The Krautrock appreciation thread

^ Moshkito, following on your last two impassioned and well reasoned posts...

I don't know that we today (listeners AND musicians) have the will to do it (yes, general American willingness to die inside is a problem! and the kind that spreads!!), and I certainly don't have it figured out, ... but I have this feeling I can't quite put my finger on that we are poised to achieve another great run in making and availability of music if we only take it.  I say this because of the internet as it is currently constituted; you can count on it that one day it'll be a real jackass scene because the mega-media (most of it American sh*theads) will get laws spun their way and make it into something that works for their horrid aims.  But right now we are here, it's exciting, and we get at least a few years more.  I don't quite know how to put it, just a sense that something is here for the taking for now.  And if I'm right, and we dig in now, we just might preserve this scrap of free expression.  Thoughts anyone, other than suggesting I'm paranoid?

American Khatru wrote: ^ Moshkito, following on your last two impassioned and well reasoned posts... I don't know that we today (listeners AND musicians) have the will to do it (yes, general American willingness to die inside is a problem! and the kind that spreads!!), and I certainly don't have it figured out, ... but I have this feeling I can't quite put my finger on that we are poised to achieve another great run in making and availability of music if we only take it.  I say this because of the internet as it is currently constituted; you can count on it that one day it'll be a real jackass scene because the mega-media (most of it American sh*theads) will get laws spun their way and make it into something that works for their horrid aims.  But right now we are here, it's exciting, and we get at least a few years more.  I don't quite know how to put it, just a sense that something is here for the taking for now.  And if I'm right, and we dig in now, we just might preserve this scrap of free expression.  Thoughts anyone, other than suggesting I'm paranoid?

Edited by moshkito - July 03 2009 at 12:30

^ Great catch!  I saw that once in a retrospective at the MoMA here.

Hi,

Edited by moshkito - July 03 2009 at 12:58

Alberto Muñoz wrote: And do not forget to others bands like La Dusserdolf and NEu!

Harmonia,Liliental,Tangerine Dream or Sergius von Golowin too

Guru Kanguru

tamijo wrote: CPicard wrote: moshkito wrote: There are few composers that went this way of the "weird" and I often think that Stravinsky was probably one of the first psychedelic composers that I can think of. No, Stravinsky was proto-Zeuhl. With a little R.I.O. taste.   check out : Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Скря́бин, Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr nʲɪkəˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ ˈskrʲæbʲɪn], Aleksandr Nikolajevič Skr'abin; sometimes transliterated as Skriabin, Skryabin, or Scriabine) (6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871]–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Chopin. Unlike the later Roslavets and Schönberg, Scriabin developed, via mysticism, an increasingly atonal musical language that presaged 12-tone composition and other serial music. He may be considered to be the primary figure of Russian Symbolism in music as well as the progenitor of Serialism.   pretty wird too.

Yes.  Here's a one-stop-shopping suggestion for piano works.  I haven't dug real deep so there may be better realizations but, again, this is one 2-cd set that'll keep you very busy for a long time!

moshkito wrote: Very few, and I mean extremely few art scenes come out of the blue ... out of one person ... or out of nowhere. The two most visible of these are the neo-raphaelites and theh 30 years later, the surrealists that sprung into the world with a film (Luis Bunuel) that obliterated the imagination (L'Age D'Or) ... and busted wide open the experimentation context of many other arts in Europe ... not as much in America and I think the media had a lot to do with it ... I can't help thinking that Orson Wells and his ______ with the Hearsts were not important or not happening with others ... and he used radio to bust it wide open, something that most artists are not activists enough and believe in themselves enough to do! (Citizen Kane is the movie btw and War of the Worlds was the radio thing) ....   I always think that things can bust out at any time ... I really thought that if America did not make a real major change (Obama or Hillary) that it would come even sooner ... the rest remains to be seen ... I really think that we have to respect the arts more in America and schools ... otherwise it will be just another culture wipe just like 200 and 300 years ago in America.   But I don't see the future ... so don't think I can justify correctly how I interpret the past ... hehehehe

Yeah, but not let's not forget that movements like Krautrock (to keep this thread on track) and the 1960s/1970s counterculture in general not to mention the Beat Generation that started it all were extensions of started out as underground movements... you know, the people who got it going already had tastes well outside the mainstream.

It did eventually end up influencing the rest of western culture, though, partly because the people doing it really wanted to change the world but also because the general population was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the current state of affairs. It's similar thing with punk's similar influence on culture in general, though that's mostly shaped the more sub-cultural side of things - it really broke through in the mid-late 1970s which again was a time of great disillusionment.

Another post mentioned something about today's prog scene being too insular and conservative too, maybe the increasing insularity of subcultures is limiting their potential to become more than just exclusive "safe havens" for the disaffected? As useful as those kind of enclaves are, the self-styled isolation might also make it hard for them to become the kind of culturally determining forces that you got in the 1960s/early 1970s beyond their style being adopted by fashion.

Of course, this attitude is partly because a lot of the popularity of subcultural art and philosophy in the past can easily be argued to have been a case of pearls before swine, though it should perhaps be mentioned here that subcultures are rarely uniform movements to begin with as they are generalized categories of many different people with similar interests and motivations... in fact, due to my young age I'm making a big bunch of generalizations here with a lot of it based on second hand information, most of my first-hand experience with subcultural politics being from the metal scene. Can some of the older posters here corroborate?

crimson87 wrote:   By the way: BRAINTICKET

Toaster Mantis wrote: Another post mentioned something about today's prog scene being too insular and conservative too, maybe the increasing insularity of subcultures is limiting their potential to become more than just exclusive "safe havens" for the disaffected? As useful as those kind of enclaves are, the self-styled isolation might also make it hard for them to become the kind of culturally determining forces that you got in the 1960s/early 1970s beyond their style being adopted by fashion.