Carla and Brad Talk About Krautrock Carla and Brad

In today's episode, Carla and Brad tip their caps to the ten or more young Bavarians who stood up to Mom and Dad, demanded money for a swank downtown apartment, and most assuredly drove their neighbors nuts with the ensuing band rehearsals. Well, maybe we tip our caps more to the parents who funded this grand and glorious adventure.Musical Münchner communards choose attitude over aptitude. Drum circles and pudding plots abound. Push the levels all the way up into the red, wh...

It's a tale as old as time. Boy meets Moog III synthesizer. Boy drops a wad of cash to buy it. Boy and Moog blissfully record two studio albums and a film soundtrack together. Boy abruptly breaks up with Moog and finds religion.Boy is, of course, gifted and accomplished pianist Florian Fricke. His project, and at times even his alter ego, is Popol Vuh. In this episode we do some Before and After sampling: i.e., we talk through the records on either side of ...

Schoolyard friends Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke loved the Beatles and the blues ... like everybody else in a Berlin rock band in the late '60s. But then they got hold of Blue Cheer's record and some blow-the-doors-off British amps. Soon wunderkind drummer Klaus Schulze was at their door, sniffing around the new equipment. Things were gonna get LOUD. Ash Ra Tempel's soundquakes and soundscapes show off a dynamic range that is unmatched in Krautrock. Come jo...

No figure loomed larger over Krautrock, as a genre, than legendary producer/ sound engineer Konrad "Conny" Plank ... and we've been looking for an opportunity to talk about him. Then we discovered the Rastakraut Pasta LP that he and Dieter Moebius recorded and released in 1980. Problem solved!From behind the board in Cologne's Rhenus Studio and then his own converted farmhouse in Wolperath, Plank put on tape some (most?) of the best German kosmische and electronic music of the '70...

We interrupt this podcast's regularly scheduled programming for a SPECIAL REPORT:We've made a Krautrock Playlist.The original idea was to have a "song draft": having dug deep enough into Krautrock, we would take turns claiming songs for ourselves. We figured this way we'd learn what each of us likes in particular, and what we like best.What happened is we came up with a list of 44 songs -- FORTY-FOUR -- that generally holds together not just as a cohesive cross-section of the genre (wit...

It's 1969. Accomplished Belgian classical/ jazz/ R&B pianist Joel Vandroogenbroeck and English rock guitarist Ron Bryer have ditched their Basel-based blue-eyed soul band and will shortly link up with lysergic femme fatale Dawn Muir. The result? A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of NOTHING. It's BRAINTICKET!Join us as we talk about Brainticket's wild and wooly debut record, Cottonwoodhill. The band brings the organ crushes, guitar chucking, j...