New Monday #19
Schönen Montag!
That’s German.
I’ve been bopping around Montreal’s subway system listening to Krautrock. It’s perfect music for trains and tunnels and feeling odd and alienated.
I went down a Krautrock rabbit hole. And this is your invitation to join me down there!
Krautrock... that is a terrible name, coined by British music journalists. I hope any German readers don’t find it offensive, and please feel free to correct or add to anything in this Neuer Montag.
It’s also ridiculously reductive. It’s applied to a variety of music recorded from about 1968 into the 1980s, that stylistically ranges from psychedelic jams to synth-based minimalism to prog rock with embarrassingly bad lyrics to punk to free jazz. As a genre, Krautrock is all over the place.
While a lot of it has a mechanical 4/4 beat known as “motorik,” the only commonalities seem to be a tendency towards experimentation and noise, and that it doesn’t have blues as a basis for chord structure or improvisation.
Whoops! Another commonality in Krautrock is a brilliant engineer/producer named...
Conny Plank
By brilliant, I mean Bill Putnam or Al Schmitt or Tom Dowd brilliant. An engineer’s engineer. Someone who not only knew where to put the mics, but also how to build the console. BRILLIANT. Conny Plank should really be much better known.
Komrad “Conny” Plank recorded or produced practically every group associated with Krautrock at one time or another. He also recorded albums for Scorpions, Eurythmics, Devo, Ultravox, Killing Joke, Brian Eno, and even Duke Ellington! Plank turned down working with David Bowie on the album that eventually became Low, (too much drugs, he thought). He also turned down working on U2’s Joshua Tree (too much Bono).
The center of his studio near Cologne was a 56-channel custom console, built to his own specifications and recording style with Michael Zahl, who now makes 500 series EQs and such.
Here is some vintage console porn. I love this stuff.
Plank also developed a recall system that used a camera suspended over the console to take a picture of the knobs. To recall this “snapshot” of the console, the film would be projected back through the camera onto the console and an assistant would turn the knobs to match the image projected onto them. Brilliant.
He also solved the problem of listening to finished mixes in the car: he built an illegal radio station in the studio. He and the clients would pile into his car, tune into the studio’s station, and wait for the assistant engineer to include the mix in a playlist of similar records. Again, brilliant.
And, of course, he was a virtuoso engineer, a huge believer in mic placement and working room acoustics. His recordings of percussion-based experimental jazz are fabulous, capturing everything with amazing clarity and precise stereo placement. He was also a master of tape manipulation, blessed with a fantastic memory that allowed him to edit long, free-form jam sessions into cohesive songs, linking forward and reversed bits of tape and noise without keeping detailed notes. He just sort of “did it."
Conny died young, at 47 in 1987, of cancer. His console is now in England, still making records for artists like Franz Ferdinand. The Motorik goes on!
Some Things to Hear
Here’s a curated list of some things Krautrock and Conny Plank.
This is a wonderful extension to everything I’ve written above, going into a bit more detail on the recordings and linked to listening examples.
https://thevinylfactory.com/features/10-essential-conny-plank-records/
Can - this is out there stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dZbAFmnRVA
Kraftwork - the Beatles of Krautrock. They’re still around. The album Autobahn was the last record they did that was engineered by Plank as they became more successful and ever more electronic. Here’s a playlist of vids. Great background music. Occasionally look up and see Germans dressed as robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQIYEPe6DWY&list=RDEMlS0N2Gz3BIH0JY8Cyyrimw&start_radio=1
Neu! - Loose, jam-oriented stuff. The recording below is an 8-track, engineered by Conny Plank. The drums here can’t be on more than two tracks, but there’s astonishing clarity and stereo perspective on everything. My guess is he did this with just two mics in exactly the right place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ&list=RDzndpi8tNZyQ&start_radio=1
Niagara - who says a percussion-only album can’t be amazing? Breathtaking engineering by Conny Plank, and amazing playing by a bunch of killer drummers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T5R4nFIBgg
La Düsseldorf - a spinoff comprised of members of Kraftwork and Neu! Industrial before industrial?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz9q9UZS4M0&list=PL4384B64D44A0F11C
Cluster - electronic and minimal, occasionally with Brian Eno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l50cmJOiHv0&list=OLAK5uy_kNoI0SQPzDD4EFa5MY1gKk-dOyd202orU
Tangerine Dream - dramatic electronic Krautrock, or the basis of every sci-fi movie soundtrack since 1980.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdFHE73aOMI&list=RDEMflsAy-eLxQ2-oszlwebZ4g&start_radio=1
Faust - Krautrock as noise. Or punk ska. I have no idea what this stuff is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=menuXx3oq80&list=OLAK5uy_lJ5UzdPN6Dj1C7D3oYhQDSc_6Zjc3KgPI
Not Krautrock, but Conny Plank...
Eurythmics - Belinda. Recorded by Conny Plank. This is when the band was way more rock.
Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports This is the record that started ambient music. Plank was very much involved.
Ultravox - Vienna A huge early new wave hit. High romance and electronic noise, Conny Plank at the faders.
Devo - Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo. Produced by Eno, engineered by Plank. Insane stuff.
Scorpions - Love Drive. Conny Plank and early metal. Great sounds overall.
A Percussion Recording Tip
I used to use a stereo tube mic most often, but when I was dealing with a percussionist who was playing a lot of different things all over the place, like congas, and then some bell tree thing, and then a rik, and then a talking drum, and on and on, it became impossible to mic all of it with a pair and get good capture, or mic things individually and not get tons of phase issues.
The solution was a t-shirt and a PZM.
A PZM is a flat plate of a mic that has a semi-hemispherical pattern — it picks up everything across 180 degrees. Not a cheap mic, they were originally made by Crown and were like $800 each. However, you could get a Crown PZM for $60 if you went to Radioshack, because the Realistic PZM was in fact a Crown mic. For $120 you could get a pair of great-sounding, albeit unbalanced wreck-around mics.
SO... I taped a PZM to the center of a t-shirt with gaffers tape and had the percussionist put the shirt on, the mic facing out from his chest, perfectly positioned for percussion pick-up. Since he was naturally balancing levels as he moved from instrument to instrument, I didn’t even have to ride gain. For the mix, I’d split the one track to a bunch of channels and then automate them with whatever EQ or effects were needed to get the best sound out of that particular bit of percussion. When dealing with expensive studio musicians, producers often wanted me to go fast with them in the studio and then work more on the mix because, well, my time was cheaper!
Thanks for coming down the rabbit hole. Tchüss til next week!
