Genre-Wise: The Düsseldorf School + The Post-industrial electronic music pioneers
Krautrock Installment 1
By: Jakub Brzozowski
Hello dear readers and welcome to my column! I am your columnist, guide and the custodian of (almost) forgotten music. This column is a trip to the museum of sounds that have somewhat obscured over the years, due to their niche and inaccessible nature. No worries, however, since your curator is here to shed some light on the darker corners of the annals of music. The agenda is simple: one trip (column article) = one subgenre that has vanished from the collective memory of music aficionados. Düsseldorf School is an informal catch-all term for krautrock bands unsurprisingly based in the capital of Nord Rhein-Westphalia: Düsseldorf. Though it consists of only a few bands (and doesn’t capture the full potency of the local scene) there is an undoubtable shared undercurrent and idea of where music experimentation should lead. These bands, namely: Neu!, Kraftwerk, both iterations of Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf all are deeply influenced by the experimentation of Karlheinz Stockhausen and are the catalysts of the development of electronic music (particularly ambient, but also techno) in the 1970s.
This article is only the first part of the series on krautrock. Due to the magnitude of the topic, as well as its sheer significance, it will be split into: Düsseldorf School (this feature), Berlin School, “Bavarian School” (a term coined specifically by me for the purposes of Genre-Wise), and presumably an additional piece on all the others who don’t fit into those slightly artificial labels.
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In the wake of social changes that were prompted by the 1968 university protests in West Germany, a path opened toward many of the cultural forms that now define contemporary life. Few Western nations experienced the historical rupture and generational reckoning Germany did, creating fertile soil for movements ventilating the stifling Cold War climate. That movement demanded cultural progress, anti-war sentiments, and liberalisation of social norms. They voiced the angst of the youth. Such sentiments couldn’t be better conveyed than in art, and such maladies would work their way into rock music that topped the charts in the latter half of the 1960s.
It seemed that wherever the next best experimental thing in music emerged, there were a few key factors that would crystallise the movement. Firstly, it would directly inherit the avant-garde lineage of emerging bands like the Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention, and Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band. Second, there had to be a catalyst: a musician or a clique that would inspire aspiring musicians to unfurl their experimental prowess. For Düsseldorf-based musicians and one producer, this catalyst came in the form of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen was a part of the Darmstadt School of composers. The school ran summer music courses (Darmstäder Ferienkursen) in the 1950s and early 1960s, which developed groundbreaking ideas for electronic music. Those composers, bored by old structured conventions, started incorporating chance and stochastic (random) processes into their music. An umbrella term for this experimentation is called serialism, particularly twelve-tone serialism invented by Arnold Schoenberg. A good starting point into the bizarre world of early electronic music is Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge / Kontakte (1962).
Among many students that cropped up in Stockhausen’s lectures, one gentleman was key to the Düsseldorf scene: Conny Plank. He was a hidden member of all the main bands within the scene: Kraftwerk, Neu!, Kluster, Cluster, Harmonia, and La Düsseldorf. He wasn’t just a producer, but an artistic director. He allowed the bands to spread their creative wings and include cutting-edge electronic soundscapes into their work. Contrary to the producers of the era, Plank wasn’t interested in uncovering some mystical formula for a hit song. He didn’t apply a single formula to every act that crossed his premises, but was rather interested in exploring different sounds.
The most artistically fulfilling version of this band-producer synergy was Neu!. Michael Rother (guitar) and Klaus Dinger (drums), who came up earlier in the scene as members of one of the first iterations of Kraftwerk, where they briefly constituted two thirds of the lineup. This lineup played sporadic concerts, but, due to creative disagreements, departed from what later would be one of the best known German bands. They didn’t, however, abandon their musical vision and grouped together, forming a duo under the moniker Neu!.
Musically, their approach is a deconstruction of rock music, similar to how Sergio Leone deconstructed Westerns with his ‘Dollar Trilogy’. The momentum of their first record was never repeated and their debut remains the fullest realisation of their vision. Starting with a track like ‘Hallogallo’, and bringing in something as neurotic as ‘Negativland’ in and of itself makes this album easily one of the most esteemed krautrock LPs. Neu!’s debut utilises conventional rock instrumentation – guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards – but its compositional approach is the antithesis of bloated rock of the time. Dinger and Rother directly applied minimalistic compositional practices to the vocabulary of rock music. Furthermore, the duo was clearly inspired by developments in synthesisers and electronic music, hence all the multilayered ambient soundscapes. Neu! is also the album that solidified the influential motorik beat, inherent to krautrock. The cover art is also starkly minimalistic. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s pop art, it established a characteristic anti-image aesthetic of the band. All of this made Neu! one of the defining statements of krautrock.
