from the LP Electric Sandwich, Brain Records, 1973
Germans on acid! What better impetus for a music scene? The term ‘krautrock’ gets loosely applied to a gazillion different bands, spanning a decade in time, and criss-crossing several actual styles of music; ostensibly, the only common thread among them being their love of drugs & music, and their being from Europe. Electric Sandwich hailed from the capital of old West Germany: Bonn. This track is the definite highlight from their self-titled debut album, and while there is no real “representative sound” which you can pin on krautrock, this is a fairly archetypal example of a popular tendril of the greater scene: lots of phasing, audio effects, echo, wah-wah guitar, all dancing around a super-tight percussive axis built from both congos and a drumset. The bassline drones throughout, another standard in this arm of the greater krautrock family. Soon after this album was released, the band members fell into disagreement over just how far down the jazz-rock line they wanted to go, and promptly broke up. Over the last couple of years I’ve started to notice more and more new indie bands aping this drone-based method, to varying degrees of success; too often, it seems, they get carried away with the simplicity rather than focusing on the groove. Electric Sandwich really nail it here, and the whole jam sort of sweeps you into their hazey, drug-adled world; this is due in no small part to the mastering and production genius of one Dieter Dirks, in whose studio this track and album were recorded (and gobs of other krautrock classics). No lyrics here to disturb the trance, which erupts into a flurry right at the end, leaving the listener happily stunned.
