“Macht das Ohr auf”: Anthropology and Functional Transformation of Sound Media in German Cosmic Music Between the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

This article highlights the importance of the discourse on sound media for the development of so-called “cosmic music” in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Already the slogan of the Ohr record label “Macht das Ohr auf” (Open up your ears) testifies to the awareness of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the founder of the label, and the bands gathered around him about the impact of media on everyday practices and the reflection on the physiological effect of sound. In particular, this article focuses on the figure of Kaiser and his Buch der neuen Pop-Musik (1969), where the author stresses the emancipatory potential of popular music starting from the considerations put forward by H. Marcuse, T. W. Adorno and M. McLuhan. On the basis of these suggestions, Kaiser envisages the possibility of a ‘functional transformation’ of sound media, placing himself in a long German tradition of reflections on the relationship between man and technology, in which it is possible to identify a line that proposes a progressive and socialist use of technical reproduction apparatuses (Benjamin, Brecht, Enzensberger) and another line that questions the connection between media and mystical experience (Mann, Hesse). In this sense, this paper explores the intellectual and literary context of the media anthropology on which the sound aesthetics of German cosmic music was founded.

1. Introduction

In this article, I wish to identify the anthropology of media that underpinned the development of the so-called ‘cosmic music’ in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While critics have mainly focused on the history of German experimental or Krautrock music (Cope 1995; Stubbs 2014; Simmeth 2016) or on innovations in the field of music production (Fontana 2020), little attention has been paid to the philosophical and literary genealogical lineage that stimulated such musical experiments, which I will consider here by starting from the experience of the Ohr record label, founded in 1970 by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, which released albums by Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Annexus Quam, among others. The sound of these bands has been categorized—starting with Kaiser himself in the article Discover the Galaxy Sound of Cosmic Music—under the label of cosmic music (Stubbs 2014, p. 373). The label’s slogan itself ‘Macht das Ohr auf’ (Open up your ears) testifies to Kaiser’s awareness—and the bands that gathered around him—of the impact of sound media on everyday practices related to the enjoyment of music and the reflection on the physiological effect of sound on the listener. This learned and conscious interest in the physiology of listening and in new sound technologies, which constitutes the specificity of cosmic music within the broader context of German experimental music, developed at the same time as Marshall McLuhan reappraised those media forms of ‘retribalization’ based on the stimulation of the sense of hearing, which ousted the sense of sight in the post-Gutenberg era.

This article is divided into three parts. In the first part, I reflect on the figure of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, who was also active as a journalist, critic and music publicist, and on Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik (The Book of the New Pop-Music—1969), where Kaiser highlights the revolutionary and emancipatory potential of popular music starting from the considerations put forward by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno and McLuhan. In this volume, Kaiser envisages the possibility of a ‘functional transformation’ of sound media, placing himself in a long German tradition of reflections on the relationship between man and technology, in which it is possible to identify a line that proposes a progressive and socialist use of technical reproduction apparatuses, ranging from Walter Benjamin to Bertolt Brecht and, in the early 1970s, to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and another line that questions the connection between media and mystical experience, for example in Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.

The second part focuses on the musical aesthetics of the Ohr bands in the light of Kaiser’s reflections on the physiology of sound and the development of media practices associated with listening in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Kaiser, the new sound technology, if decoupled from the logics of capitalism and the music industry, could allow the listener unprecedented experiences of otherness and immersion. We will see how a real media anthropology developed around the Ohr roster based on the intellectual suggestions mentioned above.

In the third part of this paper, I would like to show that this media anthropology is reflected not only in the aesthetic imagery of the aforementioned bands content wise, but also, on a formal level, in the physical products realized by the label. These show a marked multimedia character, given by the combination of music, lyrics and graphics, with the aim of stimulating synesthetic and multisensory experiences in the users.

