VIA PRESS RELEASE | “If you would like to know about some of the genre’s key players’ aspirations and motivations for their work then I can highly recommend this book to you.” —Michael Rother, Neu, Harmonia, Kraftwerk
West Germany, 1968. Like everywhere else in the Western world, the young generation is pushing for radical change, still suffering the after-effects of the Second World War. Many stream out of the lecture halls and onto the streets. Some into the underground. And some into the practice basements, in search of the soundtrack of the movement.
The unique and adventurous sounds produced by German bands such as CAN, Neu!, Amon Düül, Popul Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Faust, Cluster, or Kraftwerk, now widely-known as Krautrock, are considered a blueprint for modern rock music.
In Neu Klang, Christoph Dallach interviewed its pioneers, including Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay of CAN; Neu!’s Michael Rother; Jean Herve Peron and Hans-Joachim Irmler from Faust; Dieter Moebius of Cluster; Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream; Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and many others.
Their answers combine to form an oral history that points far beyond the individual band histories: on the one hand, into the past, to Nazi teachers, post-war parental homes, free jazz, terrorism and LSD; but just as much into the future, to global recognition, myth-making, techno and post-rock.
