T/S: Krautrock vs. Shoegaze

Uh, most of any given Terrastock lineup these days to thread?

vs. disco

Krautrock

Neither of these terms really mean anything though.

By which I mean that the definitive "krautrock" or "shoegaze" band tends to be a less than interesting example of its respective genre.

Always with the semantics

Anyway, krautrock.

Schliechenzeit vs. Blissodrone

(Name of their split EP: Overdriving the Autobahn)

Krautrock

Krautrock.

Hmmm... I suppose there was more overall quality (in terms of amount of great bands/albums) in the Krautrock scene as a whole, yes; but I think if you compare the top 5 or so bands from each genre it would be a lot closer. I was originally going to make this a Can vs. MBV thread, and that might possibly be a more interesting debate. Then again, we can also just compare the abstract idea behind both movements: i.e. oceanic sheets of noise vs. repetitive rhythmic pulse, to oversimplify things.

This was also partially prompted by my flipping through the RS top 500 albums in a bookstore the other day and being somewhat surprised by the fact that not a single Can or Neu! album was in it, whereas Loveless was somewhere in the 200s. I always though that the big three kraut bands (Can/Faust/Neu!) were semi-canonical at this point, at least in the sense that the other proto-punk stuff (Velvets, Stooges, MC5, etc.) is. I guess not.

Yeah well, not to RS anyway, which frankly doesn't surprise me.

You've got a fantastic screen name, though.

Kraut

scheißanstarren

What are the top five shoegaze bands?

Converse
Nike
Reebok
Sketchers
Adidas

oh, BANDS. i thought you said brands.

badum tish.

There's no need to fight them if they can coexist happily together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhz5BlqIUTU

Seriously though. My vote is for Krautrock:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qzc3krlDrY&feature=related

krautrock.

krrrrrrrraut

Can vs. MBV thread, and that might possibly be a more interesting debate

Can vs. Mogwai would be more interesting than that.

This was also partially prompted by my flipping through the RS top 500 albums in a bookstore the other day and being somewhat surprised by the fact that not a single Can or Neu! album was in it, whereas Loveless was somewhere in the 200s

Considering that the list only includes two albums made in non English speaking countries (Trans Europe Express and Buena Vista Social Club), you're still surprised?

Easily Shoegaze because there were some shoegaze band that did actually have great tunes. Jesus and Mary Chain sure had their moment, and I guess pre-"Thirteen" Teenage Fanclub may be classified as shoegaze too.

ringing endorsement for shoegaze, there.

Can were/are better than MBV on every level.

my fav krautgaze band = Cloudland Canyon
http://www.myspace.com/cloudlandcanyon

yes, cloudland canyon are v v good!

Can were/are better than MBV on every level.

Complaints complaints. (I won't disagree, but my viewpoints are all too well known.)

nb I like MBV just fine and will even rep for the first album, but you can't pretend that a bunch of blissed-out punks can match up to sheer musical and artistic ingenuity of the big krautrock players

I vote Hawkwind.

Easily Shoegaze because there were some shoegaze band that did actually have great tunes. Jesus and Mary Chain sure had their moment, and I guess pre-"Thirteen" Teenage Fanclub may be classified as shoegaze too.

what the hell kind of statement is...

-- Geir Hongro, Tuesday, August 26, 2008 9:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

oh.

...I wonder if Krautrock vs. Post-punk would be a better match-up, as long as we're talking about compound-word experimental rock genres.

Can vs. Mogwai would be more interesting than that.

Most one-sided fite in history.

Mogwai = most one-sided band in history?

Haha, quite possibly.

This is the most pointless dichotomy since, well, garage vs. psych: fight!

Two great tastes that go great together.

Exactly.

No. One has funk.

And the problem with that is?

early teenage fanclub = shoegaze harrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Well, Mogwai aren't shoegaze either.

And "krautrock" is such a nebulous term anyway, what does any of it matter?

I think perhaps the motorik beat was the most deliberately unfunky, straight, unsynchopated beat imaginable. The motorik kind of krautrock combines very nicely with shoegaze.

Combining funk with shoegaze, though, generally leads to jam band stoner nastiness, though, ha ha. Um.

Can were very funky and very far from motorik. Motorik has a lot more implied funk than any shoegaze drummer i can think of...

Oh, so you think funk is a good thing.

"implied funk" is one of the funniest terms I've heard all year.