2. Refunctioning Sound Media

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was born in June 1943 in Buckow near Berlin. While at the University of Cologne, he attended courses in German literature, sociology and theatre history, studies that enabled him to pursue a career as a journalist, then as a record producer when he decided to found the label Ohr in order to give visibility to new German experimental bands. Kaiser was the organizer of the music festival ‘Internationale Essener Song Tage’ in 1968 in Essen dedicated to international counterculture (Simmeth 2016, pp. 94–102). The festival was attended by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Fugs, Tim Buckley, as well as up-and-coming German bands such as Amon Düül, Guru Guru, Xhol Caravan and Tangerine Dream, who were later put under contract by Ohr. Other Ohr artists later included Popol Vuh, Limbus, Embryo, Mythos, Annexus Quam and Ash Ra Tempel. Kaiser later founded such label offshoots as Pilz and Kosmische Kuriere, whose products were characterized by an astrological fantasy-esoteric-Sci-Fi and, not least, lysergic imagery. Kaiser formed a relationship with Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor and LSD theorist. Together with Leary, he recorded sessions with members of his various bands under the influence of drugs, sessions later published (apparently without the musicians’ knowledge) under the name Cosmic Jokers.

Judging by the print and digital publications devoted to Kaiser, it seems that most critics have been interested in his bout with psychedelic and lysergic drugs and the court disputes with the artists following the recordings of The Cosmic Jokers: Kaiser is often depicted as a kind of Krautrock charlatan. It is no coincidence that David Stubbs, in the volume Future Days. Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, titles the chapter on Kaiser and the Ohr roster ‘Astral Travelling’ (Stubbs 2014, pp. 371–405). This is, in my opinion, a reductive approach, which obscures Kaiser’s intellectual interests and the anthropological and sociological basis of the Ohr bands’ experiments. These are elements that, on the contrary, seem to me to be very important from a cultural and literary history point of view.

These elements emerge in Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik, where Kaiser offers an interesting sociological analysis of the developments in pop music between the 1950s and 1960s, which are interpreted in the light of readings that fall mainly within the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Kaiser cites Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) for his criticism of political and cultural homologation in the one-dimensional capitalist society, Theodor W. Adorno in his Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Introduction to the Sociology of Music—1962) for his reflections on the distinctive features of commercial and mass music, aimed at producing a regression of listening, and finally Marshall McLuhan for highlighting the aesthetic potential of new technical media. Moreover, Kaiser was extremely interested in new forms of communication, as his commitment to German radio and television shows. He curated, for example, the radio program Panoptikum which was broadcast on NDR and WDR.

In Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik, Kaiser sets out to “draw a dividing line between our new music and the hitherto dominant popular music, the music which imposed on us gregarious behavior, frustrated obedience and the renunciation of authentic pleasure”1 (Kaiser 1975, p. 8). The references to Adorno’s criticism of the “standardization” of pop-music (Adorno 1976, p. 24) are quite evident in the language: while “present-day mass society produces surrogates of happiness, the consumption of which is strongly recommended”, causing a “mutilation of consciousness” (Kaiser 1970, p. 77), as in the case of the hit song, Kaiser is interested in the emerging musical forms that determine the “social and political actions of our generation” and in the “relationship between new music and new behaviour” (Kaiser 1975, p. 8). Kaiser focuses on the international galaxy of the Underground, not only as a new mode of musical expression, but also in its multiple manifestations: anti-theatre, anti-cabaret, new cinema, and small-scale mimeographed literature. “The Underground”, writes Kaiser, “seeks to procure its own means of production with the precise aim of freeing itself, in time, from the attempts of corruption (and censorship) by its elders. A politically and socially conscious, i.e., experimental, form shows itself in the music” (Kaiser 1970, p. 108).

These experiments are favored by the development of new technologies, which allow for unprecedented forms of music production and reception. For example, Kaiser stresses the growing importance of sound technicians, “who no longer have the task of standing behind the musicians and pushing them as close to the microphone as possible so that the wax matrix picks up everything, but because today they have to know complicated recording techniques inside out” (Kaiser 1970, p. 148). It is no coincidence that for his label Ohr, Kaiser hired Dieter Dirks and Conny Plank as sound engineers, who historically shaped Krautrock’s distinctive sound, whose structures generally favor loops and repetition (Stubbs 2014, p. 35) in the case of some bands (Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!), while in other cases (Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel), the dilatation of rhythms and of the sound environment is fostered. Not only the recording equipment changed, but also the instruments. Kaiser devotes a chapter to the use of the synthesizer and then to the new musical media, such as the long play, which imposed itself following the ‘death of the singles’:

The contrast between old and young within the music world is clearly delineated in the issue of singles. The market demands 45 rpm singles to make quick money. The new pop musicians no longer have any interest in making 3-min singles because their music does not tolerate time limits.

