The history of the Long hair label starts with the release of recordings of more or less unknown bands from the late sixties/ early seventies, who run a band competition in former German radio station SWR (South West Broadcast) and received with the recordings a wider public. A few of them like My Solid Ground, Kraan, became famous and recorded a lot of albums on well known German Krautrock labels. Others like Coupla Prog, Puppenhaus, Papa Zoot or JudДs Gallery played and recorded their music at the radio studio but received no official record deal and most of the band members started a career in an other profession. STAGG, four guys from Frankfurt, all students are one of the very best who recorded at the SWF.

The band’s line up for this legendary 1975 performance features all four original members—Irmin Schmidt on keys, Jaki Leibezeit on drums, Michel Karoli on guitar, and Holger Czukay on bass. Can Live in Stuttgart 1975 is the first in a series of Can live concerts available in full for the first time on vinyl, CD and digital formats. Originally recorded on tape, these carefully restored live albums will comprise the entirety of each show in the format of a story with a beginning, middle and end, with Can’s performances taking on a life of their own.

Two CD collection. The follow-up to Light In The Attic's game-changing I Am The Center box set is finally here. Three years in the making, The Microcosm: Visionary Music Of Continental Europe, 1970-1986 is the first major overview of key works from cosmically-taped in artists needing little introduction - Vangelis, Ash Ra Tempel, and Popol Vuh - and and unknown masterpieces by criminally overlooked heroes like Bernard Xolotl, Robert Julian Horky and Enno Velthuys. Whereas I Am The Center called for a reconsideration of an entire maligned genre, The Microcosm requests nothing more than an open mind to consider this ambient, new age, neuzeit, prog, krautrock, cosmic, holistic stuff, whatever one calls it as a pulsating movement unto itself, a mirror refracting the American new age scene in unexpected, electrifying ways, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the universality of the timeless quest to express "the Ineffable" through music. Drawing from major label budgets and homemade cassette distributed circumstances alike, The Microcosm demonstrates a depth of peace profound to behold, and clearly expands the boundaries. Lovingly conceived and lavishly presented by producer Douglas McGowan (Yoga Records) and liner notes contributor Jason Patrick Woodbury (Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard), The Microcosm features stunning cover paintings by Étienne Trouvelot, and labels by Finnish savant Aleksanda Ionowa.

We had idols who influenced us, from Jethro Tull to Deep Purple and later Supertramp. From the beginning, we tried to play as well as our Anglo-American colleagues, remembers Thomas Brück, bassist and singer of the Cologne progressive rock band Satin Whale.Generally labelled, as usual with a German rock band in the early 1970s, as Krautrock, the four Cologne musicians already developed on their debut album Desert Places (released in 1974 on the Brain label, the trademark for rock music from Germany) a quite independent and unmistakable sound with high recognition value. Reward of the effort - already the debut album was sufficient that in the same year the listeners of the German Radio Station Südwestfunk voted Satin Whale the most popular band in Germany in the contest Rocksound 74. The musicians then continued on their successful course.Over the years Satin Whale released 5 studio albums, a soundtrack (Die Faust In Der Tasche, 1979, starring Manfred Krug and Ursula Monn), a live double album and a remix album, for which Germany`s producer legend Conny Plank was responsible.Now a complete retrospective of Satin Whale's work is released in two box sets. The first box set The Studio Albums contains the 5 studio albums from the years 1974 to 1981, the second box set (released a few months later) contains the live album, the remix album and the soundtrack. A booklet with plenty of background information by Thomas Zimmermann and photos are documenting the history of the band.

All copies of the June 2024 issue of Uncut come with a free CD – Can Live 1973 – 1977 – that brings together music from Can’s indispensable live series. On these five tracks – don’t feel short-changed: the shortest one is over eight minutes long – you’ll find rock’s most forward-thinking band at their most uninhibited…

Long Hair is proudly to present for the first time as official reissues the legendary album 'All Bumm' by German supergroup 18 Karat Gold. Studio musician Keith Forsey on drums (Hallelujah/Amon Duul II), Bass genius Lothar Meid (Amon Duul II), Jorg Evers (guitar) from Embryo and American - German guitar talent Klaus Ebert on lead guitar born out of the prolific Munich music scene. Famous German music magazine Sounds praised the album as a landmark, a pioneering feat, and came to the euphoric conclusion that German popmusic has only just begun! The idea behind 18 Karat Gold seems to have been to present a Krautrock influenced musical direction of english icons like David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Roxy Music and perhaps T. Rex and Slade, who partly played a very mainstream, but at the same time sophisticated pop sound, also surnamed Glam Rock…

SIXTY-NINE is a little known German progressive rock duo formed in 1969 by Armin Stöwe (organ, piano, synthesizer, guitar, vocals) and Roland Schupp (drums, percussion, gongs). SIXTY-NINE gained significant popularity as a live act and consequently had the opportunity to play, often as an opening act, at a variety of rock festivals with the likes of popular bands such as GOLDEN EARRING, AMON DÜÜL II, UFO, BEGGAR'S OPERA, PETE YORK, WEST BRUCE & LAING, BIRTH CONTROL, JUD'S GALLERY, AGITATION FREE, FRUMPY, and GURU GURU.

