KRAUTROCK

With the introduction of Damo Suzuki, it is very interesting to see how his strangulated, odd vocal delivery fits the jam-based, experimental music of Can, becoming increasingly more intricate and labyrinthian, and on this album this aspect of the band's sound is opposed to the significantly different vocal style of Mooney, which ultimately becomes limited for the musical scope of the krautrock innovators. As for the music on the album, we have an overall eclectic sound that explores different corners of the band's musical interests - opener 'Deadlock' is definitely dark and nostalgic, and the upfront guitars sweep around rendering the atmosphere of this song hefty and remorseful, while tracks like 'Tango Whiskyman' and 'Don't Turn the Light On' offer a more upbeat post-psychedelic sound, more similar to the music on 'Monster Movie'. 'Soul Desert' is groovy and repetitive and works rather finely, despite the irritative qualities of the vocals. Then there is the 'Mother Sky' suite from 1971's 'Deep End' movie, with its fifteen minutes of fusion energy, manic guitar playing, and hypnotic rhythm section, definitely one of the essential Can works. The final song on 'Soundtracks' features Mooney and his soulful delivery, on a song that is more downtempo than the rest of the record.

This entire album is strange but rather good in parts, which is why it has remained many Can fans' favorite (or guilty pleasure). The major highlight has to the be 'Mother Sky' piece, which echoes the excellent experimental ventures of the band's 1969 debut.

Kollektiv was a German progressive rock band from Krefeld that was originally formed in 1964 under the name of The Generals. Mainly influenced by British music, they began playing beat music. However, as the time went by, they decided to risk themselves towards more experimentations and thus entirely changing their musical direction. In 1970 the band changed their name to Kollektiv. With this new name, the band released their debut and only album with the same name in 1973 that featured a jazzistic sound with a taste for space rock, involving a lot of experimentation and jamming, going nearly the same way of bands, like their compatriots Embryo. "Kollektiv" is an excellent fusion album and one of the most creative in the German scene. They disbanded in 1975, despite some few posthumous reunions.

The music on "Kollektiv" is close to the music of the pre-Kraftwerk album "Tone Float" of Organisation and of the two early Kraftwerk albums. "Kollektiv" is a spacious fusion of rock and jazz involving unusual structures for the time and using electrified flute and saxophone. At least the Dapper's flute with its alienated effect is reminiscent of Florian Schneider's playing on "Kraftwerk 1" and "Kraftwerk 2". But, the similarities are largely exhausted, although all three productions are characterized by a similar herbaceous and experimental atmosphere. But "Kollektiv" is an album that also reminds me of Neu!, and of course, the days of the experimentalism of Pink Floyd, the times of "Ummagumma".

This all instrumental album really knows how to soar into the depths of space. There's nothing too loud or musically complex here but rather seductive and transcendental. Kollectiv musically blends soft flute with flowing bass guitar and drum lines. Here, Kollektiv played edgy, raw jazz rock on their debut, dominated by the "cosmic" playing of Dapper on flute and sax and the bluesy, spacey electric guitar by Havix. Added to this is the driving rhythm work of the Karpemkiel brothers. Dapper has connected his wind instruments to all sorts of effects devices, so that their sounds waft and reverberate from the speakers in a very varied way, meditative, aggressive, mysterious or simply very jazzy rocking. Otherwise, the jamming is virtuoso and colorful, dreamily gliding along to exhilarate rushing along, especially in the two lengthy numbers. We also can say this is one of those albums where all the four instruments work to perfection.

The line up on "Kollektiv" is Jürgen Havix (guitar and zither), Klaus Dapper (flute and saxophone), Jürgen Karpenkiel (bass guitar) and Walemar Karpenkiel (drums). "Kollektiv" also had the participation of Axel Zinowski (guitar), Volkmar Hahn (violin), Christoph (electric piano) and Georg Funke (bass guitar), all as guest musicians.