(Kaiser 1970, p. 164)

These innovations, according to Kaiser, allow music to free itself “from the standardization” and to broaden the “consciousness” of the listeners. As for Adorno, for Kaiser, it is a matter of acting on form rather than on content: “to attribute an intrinsic revolutionary force to the new music would be a major misunderstanding”, he writes (Kaiser 1970, p. 174). Whereas in the protest songs the political message comes through the lyrics, the new experimental music introduces liberating everyday practices, capable of deeply modifying the perceptive sensitivity of listeners and, in the long run, their everyday behaviors.

Kaiser quotes McLuhan, who “explains how modes of behaviour have changed thanks to the media”, emphasizing their influence “on receptivity, which has been decisively transformed” (Kaiser 1970, p. 176). While distancing himself from the Canadian author’s critical approach to the modern electrified civilization, Kaiser speaks of the “enlargement of art by means of appropriate techniques”, adopting Marcuse’s optimistic perspective (Kaiser 1970, p. 177) on the use of technology, which can become an “organon of the art of life” and produce a “free play of faculties”, as Marcuse writes in One Dimensional Man:

From this point on, technical progress would transcend the realm of necessity, where it served as the instrument of domination and exploitation which thereby limited its rationality; technology would become subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification of nature and of society.

(Marcuse 2002, p. 18)

The central theme of Kaiser’s book is the ‘functional transformation’ of technical media, which can emancipate the artist from the bonds of the culture industry. Many musicians—Kaiser writes—“have allowed their music to be dictated to them, thus degrading themselves to a commercial object. They have not made use of the apparatus, even though they pretended to do so. Instead, they have allowed themselves to be instrumentalised” (Kaiser 1970, p. 183). Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of functional transformation (Umfunktionierung) of the media in the essay titled Der Autor als Produzent (The Author as Producer—1934), referring directly to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre: “Brecht coined the term Umfunktionierung [functional transformation]. He was the first to make of intellectuals the far-reaching demand not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the utmost extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism” (Benjamin 2008, p. 85). In the 1930s, Brecht had elaborated a media theory, based on his intuition of the enormous potential of the new technical apparatuses and their experimental use within his dramaturgy, as in the case, for example, of Der Ozeanflug (The Flight Across the Ocean—1929), where the author experiments with the radio to stimulate new forms of acting and reception. Brecht’s reflections on the technical media of reproduction are mainly contained in Dreigroschenprozess (The Threepenny Lawsuit—1932): On the one hand, here emerges the author’s desire not to remain outside of the process of technicalization and medialization of capitalist society (this is what he reproached authors loyal to the old bourgeois conception of art, who were loath to the structural transformation taking place), but to actively and consciously insert himself into these dynamics through the use of media apparatuses. On the other hand, Brecht (like Walter Benjamin) expresses the urgency of subjecting mass communication media to a process of ‘Umfunktionierung’, or ‘functional transformation’, which consists of forcing the medium to perform functions unseen in comparison to those required by the culture industry. Unlike those intellectuals who pitted the autonomy and authenticity of art against the ‘degradation’ and ‘massification’ to which it would be subjected in the confrontation with the capitalist industry, Brecht argues that art must inevitably come to terms with the development of technology, because it is not independent of the social, economic and technical production process.

Brecht shares Benjamin’s awareness, echoed by Marx, that “The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (Benjamin 2008, p. 23). In a dialectical sense, for Benjamin and Brecht, the formal characteristics of technical media reflect the social changes taking place but, in turn, they themselves stimulate the artistic forms handed down to a process of constant redefinition. New media introduce each time new forms of art and anthropological reconfigurations, as they affect decisively the ways in which individuals perceive reality. This was, for example, the thesis of Benjamin in the essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility—1935), where the author focuses on the new forms of reception introduced mainly by cinema from the early 20th century onwards.

This program also presupposes the re-evaluation of technology, which Brecht sees as a legitimate expression of the creative faculties inherent in man. The image of a technology defunctionalized according to a socialist program seems to allude to the possibility of an organic relationship between man and technical development, whereas for Brecht, technology, if freed from the asymmetrical relations imposed by capitalism, would allow humankind to express its intrinsic anthropological potential. This motif is also present in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, where Benjamin hopes for the advent of a society “mature enough to make technology its organ” (Benjamin 2008, p. 42). This ‘techno-media organicism’ is very similar to that theorized by Ernst Kapp in (Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik—1877), in which the author saw technical instruments as natural extensions of man’s sensory organs, as well as anticipating McLuhan’s well-known assertion that media are “extensions of the body” (McLuhan 1964, p. 202).

