One head’s guide to the great Kosmische Musik — and every record in it, in the order he names them.
What this is
Every record the book names. In the order it names them. Each one carries the sentence that puts it in the argument, set exactly as printed.
German releases only — foreign reference points such as Joy Division, Bowie and the Velvets are left out. Quotations are read off a scan of the 1995 paperback. The scan blurs the inner margin where each page curves into the spine, so a word is occasionally lost mid-sentence. Nothing has been reworded to cover it.
Contents
Before any of it had a name: Stockhausen’s studio in Cologne, and five American GIs in Hamburg making the most hostile record of the decade.
The whole scene in one sweep — the communes, the Essen festival, Ohr and Pilz, and the first records by Amon Düül, Can, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Neu!
Polydor hands a group of unknowns a converted schoolhouse and an open budget. What comes back is the clear LP, The Faust Tapes at 49p, and a legend.
Berlin, the Zodiak, and Edgar Froese’s long march from cello-and-feedback chaos to the four sides of almost nothing that make up Zeit.
The Düsseldorf line: Dinger and Rother out of Kraftwerk, the motorik beat, and everything that branched off it through Cluster, Harmonia and La Düsseldorf.
Inner Space, two singers and a great deal of tape. Cope on the five-year run from Monster Movie to Future Days.
The commune that split in two — the political half and the half that could play — and the long strange run of records that followed.
Manuel Göttsching at eighteen, Conny Plank at the desk, and the Swiss summit that produced 7Up.
The producer who invented Kosmische Musik as a brand, then dissolved his own label in a haze of acid, unpaid musicians and five Cosmic Jokers LPs.
Cope’s own top fifty, in his numbering, with the label each record came out on.