Having been part of Ash Ra Tempel and its Ashra reincarnation, as well as Wallenstein and the legendary Cosmic Jokers, Harald Grosskopf is krautrock royalty. His scintillating 1986 solo release, ‘Oceanheart’, is now being reissued and given a contemporary rework by the man himself
“I was excited by sequencers, but there were people who said, ‘Oh, this is just artificial music, pressing and twisting knobs’,” says Harald Grosskopf, who performed with such krautrock luminaries as Ash Ra Tempel’s Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze. “There was a lot of resistance to us, but I really liked what Klaus said… ‘Pianos don’t grow in fields, violins don’t grow on trees’. In France they were more receptive, but not in Germany.”
Speaking from his home near Cologne, Grosskopf is recalling the days when Moog synthesisers were such an expensive rarity in West Germany that you could count the number in operation on the fingers of one hand.
“I remember when I first saw Klaus Schulze’s Moog system – these four black boxes he bought from Florian Fricke [founder of Popol Vuh], who’d decided to go back to grand piano. It was expensive, but cheaper than a new one – like a laboratory, full of secrets. The very first time Klaus switched on his sequencer, I was so affected by the groove, and it has stuck with me ever since.”
That said, Grosskopf was not immediately encouraged to make music of his own.
“When I first touched the Minimoog – the envelope with attack, decay, release – I tried to work the attack and turn the volume up, but I couldn’t get it to do it, so I gave up and decided to stick to drumming.”
And so he did for many years, until 1980. Then, as electronic music was becoming less of an oddity, even in reluctantly luddite West Germany, he was persuaded to make a solo album for Sky Records. And since he’d been advised that “no one wants to listen to an album of drum solos”, he decided to re-educate himself on the synthesiser.
The resulting long-player, 1980’s ‘Synthesist’, is a remarkably accomplished work, combining sequencing and texture in a way that honours both krautrock and more contemporary rhythms, albeit minus the obvious brutalism of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten.
“I don’t know how to write musical notes,” admits Grosskopf. “I think I drum on keyboards.”
Although ‘Synthesist’ would later come to be regarded as a cult classic – and the subject of a 2011 remix project involving Oneohtrix Point Never, among others – Grosskopf was disappointed by the reception for its original release.
“It sold 10,000 copies and I thought, ‘Woah, what a flop’ – in Ashra we were used to selling 30,000 to 50,000. I thought, ‘No one is interested in my music’, and I didn’t listen to it for 10 years. But then, when the internet came along, I got reactions from all over the world.”
Disinclined to record a follow-up, Grosskopf resumed working with his Neue Deutsche Welle post-punk project, Lilli Berlin. In 1984, however, with the arrival of samplers further popularising the use of electronics in music, he decided to make a second album, ‘Oceanheart’, which came out in 1986. That same year saw Kraftwerk’s last album proper, ‘Electric Cafe’. It seemed their work – the electrification of pop – was complete.
“‘Oceanheart’ sold even worse than ‘Synthesist’,” recalls Grosskopf. “The industry had gone into decline. I recorded it in an industrial complex – I always worked with hired equipment and didn’t own anything apart from my drum kit. I had an 8-track recorder – it was like home recording, very independent – and I mastered it on a Betamax video recorder. I still own that master, but it took a while to get a digital copy made of it.”
‘Oceanheart’ was also picked up on retrospectively, and deservedly so. The clipped, Cabaret Voltaire-ish riffs and silvery lattices of ‘Eve On The Hill’, the spiralling patterns and novel pace of ‘While I’m Walking’, and the looped, hand-played tablas of ‘Pondicherry Dream’ are the triumphant product of Grosskopf’s unfettered approach to music-making and recording. His alternative modes of synthpop, whose suggestions were never widely adopted and therefore feel preserved in their originality, are free of the tropes and cliches of mid-1980s mainstream electronic production.
For the album’s reissue, at the suggestion of Bureau B label owner Gunther Buskies, he decided not to put it out for other artists to remix as he’d done with ‘Synthesist’. Instead, he rerecorded it himself with the benefit of hindsight, experience (“The naivety I had in those old times is gone”) and new equipment, both analogue and digital.