Returning to Kaiser, in the book Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur (Kaiser 1969) the author often speaks of ‘Medien der Gegenkultur’ or ‘Gegenmedien’, making his own the discourse on the functional transformation of the media which, in those days, was also at the center of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien (Constituents of a Theory of the Media—1970). Bringing Brecht’s and Benjamin’s proposals up to date, Enzensberger criticized the positions of the institutional Left for focusing its reflection on the media only on the manipulation discourse, avoiding any positive confrontation with new cultural trends. By contrast, Enzensberger identified the growing importance of media practices among youth subcultures as a positive development:

If the socialist movement writes off the new productive forces of the consciousness industry and relegates work on the media to a subculture, then we have a vicious circle. For the Underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the disc, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and is systematically exploring the terrain.

(Enzensberger 2003, p. 260)

At the end of the 1960s, Kaiser posed the question that characterizes today’s sound studies, which focus on the transformations of musical media and the materiality of listening. In Listening Devices: Music Media in the Pre-Digital Era, Jens Gerrit Papenburg asks, for example, “through what do people listen to music” (Papenburg 2023, p. 10). It is a question that has to do with “the listening organs of the hearing apparatus” and with the cultural practices linked to the transformations of sound media, for which “listening” becomes “a cultural technique” (p. 9). In the early decades of the 20th century, the advent of the gramophone, and subsequently the turntable, profoundly changed the habits of music consumers. In Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age, Bartmanski and Woodward observe that the fixation of music “through a tangible and durable form of records […] is a truly revolutionary event that has irreversibly altered the scale and depth of the reception of musical aesthetics and other audio content” (Bartmanski and Woodward 2014, p. 6). Music leaves the public places formally designated for listening and “enters homes”.

This represents a process of “democratisation of access to musical experience” (p. 6) that transforms listening to music into an individual and daily practice capable of gradually modifying the habits, perceptions and therefore the bodies of its users. It is no coincidence that already in 1924 in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), Thomas Mann described the encounter of Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel, with the gramophone as a mystical experience. We do not know if Kaiser had read Mann’s novel, but it is certain that all the bands signed by Kaiser to the Ohr record label were determined to explore the new sound possibilities made available by the technological process to stimulate previously unknown listening experiences.

If we look closely, Kaiser, who studied German literature at university, also fits into another strand of German culture, that of the relationship between technology and mysticism, which characterized, perhaps even to a greater extent than the sociological and political line traced by Brecht and Benjamin, the first reflections on the technical apparatuses of literary authors in the early 20th century (Thomas Mann, Heinz Hanns Ewers, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, among others). What fascinated these writers was the performative nature and the Wirkungsästhetik of new media (cinema, gramophone, radio), i.e., their ability to involve users in a more profound way than literature, thanks to a physiological modality, which concerns the body, and not only a cognitive-intellectual modality, as was the case with the practice of reading. Between the end of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century, with the introduction of new technical media—writes Norbert Bolz—“a new way of reception, which doesn’t allow critical distance” (Bolz 1990, p. 140) and has to do with the category of Rausch (intoxication) was born.

Compared to literature, new media stimulate the sensory organs of the individual to a greater extent, not least from a synesthetic and totalizing perspective. While the early cinema of German Expressionism is explicitly associated—for example in the reflections of the writer and screenwriter Hanns Heinz Ewers or in film experiments such as Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague—1913) or Schatten. Eine nächtliche Halluzination (Warning Shadows—1923)—with an aesthetic of Rausch, for Friedrich Kittler Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk “represents the first mass medium in the modern sense of the word. It is simultaneous with our senses because of the technology it employs” (Kittler 2014, p. 122). In Wagner’s case, it is significant to note that the author saw in the simultaneous use of different media (images, text, music) the possibility of giving the listeners back “all physical and mental senses” (Marx 1977, p. 98), making Karl Marx’s analysis on the estrangement produced by capitalism his own—as emerges in Wagner’s essay The Artwork of the Future (1849).

