MASTERS OF THEIR KRAFT

Abstract naturally: Germany’s ear-splitting undercurrents

Think of experimental German music of the ’70s, and many will imagine metronomic drum machines as crisp as Bavarian snow, and arpeggiated synth lines as clean as the course of the Autobahn. Looking beyond the clichés, however, Deutschland has always had a noisy side, with many of its finest kosmische artists starting out as devotees of the abstract.

Tangerine Dream’s debut album, for example, 1970’s

Electronic Meditation, was freeform, apocalyptic mood music created with a conventional rock lineup; Popol Vuh used a giant Moog and percussion to explore strange new worlds of sound on their first two records; and Cluster – then spelling their name with a k – offered up three early LPs of doomy jams complete with austere passages of spoken word.

Manuel Göttsching, too, before co-inventing modern dance music in the early ’80s with E2-E4, was creating blistering psych jams with early Ash ra Tempel, while Amon Düül ii’s side-long improvs on Yeti and Tanz Der

Lemminge still sound like terrifying pagan freakouts.

As the ’80s rolled on, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland became known for its industrial music, most famously the junkyard symphonies of einsturzende neubauten, or the strict jolts of DAf.

This undercurrent of noise seeping through German subcultures has continued, not only in the glitchy electro of oval and their ilk, but also in the scorched indie of, say, early Tocotronic, or the noise-rock of young upstarts such as Die nerven. TP