Krautrock deep cuts: beyond Can and Kraftwerk

Neu!'s Michael Rother plus Cluster's Roedelius and Moebius, recording in a village on the Weser in 1974. Brian Eno called Harmonia "the world's most important rock group" — then moved in to record with them. The gentlest, most pastoral motorik ever laid down.

The 1974 album where Cluster swapped drones for drum machines and melody — wobbly, homemade electronic pop a quarter-century early. “Caramel” and “Hollywood” sound like the future being assembled from spare parts, because they were.

Florian Fricke sold his Moog after this 1972 record and never looked back: piano, oboe, electric guitar and Djong Yun's voice in weightless sacred music. The spiritual center of the whole movement — and the sound of every Werner Herzog film that matters.

The Munich commune's 1970 double album: acid-rock freakouts with violin shrieking over the top, half-composed, half-channeled. Yeti is krautrock at its wildest and most communal — the movement's id, on record.

Sold in the UK for 49p in 1973 — the price of a single — and assembled from the Wümme commune's private tapes into one continuous collage. Pop songs surface and dissolve mid-thought. The most radical bargain in rock history.

Manuel Göttsching (guitar), Klaus Schulze (drums), Hartmut Enke (bass), 1971: one side of cosmic fury, one side of near-silence. The Berlin school of space music starts here, years before everyone involved went electronic.

Klaus Dinger's post-Neu! band, 1976: motorik with the joy turned all the way up, city-name chants and glitter on the drums. Bowie reportedly called them "the soundtrack of the eighties" — early, as usual, and right.

Berlin's great travelers: Malesch (1972) weaves field recordings from Egypt and Lebanon into liquid psychedelic jams. The krautrock record with sand in it — and the deepest groove of the movement's first wave.

Neu!'s melodic half goes solo (1977, with Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums): instrumental guitar music of absurd warmth and patience. The bridge from motorik to every melodic post-rock and electronic act that came after.

One concession to the canon, because it's the deep cut hiding inside it: Future Days (1973) is Can's ambient masterpiece, grooves dissolving into weather. If Tago Mago is their famous peak, this is the one lifers play most.