These reflections profoundly influenced early 20th-century German literature. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which was much indebted to Wagnerian and Niezschean aesthetics, the confrontation with technical media contributes to the (hermetic) Bildung of the protagonist Hans Castorp. Mann’s critics have defined The Magic Mountain a ‘Medienroman’, as the author devotes many pages to Castorp’s fascination with the media devices he discovers in the sanatorium in Davos, which allow him to make unprecedented aesthetical experiences including the body and the intellect. This is the case with motion pictures, but above all with the gramophone. In the chapter Fullness of Harmony—perhaps the most autobiographical of the novel—Castorp is ‘rapt in ecstasy’ by this medium, to the point of falling asleep and dreaming. The sound experience stimulated by the gramophone opens up the doors to his unconscious: Castorp dreams of finding himself in a forest where he has taken on the guise of Pan, the god of feasting, orgy and drunkenness: maybe a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music—1827), in which the philosopher argues about the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian art. The media in Mann’s novel are thus associated with a new type of art—not least of a hermetic nature—capable of deeply stimulating the subject’s sensory organs and thus linked to the sphere of the body, intoxication, the Dionysian, and mysticism.

In this sense, it is interesting to note that there was a temporal and cultural coincidence between the development of new technical media and the spread of occultism, esotericism and spiritualism in Europe and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. In séances, the word ‘medium’ had different shades of meaning. Mediums were people who went into trances and had access to paranormal phenomena and spiritual visions. However, mediums were, at the same time, also the technical apparatuses, which, in the case of painting and photography, served to objectively record spiritual phenomena, but in the case of the gramophone were also meant to stimulate mystical experiences (Hahn and Schüttpelz 2009). In another chapter of Mann’s Magic Mountain, titled Highly Questionable, the gramophone is used during a séance, where the apparition of the astral double of the medium Ellen Brand is stimulated by listening to Charles Gounod’s Faust reproduced through the device. Concerning this ‘mystical’ approach to the media, which inspired German literature in the early 20th century, Hartmut Böhme notes that

‘media’ in the traditional sense are not simply transmitters of messages, but mediators of spiritual powers. They not only served to distribute cultural knowledge between senders and recipients but also led to the experience of a transformation of the participants in the realisation of cultural practices.

(Böhme and Matussek 2008, p. 95)

The discovery of technical media as “mediators of spiritual powers” is also at the center of Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (1927). Here, the existential evolution of the protagonist Harry Haller, as the personification of the traditional intellectual, devoted, at least up to a certain point, exclusively to the forms of high art and tied to the book medium, develops through his encounter with the emerging mass culture. Harry Haller is described at the beginning of the novel as a lonely man, isolated from the outside world, dissatisfied with himself, devoted solely to the humanistic culture of the past and to the ‘dead’ German classical artists (he worships the ‘immortal’ Goethe and Mozart), split inside because he is unable to come to terms with the necessities of life, the body and the unconscious. Haller’s Bildung—as in the case of Hans Castorp in Mann’s novel—includes the deconstruction of his previous personality through various experiences of otherness (jazz music, drugs, eroticism). The protagonist’s new identity is shaped in large part by the use of technical media, which here again are associated by Hesse with the sphere of the body and contrasted with the abstractness of written culture. This is the case with the gramophone, which plays a decisive role in Haller’s existential turning point:

In the same way that the gramophone had a harmful effect on the ascetic, intellectual ambiance of my study, and the alien American dance tunes represented a disturbing, indeed destructive, intrusion into my refined musical world, so new, daunting, disruptive elements were forcing their way into my hitherto so sharply defined and so strictly.

(Hesse 2012, p. 138)

It is no coincidence that when, at the end of the novel, the death of the protagonist is decreed in the Magic Theatre, this condemnation consists in forcing him to listen “to the radio music of life” (Hesse 2012, p. 236). Hesse uses the metaphor of listening to describe the anthropological transformation to which Harry Haller is ‘condemned’ in the novel, alluding, as early as in the 1920s, to that process of ‘retribalization’ through the stimulation of the sense of hearing, which for Marshall McLuhan characterizes contemporary society after the end of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’. This process put an end to the dominance of the media of writing and reading, which—as Kaiser wrote in his Buch der neuen Pop-Musik—“did not require the participation of all the senses” (p. 176). Marshal McLuhan, whose analysis Kaiser directly cites, observes that “one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology” is “the stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia” (McLuhan 1962, p. 17), i.e., a development that gave birth to the “literate man, […] a split man, a schizophrenic, as all literate men have been since the invention of the phonetic alphabet” (p. 22). Harry Haller, in Hesse’s novel, represents the narrative figuration of this ‘split and schizophrenic’ anthropological type, which is condemned to a positive transformation thanks to the rediscovery of the medium of sound, which—as Walter Ong observes for oral cultures—favors a “close, empathetic, communal identification with the known” (Ong 2002, p. 45).