In my idiosyncratic definition of funk, I hear openness, some implied space where syncopation happens. early funkadelic wasn't that funky in terms of tightness of the beats or explicit syncopation, but something about the looseness and space in everything makes it funky par excellance. i don't know.

neu! beats make mbv beats sound so tight-assed in my brane. i love shoegaze (at least mbv), but was there any shoegaze band with a decent rhythm section?

x-post sorry, hard to put into words

i mean, what is closer to jungle beats: "hallogallo" or the almost-industrial snare breakdown in "only shallow"?

discussion of mbv's lack of funk bound to be fruitful.

Guy from Ride could drum but hardly funky.

well that's pretty much what this thread is about isn't it x-post

Boo Radleys.

real talk, though: ohio players -- i mean, where was the layered guitar, the dreamy sonic soundscapes, the cathedrals of feedback, the whispery hard-to-decipher vocals? more like ohio gayers.

No, no, carry on, it's a good explanation, strgn.

I tend to be suspicious of "the Funk" but it sounds like what you are referring to is actually something more like what musicians refer to as "the groove" (sorry for cheesy term) - that half the key to being a good rhythm section is knowing what *not* to play as much as what to play.

A lot of the kind of movement in such a straightforward beat as motorik is implied by the beats that are left unplayed.

It is a common complaint that shoegaze bands didn't tend towards good rhythm sections because this wasn't what was important in the music. But I think that the better shoegaze bands were the ones that tended towards motorik rather than ones that stuck in those dreadful, forced "funky drummer" loops in an attempt to make their music "funky."

Which is why, as much as I love MBV and the like, I'll always prefer the more motorik dronerock side.

ha. indie bands these days aren't funky, thanks to shoegaze. ;_;

Masonic Boom, you're totally explaining what I'm trying to think, thank you, but now I think the whole thread premise is kinda dumb because apples and oranges.

I don't think it's apples and oranges at all. More like chocolate and peanut butter.

But I would say that, because the interface between shoegaze and motorik is where much of my favourite music lies.

I always bang on about The Early Years, but they do it particularly well. Partly because they're one of the few nu-gaze bands that bother to have a decent drummer. (Though the last time I saw them, they were doing a whole Kraftwerk routine and their drummer was playing synths and "singing".)

Krautrock. I don't think I get shoegaze yet. Well, by that statement I suppose what I really mean is that I like MBV but can't wrap my head around their stature as gods. But maybe one day!

TS: the crappy Krautrock bands v the crappy shoegaze bands

You know, I used to think that I'd answer that I'd rather sit through crappy shoegaze bands than just about anything... until this past year or so, when I've had to sit through some of the WORST crappy shoegaze bands in the world.

It's almost more painful watching someone do something you really *like* really badly than it is watching someone do something badly that you don't care about.

So, well, I think at least a crappy krautrock band would probably be more amusing to watch.

Is it unfair to say that most of the canonical shoegaze bands sound a bit narrow, conceptually, compared with the best of Can (and maybe Neu!)? I'm not the biggest shoegaze freak, but the genre bands I know best each seem to consist of a few discreet and v cool ideas. They're great within the confines of those ideas, but they also seem somehow confined by them. I like the sheer sound of MBV, and a few songs really stand out; I like J&MC for the scrapy noise and the Beach Boys pop; Ride and Cathrine Wheel and Swervedriver each have their charms -- but none of 'em match the simple, organic musicality of Tago Mago & Future Days. There's a musical breadth, curiosity and generosity in Can that doesn't seem to have a shoegaze analog. Maybe Spacemen 3 come close, circa Perfect Prescription, but I'm not sure they're a proper shoegaze band...

Well, it does seem a bit unfair to compare a band with an output of 2 albums (and a handful of EPs) to a band with an output of about a dozen.

It also seems a bit unfair to compare a musical movement that was a tiny sliver of a what a certain subsection of a genre was doing in a two-year period to the entire musical output of an entire country for nearly a decade. Which is what you're doing when you compare "shoegaze" with "krautrock".

But still...

Who knows what Kevin Shields would have come up with if he hadn't gone to sleep for 15 years. Or maybe he wouldn't, maybe he'd have been like Jason Pierce rewriting the same album with diminishing returns. We'll never know.

I'm not the biggest shoegaze freak, but the genre bands I know best each seem to consist of a few discreet and v cool ideas. They're great within the confines of those ideas, but they also seem somehow confined by them.

Hahah, this is not a new complaint at all. Simon Reynolds in a year-end MM issue from 1990 basically said the same thing about the scene-as-such and recommended wider listening choices including...Can! So there you go.

it does seem a bit unfair to compare a band with an output of 2 albums ... to a band with an output of about a dozen.

