[Cover photo credit to Stefanie Dallach]

Christoph Dallach, born 1964, is a journalist who writes for Die Zeit, ZEITMagazin and Spiegel among others, and lives in Hamburg. His book, Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock, has just been released by Faber Books in the USA.

Dallach sets the stage:

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, Popol 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 Krautrock 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.”