Hesse’s novel, at the time of its publication, was ignored by German criticism and was instead rediscovered in the United States in the years of student protests, in the era of popular modernism (Bolter 2019), of the massive development of mass media (and of academic reflection on them) and the spread of psychedelic culture in music—the American rock-band Steppenwolf took its name from Hesse’s novel—and in literature—consider the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs or the interest in Hessian work shown by Timothy Leary, professor of psychology at Harvard and theorist of LSD use. Kaiser himself, in the volume Protestfibel. Formen einer neuen Kultur (Kaiser 1968), cites Hesse, author of Siddharta and Steppenwolf, as one of the “most widely read” canonical authors in the Underground galaxy (p. 117).

After all, Hesse’s Steppenwolf anticipated the ‘countercultural’ trends of the 1960s not only in content (the novel ends with a real lysergic and psychedelic experience of the protagonist), but also in form. Steppenwolf does not only describe the deconstruction of Haller’s old personality in terms of plot, but Hesse also deconstructs the genre of the novel from a formal, i.e., aesthetic point of view. At the end of Steppenwolf, in the part dedicated to the Magic Theatre, where the definitive dissolution of the protagonist’s previous identity takes place, Hesse’s writing style becomes frenetic and fast, in order to performatively engage the reader in the experience of otherness of consciousness lived by Haller, characterized by a strong synesthesia and a sense of drug-induced intoxication. Hesse’s novel is, in short, influenced by media and it is inspired by the awareness that new technical apparatuses can allow users unprecedented aesthetic, spiritual and mystical experiences.

3. “Macht das Ohr auf”

Mann’s and Hesse’s awareness of a possible connection between media and mysticism was shared by Kaiser and the musicians of his label. The use, for mystical purposes, of technology typifies the sound aesthetics of many Ohr bands, most notably Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh. In Germany, as early as the 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen, who is generally considered the father of German experimental music, had already experimented with electronic instruments with the explicit anthropological aim—as David Stubbs observes—of implementing the faculties of hearing, neglected in the West in favor of sight (Stubbs 2014, p. 60). On Ohr’s roster, the first to purchase the then expensive Moog synthesizer was Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh. In an interview with Gerhard Augustin for Eurock magazine, Fricke discussed the aesthetic and spiritual possibilities ushered in by the Moog:

It was a great fascination to encounter sounds that were until those days not heard before from the outside. It was the possibility to express sounds that a composer was hearing from within himself, which in many cases are different from what a normal instrument could express. Therefore, this was a fantastic way into my inside consciousness, to express what I was hearing within myself.

(Fricke 1996)

In another interview for Sounds magazine, published in 1971 under the title Selbstbildnis einer deutschen Gruppe (Image of a German Band), Popol Vuh, who were interested in oriental culture and in yogic and meditative experiences, make explicit the connection between their music and the sphere of the unconscious: “We try to convey a new sense of life in which the traumatic life, the unconscious space, is made conscious” (Popol Vuh 1971). The synthesizer can stimulate inner dynamics within the listener because the oscillations, which with other instruments are usually transformed into harmonic sounds, can be heard here in their raw materiality:

We are not trying to create vibrations that result from a musical product, we are already working with vibrations as source material. This music conveys itself more directly than any other music before: the vibrations hit the listener in a linear way.

(Popol Vuh 1971)

In Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia—1980), Guattari and Deleuze devoted their attention to the synthesizer because of its ability to destructure the listener’s consciousness. The authors write that the synthesizer “makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 343). The synthesizer produces molecularized sound material, breaking particular forms of music and at the same time expanding them. Whereas Western music builds a system, i.e., it creates harmonic patterns that filter out noise, electrical noise and sound currents by controlling what is heard, the synthesizer, through the various possibilities of sound synthesis, makes not only new sounds, but the very process of their production audible. Popol Vuh were aware of this “double level” of synthesized sound:

We have little interest in seeing the synthesizer as a means of reproducing things we know. We use it to express whatever is behind these things. […] This means that a sound we hear always consists of two elements that relate to each other, like the conscious to the subconscious, like day to night, like the fundamental to the dominant.