It also seems a bit unfair to compare a musical movement that was a tiny sliver of a what a certain subsection of a genre was doing in a two-year period to the entire musical output of an entire country for nearly a decade.

-- masonic boom

Eh, that's a personal taste thing. As much as I love teh Stooges (let's not talk about not going to see them on Sunday) I don't see enough development there. They did one thing (perhaps two things) EXTREMELY well. But it's pointless to compare to bands with much more of a development trajectory.

OK, the whole conversation is pointless, really, but um.

It's been a slow day at work, what can I say?

it's not to hard to recognize that krautrock is a more musically complex genre than shoegaze - I say this as a fan of and with great respect for both genres. Shoegaze's distinguishing features are almost purely aesthetic.

As much as I love teh Stooges (let's not talk about not going to see them on Sunday) I don't see enough development there.

development is overrated!

I think MBV's extreme lack of prolificness after Loveless is a testament to this fact xpost

Oh come on, Curt1s, that's testimony to nothing but Kevin Shields being a zoned-out perfectionist.

Yeah, my unearthly Stooge-love is a personal thing, not dependent on musical developments, just my own personal feeling of the strong emotion. I go the same way with Can, but I don't wanna to take anything away from the lovers of Loveless. All those people can feel the feeling, too, is what I'm saying. If they want to.

In any event, development overrated (great = great) and nu-Stooges make me want to cry.

testimony to nothing but Kevin Shields being a zoned-out perfectionist.

respectively

I'm not the biggest shoegaze freak, but the genre bands I know best each seem to consist of a few discreet and v cool ideas. They're great within the confines of those ideas, but they also seem somehow confined by them.

Unlike, say, Neu!

Perhaps it would be better to use the broadest definition of shoegaze possible, in order to even the playing field. (i.e. we could include precursors like Spacemen 3 and Loop, as well as the 'gazier end of post-rock).

It also seems a bit unfair to compare a musical movement that was a tiny sliver of a what a certain subsection of a genre was doing in a two-year period to the entire musical output of an entire country for nearly a decade.

Well, I'm assuming the definition of "Krautrock" we're using doesn't include, say, "Polit-Rock" bands such as Ton Steine Scherben and Floh de Cologne, straight-ahead German takes on genres like punk and metal, Schlager, German jazz, German modern Classical, etc. Ultimately, we're really only referring to a particular subcategory of psychedelic rock, which certainly doesn't cover even as much as 10% of the music - even of the rock music - being produced in Germany at the time. I also wouldn't include bands such as Eloy and Grobschnitt, simply because they fit in much better with English symph-prog bands than they do with what we normally refer to as "Krautrock" -- a form of music which the majority of Germany was unaware of even at the time.

"Krautrock" refers to a particular tendency within underground music of a particular time period, in a particular country -- which ultimately makes it almost as narrow category as shoegaze, especially if we take a broad view of the latter genre.

Nevertheless, the more I think about it, the more the Krautrock vs. post-punk comparison seems to work better to me. Both were extremely diverse musical scenes largely associated with one particular country, despite having sympathizers elsewhere (No-Wave vs. Swede-rock); and yet, the diversity of both is forgotten today, as the genre name has become the signifier of a very particular, stereotypical sound that acts as just another musical ingredient to add to the influence-pot (identikit Go4 funk vs. identikit motorik; Franz Ferdinand vs. Fujiya & Miyagi), despite the fact that many of the original bands sounded nothing like this (The Pop Group vs. Faust).

most of post-punk fairly bores me senseless. So that would be krautrock in a heartbeat.

mathematics OTM, though I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing krautrock largely (but not exclusively) in terms of a specific sound and the bands who best embody it. Also Otm! about Neu!. My point is maybe just that Can's omnivorous broadness unbalances the comparison -- absent Can, it seems more evenly matched, interesting to consider.

Perhaps lumping in Can with the rest of Krautrock is a bit like lumping in the Beatles with the rest of the British Invasion. Although they may have defined a genre, they also transcended it to become an entity in and of themselves?

Perhaps lumping in Can with the rest of Krautrock is a bit like lumping in the Beatles with the rest of the British Invasion.

...or lumping MBV in with the rest of shoegaze, for that matter.

The Can/Beatles comparison is a bit extreme though. I would say Kraftwerk would fit that analogy a bit better.

Me, I'm totally down with Can = Beatles, Kraftwerk less so. Your mileage may vary.

no, Kraftwerk = Beatles. Can are the Rolling Stones.

Who are the Kinks?

