Kosmische Musik III

I love Popol Vuh too, but Can is in a league of its own here.

GAM - Eiszeit is a great lost album. Probably obscured a little extra by having the worst early 2000's CD-ROM styled cover imaginable. I think Günter Schickert is one of krautrock's unsung heroes. His soundscapes are always intriguing. I relistened to Überfällig the other day, after it appeared in one of your polls. The whole album is a terrific listen but I had forgotten just how fantastic Puls is.

Vinegar's only album is a charming mess. A bit amateurish and the vocals annoy me somewhat. But the album ends with a genuine kraut-masterwork in Fleisch... which almost makes up for everything

I notice how nuts some of you are over Guru Guru, but I've always found them quite underwhelming. Guess I'm simply not too crazy about heavy guitar jams with extended soloing. The kraut - or any other music I do enjoy are rarely about that at all.

Pass out the bibs!

I have Gunter on this list three times including this band GAM. Apparently this was restored and edited by Alan Freeman from Cosmic Egg and he came up with the cover art. Julian Cope praised GAM's 1976 sessions saying they blew his mind. 

It's hard to go against TAGO MAGO. 

The only thing that goes by us all is how much of it was simply sheer improvisation combined with what Holger had stated many times, was combed from 20 hours of tapes! We still think there is some sort of "composition" in all this when as a matter of fact, the whole thing was "anti-composition" ... an attitude that we dislike tremendously in regard to "Progressive Music" and its overrated number of bands, where it is all about their ability to simply write another conventional piece of music with slight variations here and there.

Both Popol Vuh, and Guru Guru, in those early albums were quite improvised, and you can hear it better in one of the early releases of live material when GG goes insane with the sound, the atmosphere and the incredible storm ... something that we always thought only Jimi could ever do something like that! And yet, this guitar player made us look dumb for even thinking so, although we do not give him any credit whatsoever for his storm of sound, and ability to create an incredible atmosphere for this early material by this band. Sadly, they could not keep it up either and later were to become a mere shadow of the original, although still fun.

Popol Vuh, was experimental right from the start. Remember that it was specified that he bought a synth from KS in order to learn it, and eventually he dumped it for music that was more acoustic than experimental, although I think that the underlying feeling was improvisational, by the time you get to the later material you end up thinking that improvisation is a sister to ritual ... which I'm not sure it is! Ritual tends to be slightly restricted as to the procedures and doings, although music for it, might be considered a side issue, and not exactly a part of it all. So, there would be some serious considerations here, so we get a better understanding of our choices.

I would rather this vote was for the most "improvised" of all the Progressive Music materials, and both Popol Vuh, Can, Guru Guru, and especially Amon Duul 2 in the earlier days ... would be at the top of the list. 

But we have a hard time conceiving something that is improvised ... and we cannot even sit and compare the incredible atmosphere for the MM thing on Dance of the Lemmings, when put at the side of the two long pieces in Tago Mago ... AD2 in that album stands up magnificently as it did in their previous album ... but we go by favorites, not by listen and their value. AD2 is not a band that is liked because they are so different from album to album as to alienate people ... and makes us wonder what is going on?

Maybe one day we will get, and understand, what helped define and make what we know as "krautrock" ... or what I like to suggest is music for the musically intelligent instead of the musically inept that can only count to four and variations there after!