(Popol Vuh 1971)

This union of different elements is aimed at leading the listeners to “a total path”, because it broadens the spheres of perception and consciousness:

In this way, the machine challenges us to take a total path. With our music we show that electronics is not only perceptible as a technical process, but it also presents itself as a large field of sensory possibilities. In this way, we also understand our music as consciousness-expanding music in its mediation.

(Popol Vuh 1971)

It is no coincidence that Popol Vuh’s debut album Affenstunde, released by Ohr in 1970,—in Fricke’s own words—“wants to capture the moment […] when a human being becomes a man and is no longer an ape” (Fricke 1996). The image of the ape gradually becoming a man alludes to that same broadening of consciousness that must also involve the listener through Popol Vuh’s music.

The Ohr bands are determined to foster aesthetic experiences of flow and not of catharsis in the listener. The abolition of the song form, the lack of lyrics, the repetition of loops, the concentration on the musical textures produced especially by listening to the oscillations of the synthesizer rather than on harmonies or verbal content (Stubbs 2014, p. 37) causes a deconstruction of the anthropocentric subject, which is now all about the materiality of sound. In this sense, one can also understand the meaning of Popol Vuh’s collaboration with the German film director Werner Herzog (Stubbs 2014, pp. 355–69): the protagonists—as well as the spectators—of the films whose soundtracks were composed by the band (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Nosferatu) follow “total paths” that open up new perceptual experiences, new rhythms and forms of temporality, thus contributing to the dissolution of the Western ego (Grosoli and Ritter 1994).

The music of the Ohr bands (as with other German and non-German experimental ensembles of that period) is not intended to communicate some specific message, but to bring together all listeners in perceptual unity. It is as if the body becomes a whole ear, while pure sensory perception increases. McLuhan observes: “Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seen quite secondary” (McLuhan 1964, p. 312). We can therefore understand why the Ohr logo shows an ear, and its slogan is ‘Macht das Ohr auf!’: ‘Open up your ears’. McLuhan writes: “The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached” (McLuhan 1964, p. 175).

The sense of hearing and the physiology of sound are also thematized in many Ohr covers. A telephone, as a means of communication not so much between people but between bodies, appears on the cover of Osmose by Annexus Quam, published in 1970 by Ohr. While the cover of 4 Mandalas by Limbus (also signed by Ohr) features eight vinyls superimposed on those parts of the human body that, in yogic physiology, correspond to energy centers, the so-called chakras, as though the band’s sound aimed to stimulate these centers within the bodies of the listeners.

Kaiser was also interested in the world of stereophony. In the article Discover the Galaxy Sound of Cosmic Music, published in 1973, which marked his and his roster’s lysergic and Sci-fi turning point, Kaiser focused on the aesthetic aims of the SQ system, developed together with the sound-engineer Dieter Dirks. This system, which in reality had little luck and limited circulation, had four channels and could be used with either stereo or mono systems. In this way, the sound expanded not only left and right, but also front and back, high and low along transverse movements. Kaiser writes:

With Stereo, we listened, with Quadro we swim in the sounds. Our melodies soar through the spheres; our rhythms pulsate through the star-spangled worlds of Sci-Fi. Our Quadro sound offers endless possibilities for new listening adventures in the future. Take up your Quadro Headphones & Fly!

(Kaiser 2002)

The new cosmic music therefore needs a new ‘refunctionalized’ reproduction medium to let its sound anthropology unfold, a program which finds expression in the imperative ‘learn to listen’, formulated by Kaiser at the end of Das Buch des neuen Pop-Musik (Kaiser 1970, p. 200). Here, Kaiser seems to anticipate today’s reflections within materialist media theory, which emphasizes the physical and infrastructural aspects of media, an approach that can be summarized in Friedrich Kittler’s statement “Media determine our situation, which—in spite or because of it—deserves a description” (Kittler 1999, p. XXXIX). In this sense, as Kittler observes, psychedelic music constituted an important stage in the genealogy of media, as it temporally coincided with technological innovations in the field of stereophony. Kittler underlines the anthropological potential of this revaluation of the sense of hearing in psychedelic music through the implementation of technology, which introduced a new ‘totalizing’ approach to the reception of art:

If sounds in the entire auditory space, controllable sounds, can appear from ahead and behind, right and left, up and down, then the space of day-to-day orientation disintegrates. The explosion of acoustic media turns into an implosion, toppling directly and immediately into the centre of perception itself. The head, as the real control desk of the nervous system and not only as the metaphoric site of what is thought of as thinking, becomes one with all the information pouring in […].