"Rambo Zambo" opens the album with heavily processed flute soloing before jumping into high energy avant-funk with more flute work that takes you on a nearly twelve minute voyage. The grooves are laid down by the brothers Karpenkiel and effect tripped out flute and guitars rambling psychedelically in the front. This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the album. "Baldrian" is slightly tamer. It's a very atmospheric piece with hypnotic, spacey and deeply psychedelic soundscapes. It's a laid back and a slightly bluesy track with its wah-wah sax and reverberated slide guitar. It delivers dreamy and psychedelic soundscapes. "Försterlied" is a short and bizarre track that is underlain with an equally bizarre poem by Robert Gernhardt. This eccentric experiment with humorous vocal improvisation closes out the first side of the album, giving way to the band's side long three part opus, "Gageg". "Gageg" is divided into three parts, "Andante", "Allegro" and "Pressluft", which seamlessly merge. The name comes from the fact that the piece originally arose from a sequence of the tones G,A,G,E,G. It has a more composed feel than most in the side one. It's full of tripped out effects, mixing floating flute lines and guitar disharmonies in a relative calm tempo. But, it still is mostly a vehicle for flute, sax and guitar soloing. It begins slowly before building into another intense avant-jazz funk work. "Andante" is very atmospheric and is the part that sets the stage. "Allegro" is the part that brings a laid back jam for both flute and guitars. The final part "Pressluft" that takes about eleven minutes to conclude, starts with an angular, King Crimson's guitar riff over which drums jazzily riff and with more sax plays in the front. This is clearly the best track on the album.

Conclusion: "Kollektiv" is truly one of the best and most original albums that were released in Germany in this genre, Krautrock with a jazz/rock vein. It's largely instrumental and devoted to dynamic prog injections with some flowing, spaced out sessions. The music is cool, imaginative, intense, improvised and still fresh after all these years. It's spacey but melodic, elevated yet rocking, innovative, progressive in the best sense, consequent in the realisation of intent, forging new musical territory without denying its roots. The musicians did not set great store by making the kind of music that would match with the common stereotypes. The intuitive jazzy improvisations on the album introduce some sunny, enchanting flute parts and groovy sax solos. It's an adventurous and talented effort with a sound that is really refined and sophisticated contrary to most of krautrock albums. It's highly recommended to all Krautrock fans.

Prog is my Ferrari. Jem Godfrey (Frost*)

We start this cassette with aforementioned poetry, a condemnation of Christian hypocrisy and maybe a bit of urban/suburbia malaise towards the end. A snippet "I run screaming down the aisles of church while the true innocents are slaughtered in the wringing (? hard to make the words out at times) of their virgin hands / Preached double standards emphasize lusty glares (? Idk if that's correct again) / Bending words to explain their perversion / Minorities disagree and loud-mouths are placed in asylums". Wait this was written back in the 80s and not recently? No Survival For Research is the first song proper, an incredibly forgettable mid paced little jaunt with annoying clack-y, electronically treated drums, annoying rubbery strummed guitar, and annoying noisy/static-y guitar. Bass is okay. It's like a half formed attempt at a Shoegaze song. Breasts And Ass Blood continues with the same awful aesthete, only a bit longer, maybe a bit doomier. Noisy, drunkenly swerving guitar riffing and soloing carries this song to the drunk tank finish line. Is that what bro is on about on the cover actually? OD From Industry (yeah I think Mr. Raimond is not fond of the nine to five grind) is a change of scenery from everything before, a tad more interesting. Shrill and sharp synth lines are layered and layered, morphing into a white hot sheet of screeching tinnitus, odd treated and robotic vocal snippets peak through, all the while an incredibly nervous bass line constantly thumps in the background. Random tinklings of piano like a drunk person uncontrollably relieving themselves all over. Castalian Remix (DWM have a song on Transistors & Chips / E-Lok 1111 various artist compilation called Castalia, I'm guessing this is a remix of) is more my style, despite having many of the hallmarks of previous songs. We've moved a bit into Industrial/Synth Pop/EBM territory, those cheap, klanky drums sped up and even more distorted, reverbed vocals mashed and thrown around, blaring, droning and moaning synths, and that noisy, screeching and soloing guitar. Really this is a beautiful mess of hideous sounds.

B side starts with the longest song on the album, Little Girls With Leprosy, a total jump into the morass of free improvisation. Someone atonally smashing away at a piano, while some taut wires or some such are scrapped and plucked, and an onslaught of chiming bells. Things take a turn into more interesting territory once the piano subsides, as we enter into some tape manipulation and looping experiments, full on Musique Concrète. All manner of clicks, whirs and who knows what are processed while the bells eventually calm down. This turns into a distorted cacophony of various whistling sounds, a demented symphony of songbirds, slowly progressing and processed into a rough noisy oblivion of whirring static. This all comes full circle with the scrapped/plucked strings, bells, and someone attacking the piano again. We end with a short, noisy, reverbed, and blown out psychedelic exercise of lazy, floating guitar and sequenced synth, not allowed to stretch its legs enough before unceremoniously getting cut off. A little blip in this bands huge discography, and mostly stuff that can be found done more interesting elsewhere IMO.