The band’s second album doesn’t live up to the promise of their debut. The crux of its failure is the lack of material to fill up both sides of the record. This resulted in side B containing remixes of songs ‘Super’ and ’Neuschnee’, which were released earlier as a commercially unsuccessful single. While the historical significance of side B for the culture of remix cannot be overstated, the lack of clear vision was not only palpable for listeners at the time, who paid the full price for an LP, but also nowadays, where the latter half feels bland when juxtaposed with an 11-minute krautrock-behemoth like ‘Für Immer’ on their debut.
Their third and final record of the 1970s, Neu! 75 was recorded after a years long standstill. For this effort, the main duo brought on two additional drummers to reconcile their diverging musical ideas. Dinger preferred the noisier current within their music, which retroactively was described as proto-punk (e.g. ‘Hero’, the opener of side B), while Rother, owing to his collaborative efforts in Harmonia, opted for higher emphasis on ambience. This resulted in a surprisingly coherent record, which mainly represents the most sophisticated use of keyboards (the piano in particular) and electronic soundscapes the group had undertaken. Despite the innovation of Neu! 75, their following records, Neu! 4 and Neu! ’86, lack the exploratory edge of the first trilogy.
Neu!’s influence on music is extraordinary. Almost any post-punk act is indebted to them rhythmically, with motorik becoming prevalent in new wave music. Needless to say, the best album by Public Image Ltd. – Metal Box – could snidely be described as their take on Neu!. At the same time, all the coldwave acts owe their frigid, dense atmosphere to the Neu!, while post rock acts (particularly Tortoise) owe their drive to Dinger’s drum work, and the guitar approach to Rother’s innovations. Other admirers also include: Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Stereolab (and basically the whole British neo-psychedelia of the 1990s), and Boredoms. More recently, there was the release of , The Tribute to Neu! (2022) by a diverse group of artists inspired by the Düsseldorf duo.
Another essential act in the scene is Kluster, whose music is one of the first abrasive sound collages, which could be classified as an elementary form of industrial. Preceded by avant-garde groups like Geräusche (English: Noises) and Plus/Minus, Kluster was formed in 1969 when Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius formed the trio. Their music, in its live version, consisted of each band member torturing their respective instruments (which sometimes included car batteries, or signal generators used by electricians) with feedback, noise and other conventionally unwelcome byproducts of the instruments’ construction. In its album version, with producer Conny Plank overseeing the process, the studio was weaponised to create an elaborately structured sound collage.
Though Kluster’s first two records can sound musically amputated, they were highly influential on future industrial music. Similarly to Neu!, they are more of a deconstruction of music, rather than an experimental form of it – this time a more fitting analogy would be Resnais’s ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ (1961), which deconstructs the idea of a story, by turning it into pure abstraction (as does Kluster with sounds).
After Schnitzler grew bored of functioning in a band environment, Roedelius and Moebius anglicised the name and rebranded it into a duo. As Cluster, they immediately relocated to a remote village of Forst in Lower Saxony, where they built a studio and started creating music. The first results can be found on their 1971 eponymous debut album. Cluster tames the musical formula developed by Kluster and focuses more on drone, rather than proto-industrial. The music is purely electronic and is an example of a proto-ambient work, which while somewhat dissonant, can ultimately be a satisfactory listen even to untrained ears. Their sophomore album progresses the ideas established on their debut, but this time the music is somewhat melodic and the song lengths are relatively more approachable (the longest track clocks in at 14 minutes, rather than 21 minutes). These two albums are my favourite offerings of the Roedelius/Moebius duo and proved incredibly influential on the future of ambient/drone music.