Recorded at the same time (July 1972) at the same studio (Bavaria Studios, Munich) as Amon Düül II`s well known and of their best efforts 'Wolf City', Utopia was a common project by Amon Düül II producer and musician Olaf Kübler (saxophone, moog) and Düül bass player Lothar Meid. Using the synergy of the parallel sessions with the Wolf City recordings, Olaf Kübler appreciated Düüls singer Renate Knaup-Krötenschwanz as singer of 2 of the album tracks and Düül heads Weinzierl and Karrer on guitar and violin. There is also a different version of Deutsch-Nepal on the album. As Olaf Kübler reminds Deutsch-Nepal was originally planned to record only for the Utopia album. Musically Utopia has a lot in common with the Düül records 'Wolf City' and 'Viva la Trance' and slightly early Passport and Embryo influences…

What might have been simply seen as an agreeable enough debut album has since become something of a notorious legend because Kraftwerk, or more accurately the core Hütter/Schneider duo at the heart of the band, simply refuses to acknowledge its existence any more. What's clearly missing from Kraftwerk is the predominance of clipped keyboard melodies that later versions of the band would make their own. Instead, Kraftwerk is an exploratory art rock album with psych roots first and foremost, with Conny Plank's brilliant co-production and engineering skills as important as the band performances. Still, Hütter and Schneider play organ and "electric percussion" – Hütter's work on the former can especially be appreciated with the extended opening drone moan of the all-over-the-place "Stratovarius" combined with Schneider's eerie violin work. But it's a different kind of combination and exploration, with the key pop sugar (and vocal work) of later years absent in favor of sudden jump cuts of musique concrète noise and circular jamming as prone to sprawl as it is to tight focus.

Doomsday (1979). Gravestone play somewhat somber Progressive Rock of a rough nature. This is a re-release of their 1979 album on the Garden of Delights label. The music is at times jazzy and bouncy, and there are hints of blues throughout, and the majority of the tracks are instrumental. There is a lot of improvisational blues styled stuff going on here. The guitars are the main lead instruments, although there is an organ tickling the background, the guitars are full front, screaming in true psychedelic fashion on the latter tracks of this album.
War (1980). In the eighties, Gravestone from Illertissen, Swabia, became quite famous as a hard rock and metal group. What many people don’t know is that they initially - and with a different line-up - released two LPs with progressive rock and critical lyrics, namely “Doomsday” from 1979 and “War” from 1980, in small editions of 1000 copies each…

Can Live in Aston 1977, the latest in an ongoing series of Can album releases focusing on the band’s live performances, is set for release on vinyl, CD and digitally on 31 May 2024 via Mute and Future Days.

A classic of the German space genre. Their current music is a combination of Progressive Rock and New Instrumental Music, with touches of Jazz and passages dedicated to an experimentation near to Ambient. Their originality was due to the blend electronic and repetitive musics with a lot of ethnic elements from North Africa, India, etc. Very much like your early Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru type bands except with a cultural influence. Several Agitation Free albums were released after the group's breakup, including 1976's "Last", 1995's "Fragments" and the following years' "At The Cliffs of The River Rhine" (1998), "The Other Sides Of Agitation Free" (1999)… Their aptly titled "Last" is considered by many to be one of the best live space albums ever. Lots of acid-drenched guitar and electronics to really carry you "out there".

The German psych/prog label called Garden of Delights made a campaign to reissue a bunch of lost krautrock classics, Arktis is at the top of these 70s obscurities. Formed in 1973, the band released their first album the same year. This self title album revisits a conventional heavy rock style mixed with freak out improvisations largely made of fuzzy guitars. The second album from 1975 comprised mainly improvisations without firm aims or limitations in structure. This difference is already indicated by the album’s title "Arktis tapes". Although in perfect condition after 19 years, the master tapes were additionally remastered. The third album, "On the rocks", is totally different again: by now "klausless", that is without Mr Blachut and Mr Göllner, but featuring an organ instead, they have become more straight-forward and slamming and are less playful than before…

Tetragon, successor of Trikolon, were founded in Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) in the spring of 1971. They released their first and only LP, "Nature", in that very year. The band did not conform to any predetermined musical style: they played whatever they pleased, as long as it included groovy Hammond organ and very trippy, flanged wah-wah guitar, in various taut jamming modes that favored jazz/rock fusion à la Miles Davis with a small dose of classical music (adapting a Bach fugue along the way). The result is a bouquet of lush instrumentals, with elements of Egg or the Nice, and quite a bit of T2 to boot.
At the end of 1971, Tetragon recorded in a Hamburg studio five long tracks in their well-proven style for their second LP, the release of which, however, failed…

Following a series of meditative explorations in the form of the Singularity Zone series of releases, The Oscillation have returned with a new sense of vigour and purpose. Refreshed and re-energized, the result is The Start Of The End, an album that casts more light and shade than ever before to create a mood of hope and re-birth.