Some music is born of trauma and silence. Post-war West Germany was a country in shock, cut off from its own recent history and from the rest of Europe, unable even to look at its own musical traditions without embarrassment. Out of that void, paradoxically, came one of the most fertile and influential seasons in twentieth-century music: krautrock. David Stubbs has written the book the subject lacked in English — a study at once musical and historical, deep and readable.
Stubbs's argument is that krautrock makes no sense without the Germany that produced it. These musicians — Can, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II, Kraftwerk — deliberately rejected the Anglo-American blues-and-rock'n'roll tradition, because that tradition stood for an inheritance they didn't feel was theirs. They looked elsewhere for their roots: in Eastern mysticism, in the rigour of Stockhausen, in the repetition of machines and assembly lines, in the endless autobahns, in the forests of the Rhineland. In effect, they built a music of the future because the past had become uninhabitable.
Stubbs tells the story group by group, in chapters that are full portraits, with an ear always tuned to the social and political context. His is the writing of a real critic — he came up through Melody Maker, The Wire, Uncut — able to describe music with precision and passion without ever lapsing into technicality. The chapters on Kraftwerk and Neu! alone justify the book, but it's the whole that measures how deeply these groups shaped everything that came after: post-punk, new wave, electronica, ambient, hip-hop. Bowie, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem — all in their debt.
For the collector, krautrock is one of the most fascinating and treacherous territories: often rare records, fiercely sought-after original German pressings, reissues of uneven quality, a market that takes real knowledge to navigate. Future Days is no pressing guide, but it is the indispensable historical and critical map for understanding what to look for and why. Knowing who Faust were and what Neu! stood for changes the way you look at those records in a market crate.
For Groov-illa, this book opens the section on electronic and experimental music, and it is the right place to start: it tells the moment European music stopped imitating America and began to imagine the future. It is a German story, but it is also the story of how much of the music we listen to today found its shape.