The 2023 release sets the original recordings alongside the upgraded tracks, which are sleekly and subtly modified. As a double album (divided into ‘Oceanheart’ and ‘Oceanheart Revisited’), it’s a wonderful demonstration of what was visionary in the 1980s and what electronica is capable of now – both state-of-the-art and drawing on its own history.
“Last year, I was lucky enough to meet an electronic engineer, Tobias Stock, a collector for 20 years of analogue music equipment,” says Grosskopf. “Huge reel-to-reel recorders from two-inch to half an inch – everything is in mint condition. For him, it is a hobby. He really likes that someone is using all this equipment. Analogue changes the sound, the dynamic, the filtering here and there, which I really like. Among his collection is a 4-track, one-inch recording machine used by The Beatles. It’s great to combine these analogue instruments with the digital.”
Born in 1949 and growing up near Hanover, the teenage Harald Grosskopf took a similar path to most would-be West German pop musicians in the 1960s, at a time when the country was still struggling to gain a sense of cultural identity – he played in beat groups covering Anglo-American material, particularly The Beatles.
“We didn’t understand what groups like The Beatles were singing,” says Grosskopf. “So we just wrote down the syllables. Or a record like ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix, we couldn’t understand. Our version of it – what we wrote down – was very funny. I know the Scorpions did that too because they had even worse English than me.”
As well as his own group, Grosskopf would occasionally play with the Scorpions, years before they attained worldwide fame.
“I grew up with the Schenker boys, and I went to kindergarten with Rudolf for a while, so we met each other a lot,” he continues. “My band was The Stuntmen and theirs was the Scorpions. I created posters for them and filled in for their drummer three or four times when he was ill. This was around 1965, 1966. There was a very big scene, with everyone trying to be as English or American as possible. We thought the German accent didn’t work, that it was a horrible language, so hard – ‘Achtung’ and all this military imagery.
“But then Kraftwerk appeared and they didn’t give a shit. And people liked it because it was special. I remember when I was with my group Wallenstein and we played a little festival, and Kraftwerk were there. They had long hair, strange equipment on tables, instruments I’d never seen. Most people left the event because they just couldn’t cope with it. But you know the story. They were very successful in the end.”
By the late 1960s, the young German generation were collectively coming to terms with their recent history – the rise and fall of Nazism. It was a subject their parents and grandparents often wouldn’t talk about. There were waves of protest, parallel to the demonstrations of May 1968, a convulsive, angry response to the ex-Nazis who were still in prominent positions of power.
“After the Third Reich, Germany had an inferiority complex,” reflects Grosskopf. “We tended to copy Anglo-American music for a very long time, but then some of us decided we didn’t want to do that anymore. Then all of these instruments appeared, like the Moog synthesiser, which were very unconventional and gave us this amazing freedom.”
In search of different modes of expression that might form the basis of a “new” West German sound, musicians looked to the precedent set from the 1950s onwards by the Cologne-based composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and his extreme, avant-garde explorations of electronics and musique concrète.
Stockhausen’s work was, in part, a response to the horrors of war, which he had witnessed first hand as a child, and it seemed to open up cosmic realms, representing a reproachful alternative to this fallen world.
“It’s amazing what he did,” marvels Grosskopf. “Today, you just turn a little knob here and there, but he had hundreds of machines to make those effects. He was quite a role model for us, and American minimalists like Steve Reich – their repetition, their monotony.”
The likes of Pink Floyd and The Mothers Of Invention also provided inspiration.
“I paid six Deutsche Marks for a Pink Floyd concert, and I didn’t even know who they were,” says Grosskopf. “But I really liked them and their originality. Also Cream and Hendrix – I saw him at a huge festival in Germany just before he died.”
Unlike the beat scene of the 1960s, the new, fast-maturing generation of West German musicians sought not merely to imitate or cover the psychedelic wave of rock billowing from the West, but to invent for themselves and begin again. Grosskopf made vital contacts.
“I met the Berlin people – Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream, Manuel Göttsching, Klaus Schulze,” he says. “A lot of German rock bands had this competitiveness about who could play the best, who made mistakes, and I didn’t like that at all. But with these guys, there was a sort of anarchy. None of them were great technicians on their instruments, but they had something – a confidence, a special feeling. I think Klaus Schulze was the first to compliment me on my drumming – I’d never had that before.
