kosmische music debate

An entry in Momus blog pointed me to a debate underway at Owen Hatherley's blog.

This centres on an absurd contention made by David Keenan in the most recent Wire magazine that German fascism was essentially modernist in character. It's a contention that made my jaw drop when I read it, and seems to have had a similar effect on Owen. First let's quote Keenan at length for the sake of clarity. In the magazine's bimonthly Primer section Keenan looks at Kosmische music:

"Faust were the archetypal Krautrock group, the first to fully popularise the term and, alongside Kraftwerk, Can and the Michael Rother/Klaus Dinger circle, the first to attempt a specifically German rock music. But in their love of energy and speed, and their revelling in the sound of destruction and mechanisation, whether scoring symphonies for power tools or reducing rock's sex beat to a steely metronomic pulse, their adoption of futurist ideas and aesthetics, and calls for an indigenous German rock felt uncomfortably close to the calls for violent national renewal that plunged Germany into the abyss in the 1930s. But there was a parallel utopian Krautrock, based around a cabal of musicians who rejected any notion of a year zero in favour of recuperating earlier German folk styles while taking inspiration from the psychedelic explosion that had taken place in the UK and the USA. This was Kosmische music, named after label manager, author and visionary underground head Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's fantasy of a devotional form of psychedelia synthesizing traditional folk with Middle European orchestral traditions, improvised rock, endless keyboard drones and the euphoric communion afforded by mind-altering drugs. Unlike the Industrial Krautrock of Faust or Kraftwerk, the Kosmische scene was a pastoral trip. All the iconic images of the music involve surrender: green politician and folklorist Sergius Golowin squatting in bliss beneath the blue skies, rolling green hills and cascading waterfalls of the Swiss mountains..."

To anyone with a passing knowledge of history this utterly misrepresents Nazism. As Owen points out far more articulately that I can German fascism was founded in toxic pastoral myths, new age fantasies, and other atavistic bullshit. Check out Owen's full post and the comments in response here. See Momus on this debate and a couple of others here.

Wire is here although at time of writing the current Primer is not online. And over at YouTube Jonathan Meades' Jerry Building from 1994 covers both the architecture and the largely invented folkloric 'traditions' the Nazis tapped into.