Ten rare krautrock records

Go by the sleeves and krautrock looks like a scene with a healthy number of record companies standing behind it. Ohr, Pilz, Kosmische Kuriere, Brain. Four logos, four house styles, four catalogues that each start counting from somewhere different.

Go by the paperwork and it thins out fast. Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser sat behind three of them, having set Ohr up in Berlin with the producer Peter Meisel, in the same building where Meisel was already running his other businesses.

These ten came out between 1970 and 1974. They aren’t in date order. They’re grouped by label, because that’s the arrangement in which the arithmetic shows.

Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk aren’t here. Those three find you on their own.

Listen while you read

Three on Ohr

Guru Guru, UFO (OMM 56 005, 1970). Five pieces. Ohr’s first LP had gone out that April, and across the label’s entire working life it managed thirty-three albums and twelve seven-inch singles before the whole thing stopped.

Ash Ra Tempel, Ash Ra Tempel (OMM 56 013, 1971). One piece a side, nothing else, Conny Plank at the desk. The drummer is Klaus Schulze. He turns up further down this page on his own.

Worth knowing before you press play: Spotify carries it as Ash Ra Tempel (Mixed Tracks), and the two long sides have been chopped into eight, with Amboss running nineteen minutes and fifty-two seconds across four parts and Traummaschine twenty-five thirty-one across four more.

Klaus Schulze, Irrlicht (OMM 556.022, August 1972). The credits name him and nobody else. He plays it. He produces it. He engineers it, does the cover and takes the photograph.

Two on Pilz

Popol Vuh, In den Gärten Pharaos (20 21276-9, 1971). Florian Fricke on Moog, organ and Fender piano, Holger Trülzsch on percussion, Bettina Fricke producing.

Wallenstein, Blitzkrieg (20 29064-6, 1972). Four pieces, a mellotron written into Jürgen Dollase’s credit, Dieter Dierks in the control room. Dierks reappears in a moment, as a guest on the Wegmüller record.

One on Kosmische Kuriere

Walter Wegmüller, Tarot (KK 2/58.003, 1973). Twenty-two pieces in a box, credited to a Swiss painter who drew the tarot deck that came with it.

Playing on it: Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke out of Ash Ra Tempel, Jürgen Dollase and Jerry Berkers out of Wallenstein, plus Harald Grosskopf, Walter Westrupp and Bernd Witthüser, which amounts to most of Kaiser’s roster in one room on one session.

Two on Brain

Harmonia, Musik von Harmonia (brain 1044, 1974). Eight pieces. Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, with electric percussion listed on the sleeve as an instrument in its own right rather than as an effect somebody added afterwards.

Cluster, Zuckerzeit (brain 1065, 1974). Ten pieces. Twenty-one catalogue numbers on from Harmonia, with Rother producing again alongside the duo.

Brain is the one label here Kaiser never touched. Two A&R men set it up, Bruno Wendel and Günter Körber, in partnership with Metronome.

Körber walked out of the executive job in 1975 and started Sky in Hamburg, with a roster that looked a great deal like the one he had just left behind him.

Two outside the circle

Amon Düül II, Yeti (Liberty LBS 83 359/60 X, March 1970). A double. The band produce it with Olaf Kübler, Willi Schmidt engineers, and the German catalogue number is doubled up because the record is.

Agitation Free, Malesch (Vertigo 6360 607, June 1972). Seven pieces on the Vertigo pressing. Peter Michael Hamel plays Hammond organ. The title is printed on the sleeve in Arabic before it appears in Latin letters at all.

How it ended

Edgar Froese and Klaus Schulze took Kaiser to court in July 1973 to get out of their contracts, and the Berlin regional court found for them in May 1974, writing that the company’s boastful manner was making its own musicians look ridiculous to a good part of the industry.

The firms went bankrupt in 1975. What was left of the stock went onto the bargain tables at Karstadt for two marks ninety-five, against the fourteen to nineteen a normal LP cost.

Jan Reetze, who pieced the story together, reckons a lot of the original copies in circulation today came out of that clearance sale. A record you now pay real money for was sitting in a bin next to the toasters.