Much of DWM's art is stylized in a seemingly amateurish or crude way, or maybe one could say naïve or childish. Perfect in other words. This first release from DWM is pretty amateurish and crude, but not perfect, unfortunately. Mostly culled from recordings made at the San Francisco State University electronic music class in 1984, and a handful from a few years earlier in 1982. One foot is in the prior decade's electronic musings and one foot in the then burgeoning cassette underground.

We kick the A side off with Life Of The Beached Whale, one guess as to what this sounds like. Slippery and wet gurgling synths give a slight illusion of being in the depths of the ocean, while higher pitched synths squeak and EEEEEEE away, beck and calling. 59 I Pool is a track being played in reverse; with swooping synth sounds, various tribal sounding drums, coming and ebbing in waves. Meeting Extravegance is the longest offering on the A side, a heady stew of metallic droning, burbling synths, electronic insectile chirping, and what sounds like a kettle boiling; all fading and increasing at random throughout the track. Self Automated Patch #1 is exactly as the name suggests, a synth gleefully burbling and whirring and scratching away of its own volition, a bit musique concrete feeling. Avacado Marketing Techniques #1 is the first of the two songs recorded in 1982, and also the first to sound almost musical at times, but also one of the weaker songs here. Lo-fi guitar samples attempt to mesh with droning synths and some looped vocal samples. There's a bed of quiet electronic thumping and droning tones allowed to the forefront for a while, as everything else subsides. The guitar and vocal samples return, joined by non-sampled bass guitar soloing, and we cycle between these two modes for the rest of the song. Help, We Need A Melody is 20 seconds of a harsh, insufferable, screeching tone to end side A.

Side B has the second and last 1982 recorded track, Avacado Marketing Techniques #2, and IMO much better track than the first. Drifting, sublime, etheric bass wanders through oceans and waves of analog fuzzing and hissing. Sounds like a post rock song drowning in a sea of black and white TV static. Pure atmospheric bliss, and very unlike anything else on this cassette. Self Automated Patch #2 is a return to Buchla synth self-playing, not much to say. When A Girl Lives Alone features groaning and moaning treated vocal samples slowly being layered upon one another, creating an undulating water bed for Rich Ferguson to recite some poetry, presumably of the same name, over. Sounds very much like a poem written by some guys in college. Tribute To The Music Of Raisin Bran Trust is a return to longer form experimental electronic stews; synths doing various impressions of whirring fans, various dial and fax tones, watery and laser like burbling, babbling, chirping, and hissing. Somehow this track sounds quite spacious and void like at times, as if all the sounds are being captured out of space. Patchwork Park Insanity returns to samples being played in reverse, though with a bit more diversity than 59 I Pool. Abstract humming tones, melancholic guitars, odd vocal snippets, and what sounds like amplified tin foil being rubbed and scraped. We end this journey on a sour note, with yet a third offering of random nondescript Buchla babbling.

An interesting journey's start for a group with a lot of fingers in a lot of different pies.

The first half is a sessions that was broadcast by John Peel on BBC Radio 1 in 1973, and although there are three distinct pieces it is indexed as a single track on my copy. The Lurcher is an otherwise unavailable 8 minute instrumental slice of early 70s Faust that meanders according to its own internal logic, starting with saxophone blowing over a lazy beat and slowly morphing and mutating until Krautrock kicks in at around the 8 minute mark. This isn't radically different to the version on Faust IV, although the individual instruments are more clearly audible. The BBC session closes with an alternate and slightly extended version of Stretch Out Time from The Faust Tapes.

The second half gathers together a few otherwise unavailable fragments from Faust's early years, along with a couple of pieces that had previously surfaced on Munic & Elsewhere, The Last LP Party 9 is very much of a piece with other Faust instrumentals of the era, while 360 is a tape collage Faust at their most experimental. Party 10 would have slotted nicely onto The Faust Tapes, and then we're into the the heavily treated drums and percussion of Party 1. This leads into We Are The Hallo Men, and then we get alternate versions of So Far and Meer.

The BBC Session is superb, and justifies owning this album on its own. Prospective buyers should be aware that the session was also issued as part of a bonus disc with some Faust IV reissues, although Bob Drake's remastering gives this much better sound quality. The remainder of the album is a kind of supplement to 71 Minutes Of... , and overall you get a pretty good overview of Faust's world in the early 1970s. If you see it at a bargain price it's not a bad introduction to Faust's early years, but you would be better starting with Faust and working forward from there. 3 stars.

The first few minutes of this concert had been previously issued as part of the Can Live 1971-77 collection as Fizz, and Eins jumps in where that release left off. The band had well and truly hit their stride by this point in the proceedings and they explore the theme for 10 minutes before launching into Zwei, which is loosely based on Pinch from Ege Bamyesi (this and Vitamin C were regular fixtures in their setlist at this point, along with more recent material). Drei is a 10 minute instrumental version of Don't Say No from Saw Delight, and is a rather more aggressive take on things. Vier is an improvisation, before proceedings are brought to a close with Funf, a 25 minute hypnotic reading of Animal Waves.