Concurrent to their commercial expansion, Roedelius and Moebius teamed up with Neu!’s guitarist, Michael Rother, who hoped the duo would work as a backing band for his main act. Nevertheless, after fruitful jam sessions the now-trio decided to record together under the name Harmonia. The result was a jammy record, which combined the tamed Cluster style with Neu!’s pulsating rhythms (here provided by electric drums) and Rother’s unmistakable guitar work. Their album, Musik von Harmonia (1974) clearly influenced the Cluster duo in recording the aforementioned Zuckerzeit, as the latter record also exhibited elements of rhythmicality not to be seen in their earlier output. After a brief hiatus, due to Rother’s contractual obligations with Neu!, the trio recorded their sophomore and last full-length – Deluxe (1975). This record maintained the ad hoc nature of their debut, while this time leaning a bit more into atmospheric soundscapes and slower, mood-conjuring pieces.
Interestingly, Brian Eno, the ambient pioneer himself, drew influence from the so-called Kosmische Musik as well. He explicitly called Harmonia “the most important band in the world”. Following his statement, he collaborated with Cluster on two albums: Cluster & Eno (1977) and After The Heat (1978). Both records are a very interesting case study of a synthesis of two artists’ style, who influenced each other.
At that point, however, Moebius and Rodelius had scrapped the use of harsher textures and so the albums achieved a combination of Cluster’s style from Sowieso with Eno’s style from his influential collaboration with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp – Evening Star. The effects of that collaboration on subsequent Eno’s albums is palpable. For example, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the first album in his ‘Ambient’ tetralogy, was produced by none other than Conrad Schnitzler. Furthermore, Eno’s genre-defining Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, which laid the groundwork for space ambient, contains elements directly derived from Kosmische Musik.
Out of all the side-projects the scene produced, I wanted to mention La Düsseldorf, which was more or less a one-man effort by Neu!’s Klaus Dinger. He brought on his brother, Thomas Dinger, and Hans Lampe (the double drummer duo from Neu! 75) and recorded an album, which continued in the direction of more mellow songs on Neu’s final album. La Düsseldorf’s debut lays emphasis on ambient soundscapes and mixes it with the ineliminable motorik pulse of his parent band.
Surprisingly, La Düsseldorf achieved commercial viability, with record sales across their original three album run exceeding a million. This could partly be due to the fact that apart from aforementioned Brian Eno, another of his affiliates,, David Bowie, publicly declared "La Düsseldorf... the soundtrack of the eighties". This is especially palpable if one listens closely to the best Bowie albums, i.e. the Berlin Trilogy, and compares them with the Düsseldorf School.
Another, mostly forgotten, artist from the Düsseldorf School is Conrad Schnitzler. He participated in many seminal krautrock endeavours: Tangerine Dream’s first lineup, the earlier-described Kluster, and the free-improvisation-focused Eruption collective (which included krautrock’s cream of the crop). He was also the founder of the legendary Zodiac club in Western Berlin, whose influence over the krautrock scene is unprecedented.
It seems that every scene has to have a jester, who will participate, yet sardonically mock the scene inasmuch as possible. Such a role was assumed by Schnitzler. Even if his derisive opinion of the rock aspect of krautrock might be best illustrated by an analogy to the miserable jester on Jan Matejko’s ‘Stanczyk’ (although, he rather resembles Goya’s ‘Saturn devouring his son’ in any photos available online), he still actively participated in the scene as highlighted above. Simultaneously, he proudly claimed that his role in Tangerine Dream was to thwart all conventionality present in their music. He also produced dozens of solo albums, which seem to document his every interaction with synthesisers. It’s easy to get lost in that maze, so I’d recommend starting with the colours tetralogy – from Rot (1973) up to The Red Cassette (1974), as well as 1978’s Con.
My favourite anecdote about Schnitzler is how someday he let Øystein Aarseth, a young Norwegian musician and passionate fan of Tangerine Dream, into his house and accorded an unfinished piece entitled ‘Silvester Anfang’ to him. This track ended up being the introductory music to one of the most extreme underground metal recordings of the 1980s – a cornerstone of Norwegian Black Metal: Mayhem’s earthshattering Deathcrush (1987).
Finally this article has to contain a section on Kraftwerk, the most influential and popular act from the Düsseldorf scene. There is an enduring debate, whether they even qualify as krautrock. Intellectual honesty demands that I also take a standpoint, so, to my mind, the answer is glaringly simple: musically – yes.
However, what was started on their 4th LP with Autobahn (1975), and was, in my opinion, perfected on Trans Europa Express (1977) is a completely different story and is among the most important chapters in the modern history of music. It also serves as an unabated testament to the legacy of the Düsseldorf School of krautrock.