kraut kraut kraut kraut

My current musical fixation has been krautrock. In the 90's, when stereolab was first mining the motorik neu-beat, kraut-rock was more obscure and less talked about. Since then, and I think somewhat to do with the new york/brooklyn rock revival (liars, dfa, black dice, animal collective) and a general record-collecting -> hipster convergence (along with other obscuro-psych genre hipster cravings -- psych folk anyone) kraut rock has become more talked about, less obscure. This is also fed by the reissue of some classics: the first three neu albums on astralwerks, can reissues, etc. and going from my heavy rock to hawkwind to pink floyd to amon duul II getting into krautrock is only natural. here are some of the more obscure records i've heard so far:

agitation free - malesch: berlin freak-hipsters travel to egypt and at that to their psych brew. good stuff. i saw it compared to the greatful dead somewhere but it's closer to trippy parts of early/mid floyd.

cluster & eno (and eno's before and after science) among the big early boosters of krautrock, which was reasonably popular in the uk where prog/heavy bands like hawkwind, king crimson, man already treaded, but the first wave of popular outside-the-de kraut was amon duul and faust and tangerine dream. the wankier or the heavier. i don't think can, neu sold a lot of records in the uk. that said, eno was one of the first boosters. jumps on the bandwagon lauding harmonia/cluster/neu as the 'most important band around' and the neu beat as one of the most important beats of the 70's (along with jb and fela (i think)). but late 70's he makes the trip to berlin, along w/ bowie & iggy & reed, to start tapping into the forward deutsche sound. out of this comes more ambient stuff, a collab w/ the cluster boys and the b&as record, which members of can and cluster are also involved with. all said it's typisch eno ambience ala the 2nd side of low/music for airports etc. pretty good stuff. need to listen to it more.

and somehow they all come together ( http://www.jahsonic.com/ManuelGottsching.html ). Gottsching the guitarist of Ash Ra Tempel - and pretty soon Ash Ra itself went on to write this 30' electronic jam that is heralded as a seminal techno moment. who knew?

and that links to the new track from lcd soundsystem/dfa. a 40 min nike jam. wierd. i picked up the new black dice lp used, yet another techno/kraut/noise confusion. great. and some more wackie's dub (reissued by basic channel) and some seminal dancehall -sugar minott. looking forward to finding the white mice lp to hip myself to seminal digital dancehall. what is it all about?