This is the stronger of the two releases from the 1977 tour. It's a soundboard recording, and both Rosko Gee's and Holger Czukay's contributions are much more clearly audible than on Aston 1977. The extended versions of two pieces from Saw Delight are ample proof that Can could still deliver the goods on stage even if their studio albums had become rather hit and miss by this point, although they never recaptured the manic energy of the Damo Suzuki era. They were also leaning more into extended jams than spontaneous compositions at this point - it's hard to define where one approach ends and the other begins, and one isn't necessarily better than the other, but it's fair to say that the Godzillas had been tamed.

It looks like this is the last Can archival live release (for now), and it's not a bad point to finish on. Can's trademark hypnotic grooves are present and correct, and if Rosko Gee's bass is a little busier than Holger Czukay's, he and Jaki Liebezeit gelled into a supple and muscular rhythm section, laying down a solid foundation for Karoli and Schmidt to extemporise over, while Holger Czukay beamed in noises from another dimension. A solid 4 stars.

Full Hammond B3 Organ, flutes, winds, strong bass and drums.Some parts are pop music, but the best part it's a progressive kraut rock ,in vein of Cornucopia. The second album is better and we can listen echoes from Uriah Heep keyboards style.The vocal is in Germany idiom (both albuns),the voice is not so good, but all right.The pop parts are near of rock"n"roll with some organs.

If the music itself wasn't bad enough, the sound quality only makes things worse. And naming this "Disaster" could not have been more appropriate. And while I had a glimmer of hope during that very first spin with the opener. That glimmer vanished quickly as this played out for a painful 67 minutes. It's just gets annoying very quickly to hear all this banging and not much else.

This is one of those purchases that I really regret. I'm still kicking myself for not just being content with the one good record they did make in "Paradieswarts Duul" with a different lineup and three significant guests. Two from AMON DUUL II and Hansi from XOHL CARAVAN and later with EMBRYO and more.

Barely 2 stars for this one and a waste of time and money.

All four tracks appearing on the album have their distinctive characteristics, which all add up to the eclectic nature of 'Monster Movie', an album for which it would be more difficult to trace the influences of, rather than go on and understand how much of popular music has been influenced by it and by Can's trippy, expressive, and mechanically repetitive music. Opener 'Father Cannot Yell' is an accomplished krautrock staple, with its avant-garde psych-experiments and lightweight references to the Velvet Underground, as we see how Can would use tape experiments, improv and sound layering to create pieces of music that work in an almost-monolithic way. The use of reverb and various other guitar effects is prominent on the album, and the second track is a good example of that, with the elegiac tones of Michael Karoli's playing swaying in-between the sounds of the song. A more upbeat and shorter third piece 'Outside My Door' redirects the listener to the pomp of psychedelia, leading you towards the final, 20-minute-long closing track 'You Doo Right', the epitome of the entire album, a musical monolith of experimentation and tape editing, with wailing screams and stomping guitar flares, this is a gorgeous, startling and eerie piece of music that could have only appeared on a Can album. And with all this in mind, how could one oversee the gritty debut album of this rather unconventional German band, blending a variety of genres and techniques, and offering music that is nothing short of achingly compelling.

Eins is a strong opener, just under 14 minutes of the trademark open ended musical exploration that Can did so well. It may not have the manic intensity of the free form freak outs that can be heard on earlier concert recordings, but Schmidt and Karoli weave fascinating patterns over an ever evolving groove laid down by Gee and Liebezeit and it demonstrates that Can could still conjure beguiling music out of thin air. Zwei is based on Vitamin C from Ege Bamyesi, beginning with Irmin Schmidt's keyboard arpeggio and exploring the theme from there. We stay with Ege Bamyesi for Drei, which uses Pinch as its jumping off point and which is where they really cut loose and let fly. It's also where Holger Czukay's contributions are most audible. Vier is a heavily deconstructed Dizzy Dizzy and brings proceedings to a satisfying conclusion.

Although they were touring Saw Delight at the time, this release leans heavily into Ege Bamyesi and Soon Over Babaluma in terms of both musical themes and overall feel. Rosko Gee's bass is busier than Holger Czukay's and both he and Czukay are relatively low in the mix most of the time. It's an interesting document of a frequently overlooked and under appreciated phase of Can's career, but is a solid rather than inspired addition to the archive live recordings.