“Later, I heard something of his on the radio, so I wrote him a postcard – I didn’t have a phone. He invited me to his place, and we ended up making four albums together. It was fascinating the way he worked. In my band we rehearsed like crazy, to the last detail. But Klaus would say, ‘I’m not telling you anything – you know what’s going on’. I loved that great freedom, and since then that’s been my way of making music.”
Grosskopf lived in Berlin between 1974 and 1987 and became dimly aware of the impact made by the krautrock scene.
“It was the most exciting time in Berlin,” he enthuses. “David Bowie was there – he came to a concert I did with Klaus Schulze. I didn’t see him, but I know he was very interested in our music. I wasn’t aware that the guys who made British industrial music were so into krautrock.”
Electronics, Grosskopf realised, were key to this vital sense of self-reinvention. Even if that meant modifying existing instruments, as Tangerine Dream had done in the early days, synths still being too pricey for most musicians.
“Most of them started with Farfisa organs,” he recollects. “They created echoes with them, which I always loved, both then and now – it was very important.”
This spirit of adventure was sometimes also assisted lysergically.
“Once, on an LSD trip, I grabbed Manuel Göttsching’s guitar and Copicat tape echo unit,” recalls Grosskopf. “I couldn’t play guitar, but I had so much fun, and the echo convinced me there was someone else playing beside me. That was an amazing experience.
“Sometimes it freed minds in ways you don’t want to see. Ash Ra Tempel’s bassist Hartmut Enke was a very sensitive musician. He had so many great ideas – using a compressor and echo machine on the bass. He created a very long, sustaining bass sound. And on one of those LSD trips he kind of flipped out. He was laughing crazily. He told me how he had detected a single note that could conquer the world, and he was going to tell the Pope about the single note you could make hit records from.”
Grosskopf also connected with musicians such as Can’s Jaki Liebezeit – a placid man, but one not to be trifled with.
“We did drum sessions together in Cologne,” recalls Grosskopf. “He was playing on self-made drums, I was playing on an electronic drum set, and there was this other guy in the studio playing rock riffs over and over on guitar. And Jaki went to him and said, ‘Hey, we don’t play rock music here’. But this guy carried on playing. So Jaki went up, grabbed his guitar neck and stopped him there and then.”
In the 1970s – the era of the Red Army Faction – being an experimental musician, with its attendant appearance, could be perilous.
“In 1977, we toured France with Ashra,” recounts Grosskopf. “Three long-haired guys travelling around in this big Mercedes. We were a little drunk and had smoked a joint. Suddenly, this vehicle pulled up and these guys leapt out and put guns to our heads. Luckily, Lutz Ulbrich spoke French and produced his ID card.
“But these security guys were scared, more scared than us. We gave our IDs and they let us go – they didn’t give a shit that we were drunk or stoned. And when we got back to the hotel, we found out the Baader-Meinhof group had just killed this German prosecutor, an ex-SS man.
“We were often stopped on the autobahn, with 10 or 12 cops with machine guns surrounding us. Just because of how we looked.”
Punk arrived late in West Germany, mutating by 1979 into the Neue Deutsche Welle, a genre that fused it with new wave and electronic influences.
“Punk was a movement I had not much to do with,” admits Grosskopf. “We had rebelled against our fathers who had served in the Third Reich and been in the Wehrmacht. That was our rebellion. So was electronic music. We didn’t want to be political. Maybe the way we used echo was a means of escaping into space, away from this bourgeois world.”
He was amused, though, by how Neue Deutsche Welle made such effective use of the German language for barbed comic effect, as on Lilli Berlin’s satirical, minor electropop hit, ‘Ostberlin-Wahnsinn’ (‘Crazy East Berliners’).
In recent years, Grosskopf has been gratified to learn of the afterlife of his synth albums. He’s been sent recordings of his music played at an Australian rave and has connected with the makers of the ‘Stranger Things’ soundtrack, who turned out to be huge fans.
“I really like this recognition late in life,” he says with a broad smile.
Today, Grosskopf continues to record, at the bottom of his garden in a soundproofed studio, absolutely on his own terms.
“I don’t want to have to make music just to survive. Then you start getting corrupted, go mainstream. I preferred doing jobs at industrial fairs, jobs you don’t like, rather than making music you don’t like.”
‘Oceanheart’ / ‘Oceanheart Revisited’ is out on Bureau B