Okay, you put it that way, I sort of see what you mean. Makes sense, but in a different way than Masonic was talking about.
xpost

Who are the Kinks?

Amon Duul II

As far as I'm concerned, MBV are pretty much a dictionary definition of shoegaze.

As far as not lumping them in, well... what other musical movements have they "done" since then?

"Krautrock" -- a form of music which the majority of Germany was unaware of even at the time.

Like so much else in this thread, this is wrong.

And, to me, krautrock doesn't encompass all german rock from the 70s -- rather, like shoegaze, it's a particular thread.

T/S: Your Krautrock vs. Your Shoegaze
T/S: My Krautrock vs. His Shoegaze
T/S: Her Krautrock vs. Their Shoegaze

etc

I used to think I knew what people meant when they said "shoegaze". Now I'm not so sure.

However, I never knew what people meant by "krautrock". That's one of those phrases one really has to define before one has a conversation about it.

It's bollocks, what does Popol Vuh have to do with Faust, for instance?

or Heino?

I long ago discovered that "Krautrock" means "the German stuff from the 70s that I happen to like"

eg Heino.

Eben

Whilst shoegaze as a genre I thought was fairly easy to define - a bunch of bands in the late 80s/early 90s that could trace direct influence (whatever that means) back to My Bloody Valentine.

But then it gets all bogged down with people who were in the scene at the time going "no, no, MBV were just one of a whole bunch of bands in a scene with Spacemen 3 and Loop and the Telescopes and stuff! And then all those copyist bands like Ride and Lush and Slowdive came later!"

(But my answer to that is, that first wave was actually technically dronerock.)

((The true answer is, that scenes or genres are never so clearly well defined as one would like them to be, and flow one into another. And I think the interesting bits depends on where those flows intersect.))

Does it not go back to the 13th floor elevators?

"Krautrock" -- a form of music which the majority of Germany was unaware of even at the time.

Like so much else in this thread, this is wrong.

No. I lived in Berlin for half a year, and while there, did a research project on Krautrock for my German class. I interviewed a handful of bands and fans, but they were quite hard to find, because, as I discovered, most people of that generation don't actually know anything about that scene. I can pretty confidently state that the bands that were most respected abroad, with the exception of Amon Duul (and possibly Ash Ra Tempel) were, for the most part, relatively unknown within Germany.

You will know that Can had a No. 1 single in Germany then? It's true that the majority of Germany was unaware of "Krautrock" bands at the time, in the same way that the majority of UK was unaware of Van der Graaf Generator or Camel or Gentle Giant at the time.

I'm assuming you're talking about "Spoon", which was pretty much a novelty hit that came as a direct result of its inclusion in a German TV show.

So?

For those of you living in France or Germany, there's a krautrock documentary on Arte at 10.30 tonight.

By the way, I honestly don't think MBV sounds that much like Lush, Slowdive, Ride, or most other "shoegaze" bands at all. MBV was more about the noise and less about effects-pedal abuse. (Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but they're quite different things.)

So?

So the popularity of the single was an isolated occurrence that didn't really reflect the popularity of the band's other material.

According to Julian Cope's book, Krautrock was a british thing. Which makes sense, I mean, who here talks about "English Rock" ?

Look, I'm not saying an audience didn't exist for this stuff in Germany; I'm just saying that it was much smaller there than the audience for, say, English prog.

I didn't say MBV *sound like* Ride, Lush, etc. I said that Ride, Lush, etc. were hugely influenced by the direction that MBV went in.

Not the same thing at all.

(Heck, maybe they all just suddenly, independently, randomly got the idea of "hey, let's mix a bit of Cocteau Twins loveliness with Sonic Youth noise" simultaneously at the same time. But, judging by contemporary interviews, that's not what happened at all. Most of those first generation shoegaze bands have openly acknowledged their debt to MBV as their starting point - heck, Slowdive recruited their members from an MBV fanzine!)

Ok, well, fair enough then.

Comparing MBV to Can or the Beatles is fucking brane dead. MBV are shit.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Z58u2hAJL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

T/S: Your Krautrock vs. Your Shoegaze
T/S: My Krautrock vs. His Shoegaze
T/S: Her Krautrock vs. Their Shoegaze

Lyrics to a forthcoming Fall song

But then it gets all bogged down with people who were in the scene at the time going "no, no, MBV were just one of a whole bunch of bands in a scene with Spacemen 3 and Loop and the Telescopes and stuff! And then all those copyist bands like Ride and Lush and Slowdive came later!"

