This chapter discusses the work of Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze. Both were founding members of Ash Ra Tempel, a psychedelic rock band active in 1970–75. Their self-titled debut album, released in 1971, is recognised as one of the classic recordings of Krautrock. Later, Ash Ra Tempel would have a deep influence on space rock, electronic music, and ambient music. The chapter provides an overview of the evolution of Ash Ra Tempel, its successor Ashra, and traces the solo careers of Göttsching and Schulze, with a focus on Göttsching. His career spans from the era of Krautrock through the heyday of the electronic Berlin School in the mid-1970s and the birth of electronic dance music in the 1980s. Since 1972, Klaus Schulze has also produced an imaginative and unique body of musical work as a solo artist. Besides several collaborations, he created many pioneering electronic solo albums in the 1970s, and his active career has endured five decades until the present day.

This chapter explores the multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream and their founder, Edgar Froese, with an equal emphasis on the band’s practices during the 1970s and 1980s. We situate Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography within multiple styles such as kosmische Musik, ambient, techno/trance, and synthwave, while highlighting the band’s influences and legacies in live music and Hollywood film scores. First, Tangerine Dream’s evolution during the 1970s is traced, involving the group’s central role in the ‘Berlin School‘ of electronic music. Classic albums on Ohr, from Electronic Meditation to Atem, led to success particularly in Britain and France. With the signing of the band to Virgin Records, the subsequent sections explore landmark albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon, and the important roles of Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann in the group’s classic configuration. We then highlight Tangerine Dream’s iconic live tours, stretching from Australia to America, as well as influential concerts in Eastern Europe. The band’s extraordinary career in film music, especially in 1980s Hollywood, forms the focus of our conclusion, where the mark of Tangerine Dream’s major influence can be seen in media as diverse as the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto 5 and the Netlix hit series Stranger Things.

In terms of musical style, the sizeable catalogue of music that falls under the label of Krautrock is as diverse as it is experimental. The difficulty in pinning down a specific ‘sound‘ for this diverse body of music can be traced to its roots in the period of cultural revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter discusses how the desire to create a new German identity, distanced from the crimes of the Nazi present and freer from the influence of American culture, was reflected in this music: Krautrock musicians began to abandon the characteristics of both Anglo-American popular musics such as beat and rock ‘n’ roll, and the prevailing German style of the time, Schlager, endeavouring to create something entirely original. The chapter demonstrates how Krautrock was initially better defined by what it was not, rather than what it specifically was. However, these radically different approaches to newness shared certain characteristics. As the chapter argues, Krautrock musicians embraced innovative approaches to instrumentation, timbre, the voice, texture, and form, generating a new musical vocabulary that they could call their own.