see this genre still being alive in the collective consciousness. Can's Ege Bamyasi is still on of my fav records.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:55 am

Dunbar wrote:The term now has entirely positive connotations, for English speakers. It's associated with a motoric style of music.

If 'Krautrock' is going to cause offence, 'Motorik' might be an alternate category name. And before the local genre police jump in, this is not an attempt to conflate the two, merely a suggestion for a useable label with the same basic connotations.

nasenmann · Post by **nasenmann** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:15 am

whyterabbyt wrote:
Dunbar wrote:If 'Krautrock' is going to cause offence, 'Motorik' might be an alternate category name. And before the local genre police jump in, this is not an attempt to conflate the two, merely a suggestion for a useable label with the same basic connotations.

That's a neat genre name, and despite being german i've never heard of it. Gonna read up a little on that.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:18 am

nasenmann wrote:
whyterabbyt wrote:
Dunbar wrote:If 'Krautrock' is going to cause offence, 'Motorik' might be an alternate category name. And before the local genre police jump in, this is not an attempt to conflate the two, merely a suggestion for a useable label with the same basic connotations.
That's a neat genre name, and despite being german i've never heard of it. Gonna read up a little on that.

Really, it was more specifically descriptive of the driving beat common to a lot of the k***rock stuff than a genre in and of itself...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorik

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:18 am

nasenmann wrote:
whyterabbyt wrote:
Dunbar wrote:If 'Krautrock' is going to cause offence, 'Motorik' might be an alternate category name. And before the local genre police jump in, this is not an attempt to conflate the two, merely a suggestion for a useable label with the same basic connotations.
That's a neat genre name, and despite being german i've never heard of it. Gonna read up a little on that.

neu use the term motorik to describe their sound, but ive also heard it used by members of can and kraftwerks autobahn was called the same.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:20 am

Interesting wee read on the topic:

http://thequietus.com/articles/03472-fr ... -modernity

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:20 pm

back to nowhere!!!

(yes i know thats not the actual line, although it is now as i will occasionally shout this while me and my guitarists are noodling)

Goseba · Post by **Goseba** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:38 pm

Faust had a track called Krautrock on the album Faust IV.

fmr · Post by **fmr** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:44 pm

Using Krautrock may be as innacurate as using any other label. It's the same with progressive rock, symphonic rock, hard rock, simply pop or rock (these two then...).

But even the main label of this kind of music (Brain Records) adopted the name, if I'm not mistaken. And I also agree that the name "Berlin School" is more restrictive. I would not put Jane, Popol Vuh, Amon Duul II or Can under that name, for example.

http://www.furious.com/perfect/brainrecords.html

http://www.green-brain-krautrock.de/ind ... 94a6b0496c

Krautrock is now established as the designation for this type of music. I remember over here, in the beginning, we just called it "german rock".

The_Hidden_Goose · Post by **The_Hidden_Goose** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:46 pm

Motorik is used to describe the mechincal style of drumming that Neu and others employed.
Most of what TD did wasn't Motorik, for example.

I can understand why Krautrock would be seen as derogatory, despite it being accepted to some degree - it was only really popular in the UK at the time, and it's an english derogatory term for Germans. It took a while to be accepted outside of the club scene it sprang from in Germany.

It would be like calling something rock bands from France "Frogrock". Which sounds worse, but it's the same thing really. We haven't have a generation or so to get used to it.

Can't help but use the term sometimes automatically as it's always been called that to me, but I can understand why folks might have a problem with it.

It's a pretty broad thing...often with very little in common beyond a drive to experiment. I wouldn't normally think of Faust (either/any of them!) or most of what Amon Duul (or Amon Duul II) being the same genre as Tangerine Dream. The most that many of them had in common was that conny Plank produced some of their records (or was practically a member in the case of Cluster).

It was all a backlash against the deliberately inoffensive mediocrity that dominated the pop music in Europe at the time (Schlager music it was called, I think)

ThoughtExperiment · Post by **ThoughtExperiment** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 1:28 pm

I've always hated the term - it was coined by a music journalist (Angus McKinnon in the NME, I think) as a lazy way of grouping together all the bands emerging from Germany in the early 1970s. But those two factors were the only common thread - Faust didn't sound like Can who didn't sound like Amon Duul who didn't sound like Cluster...etc, etc, etc

So as an indicator of a specific musical genre or sound, it's meaningless - it's been mentioned before, but the type of sound you're describing in your original post (Hi Laurent by the way!) is what I'd think of as Berlin School.

And without wanting to sound stuffy, I don't think the age of a phrase can diminish its offensiveness. I could stick my head out of the window now and shout 'F*ck off!' to some random person passing by and I'm pretty sure they'd still be offended even if I assured them that the 'F' word was about 500 years old...

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 1:30 pm

frogrock

KrautRock ?