Krautrock deep cuts: the records that aren't Tago Mago or Autobahn

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.