Their rejection of over-cooked Anglo-American rock forms was wilful and would have been controversial in Germany, had any one really been paying attention. Although it was, as David Stubbs explains, a ‘posthumous music’, categorised as such long after the moment had passed, bands like Kraftwerk, Can and Neu! couldn’t have been more self-conscious in their attempts to redraw a sense of German cultural identity. There’s a paradox at the heart of the music first disingenuously and now somewhat more affectionately known as krautrock. We caught up with music critic and author of a new definitive history of krautrock David Stubbs to find out more about one of the most defining eras in modern music. His books include Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany and Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music both published by FABER & FABER. He has written for NME, The Wire, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Uncut, The Quietus He was formerly staff writer at Melody Maker. David Stubbs will explores the music and legacy of BOC and our relationship to nature, memory, the un-dead past, and the technological systems in which we find ourselves ever more deeply enmeshed. They were reclusive, off the grid, living in retreat from the contemporary world, their music wifully unsuitable for the dancefloor. They resorted to the analogue methods of past electronic eras. They seemed to dwell not in the right here right now but in the past, or at least the lost futures of the past. They took inspiration from the remote, Scottish, rural environment, from grainy memories a brief period intheir childhood in Calgary watching nature documentaries, from numerology, ancient esoterica. These two childhood friends fused New Age, hip-hop and rave into a strange new gumbo, situated at the interstice between the mystic and the metric. Out of all of Warp’s banner artists, only Aphex Twin and Autechre (perhaps) inspire the same sort of fevered admiration. Boards Of Canada remain one of the best-known and best-loved electronic acts of the last two decades.

Future Sounds by David Stubbs