Krautrock or Kosmische (Cosmic) music is a term covering music of various genres; Rock, Electronic and Fusion, emerging from different cities in West Germany roughly between 1968 and 1978.
The music emerged as part of a powerful cultural re-evaluation amongst young Germans. Young people refused to accept the direction their country was taking and moved to establish a new cultural identity for themselves outside the shadows of Nazism, Capitalism and American influence.
The musical approach rejected American blues as a template and looked instead perhaps to European classical and Jazz and also world music. Artists were also seeking to reject conventional musical formats in order to develop something new, something European. Bands often had a democratic, open ended approach but the music can have quite a rigorous, even minimalist, structure. One element of this has been described as Motorik- a driving percussion approach, almost tribal in nature.
Within Krautrock each band member seems to contribute equally to create a piece of music and there is often no obvious leader, ‘No Fuhrers’ as Irwin Schmidt of Krautrock group, Can, described it. Krautrock has had a huge largely unacknowledged influence on the development of British and US music, from punk and new wave through to trance, drum and base and electronic music
