From the editor
This is the second issue of SoR Magazine. This month it is about Germany and about the music the English called krautrock.
Many people know Kraftwerk, and everyone knows David Bowie. What fascinates me most is the story behind it: about a country that had to start again after the war, about young people who asked their parents what they had done, and about musicians who deliberately did not want to go back to the past and did not want to imitate America either. They made something new, with tape recorders, endless rhythms and the first synthesizers.
That new sound travelled further than they ever imagined: to Bowie in Berlin, to the Bronx and to Detroit, where young Black people turned it into techno. And that techno came back to Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Telling history through music: that is what SoR is for.
Start the fragment with every story and keep reading. In the story about Can you see the band in the Beat-Club in 1971: four men playing a rhythm that never stops. Finish with the timeline, from zero hour to Kid A.
Do you miss a record that you think belongs here? Let me know.
Jan-Wolter SmitEditor-in-chief, SoR Magazine
After 1945 Germany had to start again, in music too. In the late 1960s young Germans no longer wanted to hear their parents' Schlager, nor to copy the rock of the English and Americans. They looked for a sound of their own, and found it in endless rhythms, tape recorders and synthesizers. In England it was mockingly called krautrock. But out of Cologne, Düsseldorf and Berlin came music that changed David Bowie, helped to set off techno in Detroit and still resonates today.
In this issue
Krautrock · story
The Year Zero
A country in ruins, parents who kept silent and students on the streets. Why young Germans went looking for their own sound in the late 1960s.
Krautrock · story
The Rhythm That Never Stops
Two pupils of Stockhausen, a jazz drummer and a Japanese street singer: Can. And two men from Düsseldorf who invented a rhythm like an empty motorway: Neu!
Krautrock · story
The Man-Machine
Four men in suits, a small synthesizer and a ride down the autobahn. How Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf gave the future a sound.
Krautrock · story
From Berlin to Detroit
David Bowie fled to Berlin, a DJ in the Bronx borrowed a German train, and techno was born in Detroit. How krautrock went round the world, all the way to Radiohead.
Krautrock · story
Trans Europa Express
A train, a few sentences and a greeting to Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Kraftwerk's most famous song, line by line.
Krautrock · to finish
Timeline
From zero hour to Kid A: browse fifty-five years of German music, with a fragment for almost every year.
Listen and learn
Spotify playlist