That kinda how I see things. MBV was just the inevitable conclusion/collision of what Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, and the Cocteau Twins were doing earlier. Hell, much of shoegaze is just the goth-less version of what The Cure were doing ten years earlier - not so much copyist as just part of the overall continuum.

pfunk

(ok Krautrock)

Thing is, MBV produced loads and loads of copyists very quickly. While we had to wait 20 years for sh*tty Spacemen3 tribute bands.

they were asleep.

By asleep you mean "on the nod"?

i like that early years band, they do krauty shoegaze sort of

(my terminology is off. either that, or I'm their parents, downstairs...)

WHACKED OUT ON SMACK?!?!?

K might lynch me for this but I tried to see most of the bands playing the Sonic Cathedrals stage at this year's Truck festival and TEY were the only band I really enjoyed. I was excited when a SC stage was announced but in practice my attention kept wandering. Actually, I've been noticing I don't like shoegaze as much as I think I do on record, either.

(Plus having a nu-gaze event near Oxford and not inviting locals the Workhouse is just rude, see)

So, krautrock please. Better source material, and even after all these years the new-kraut bands are just rare enough and keep just enough variety to seem refreshing, which hasn't seemed true for shoegaze for some time now.

(though has KR has been ripped off for less long than shoegaze? sure, Quickspace and Stereolab family trees to thread, but most people might've needed to wait until '99 for Napster and reissue programmes)

Bowie and Eno were ripping off Krautrock in 1977. Eno in 1975.

Sorry, "ripping off"

And "Krautrock"

Last night I dreamt that I was playing Rock Band with tehrza and dmr but it was Krautrock and all the lyrics were phonetic german in black olde block lettering. (It was Amon Düül II, I think!)

I'm not going to lynch you for that - I'd probably agree with you if I'd gone. I was really bored by the SC stage lineup when it was announced - can't even remember who played now, apart from TEY.

Lots of that scene has just gone in for really dull, boring sub-Warlocks shoegaze copyists with BJM links. Which just sounds like so much classic rock to me. And the other half has gone in for dull Ulrich Schnauss type vaguely textural electronics like Maps and Kyte.

God, what am I defending shoegaze for? I hate nu-gaze! I'm just realising how much I dislike most of this crap!

Meantime the new Windy and Carl album is great, so just listen to that instead. :-D

T/S: Your Krautrock vs. Your Shoegaze
T/S: My Krautrock vs. His Shoegaze
T/S: Her Krautrock vs. Their Shoegaze

etc

I long ago discovered that "Krautrock" means "the German stuff from the 70s that I happen to like"

-- Tom D.

Basically the kosmische musik electronic explorers and/or bands that treated beats as endless, "motorik" mantras

I don't think Faust are either of those. Or Ash Ra Tempel. Or Amon Duul II. Or Popol Vuh (after 1st two albums)

OK, Ash Ra Tempel bit kosmische on occasion, admittedly

Re Tom:

I had a line in there about Faust being outliers, but cut it cause I didn't wanna argue the point. But yeah, they're the thing that is not like the others. In their defense, experimental electronics, avand-garde composition and musique concrete were influences on Krautrock in general -- Faust just took those elements (a lot) farther.

Also agree about most of ADII and Ash Ra. They're included simply because they're canonical and were so central to the scene that birthed Tangerine, Kraftwerk, Kluster, Can and Neu!, but they really belong in the bin that contains bands more closely related to "otherwise established American, European and English prog, pyschedelic and/or acid rock approaches." As you say, Popul Vuh gets in for Affenstunde & In Den Garten (= seriously kosmiche). After that, they moved on.

I think that you couldn't pick out one specific characteristic that all KR bands have that non-KR bands don't. It's more of a constellation of characteristics that weren't shared by every single band uniformly. So, I could make a list of trends in Krautrock (which would include things like rhythmic minimalism, tape editing/experimentation, middle eastern influences, use of electronics, etc.), where any given Krautrock band would conform to some, but never all, of the items on my list. I don't think Krautrock is particularly unique in this respect; there are very few large genres or scenes that don't work this way.

(For example, what do Judas Priest, Nortt, and Necrophagist have in common? What do Dinosaur Jr., Tortoise, and Magnetic Fields have in common? etc.)

^^OthisM^^

For example, what do Judas Priest, Nortt, and Necrophagist have in common?

They all end with the letter t.

:o)

krautrock and shoegaze go fucking great together -- Th' Faith Healers to thread!

stephen OTM. My personal favorite smash-up is The Milk of Human Kindness by Caribou. "Barnowl" in particular.

also... Jessamine to thread!