ABSTRACT
Introduction ‘Made in Germany’ rock music really took off in 1973. At the latest. And yet this journey’s destination was not one of popular music’s quasi-mythical locations, such as the swampy Mississippi Delta or the mouth of the Mersey in England’s northwestern city Liverpool. Instead, this journey – or should we say ‘trip’? – was supposed to lead much farther away: into the cosmos. In order to reach such an ambitious destination, a few stopovers in some rather uncosmic places were necessary; Switzerland’s tranquil Bern, for example, and the even more tranquil Stommeln, a small district northwest of Cologne, and let us not forget West Berlin, still walled-in at the time. The cosmos was conjured up with numerous, often synthetically generated and intensely produced sounds, some crudely cried out by rather untrained voices – but of course always with the laid-back sound and jargon of the hippie counterculture which had emerged in the late 1960s. Popular music began this orientation towards the cosmos with one brash, fully hypertrophic expectation: not only would the local remain explicitly unarticulated, it would transcend even the global space itself. This demand for transgression, one which resonated in the sounds of bands and musicians such as the Cosmic Jokers, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, and Klaus Schulze in the early 1970s, was taken up and solidified as so-called krautrock, primarily in England, ironically. However, the re-territorialisation of ‘kosmische musik’ (cosmic music) was less an expression of the genesis of purportedly ‘German’ rock music, and more of an indication that the development of popular music forms around 1970 was affected by a ‘complex flow between regional scenes in all parts of the world’ (Schildt & Siegfried, 2009: p. 361). England and the U.S. were only two of the many hubs (see also Nieswandt in this book).