(Kittler 2015, p. 9)

4. “Die Involved Generation Erlebt Multimedial”

It is not surprising that on the covers of Ohr records, vinyl is considered a sort of portal to access other dimensions. This is the case with the first Popol Vuh album, Affenstunde, where the cover depicts a door from whose windows a warm light emerges contrasting with the darkness outside. The bars in front of the window seem to indicate the inaccessibility to this source of illumination, accessible only to those willing to undertake the “total path” of listening to the record.

Similarly, Ash Ra Tempel’s first album features a triple-layer gatefold cover, which alludes to a sort of gradual esoteric path to a temple, with an obvious reference to the mystery cults of ancient Egypt. The B-side of the album contains the long suite Traummaschine, which translates into German the word dreamachine, alluding to the fact that Ash Ra Tempel’s first vinyl aspires to compete with a dream-producing machine. Conceived by the painter and writer Brion Gysin and his friend Ian Somerville together with William Burroughs in the early 1960s, the dreamachine is a perforated cylinder placed on a 78 rpm turntable, with a light bulb suspended in the center. The rotation of the cylinder causes the light to flash at a frequency between 7 and 13 pulses per second (Hertz), a range of frequencies corresponding to the so-called “alpha rhythm”, or the electrical oscillations emitted by the human brain when it is in a state of extreme relaxation, when the eyes are closed, or in the absence of external stimuli. Contemplating the dreamachine would therefore cause the subject who looks at it to have colored visions and, in some cases, can induce a psychological state similar to that of a dream.

Ohr’s album covers, with their strong multimedia character, seem to want to encourage similar multisensory experiences in the user, where graphics, tactility and sound mix organically with each other. For example, the cover of Osmose by Annexus Quam is made up of four triangular flaps that can be folded to form other images or create a pyramid so that all the drawings can be seen together.

Kaiser, in Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik, also focused on the graphics of the album covers: “Until now, no one has ever seriously asked themselves whether the packaging, the cover, does not perhaps already kill any content that it should communicate, reducing it to a mere commercial product” (Kaiser 1970, pp. 182–83). The problem—adds the author—“is that most albums are not addressed to users as listeners, but as buyers” (Kaiser 1970, p. 189). For the producer, one of the distinctive features of new music is precisely the “mixing of all means of communication,” which stimulates new performative forms of “involvement”, which represents the key word in his analysis. Kaiser explains that “The song alone is no longer enough; it is integrated with other means of expression. […] The new generation, called the involved generation, experiences sensations through a multiplicity of media” (Kaiser 1970, p. 170). In the volume Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur, Kaiser writes that “The ‘involved generation’ erlebt multimedial” (p. 133), mentioning the light shows organized by Pink Floyd or Soft Machine at the Ufo Club in London and explaining that, through the union between music and other arts, listeners stop having a passive role and becomes an active part of the performance, as they are confronted with external influences that affect them physiologically, escaping the control of discursive reason.

The media produced by Kaiser have the same performative purpose, where—as seen in the case of Ohr vinyl—they present a marked multimedia character: this is demonstrated, for example, by the volume Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur, which includes collages, multi-colored images, photos, drawings, short essays, interviews, addresses and telephone numbers of artists and personalities of the European underground. In this sense, the book presents itself as a “Gegenmedium”, or rather a refunctionalized medium, because it wants to stimulate another way of reading compared to the traditional one characteristic of the “Gutenberg Galaxy”, whit the aim of involving readers in a holistic way, or rather encouraging the activation of all their receptive faculties, as in the case of the music of Ohr bands.

5. Conclusions

Reconsidering the activity of Kaiser and the Ohr bands in the light of the media anthropology that consciously inspired these experiments means, in my opinion, shedding light not only on Kaiser’s philosophical and literary interests, but also on the political context in which German experimental music developed, driven by the urgency of finding alternative escape routes to the capitalist music industry. It was this same need for otherness that made punk and then post-punk, between the late 1970s and the 1980s, look to German Krautrock as a point of reference (Pyzik 2014, pp. 72–131; Karpenter 2022). In the film inspired by post-punk aesthetics Decoder, directed by Muscha and released in 1984, the discourse on the functional transformation of sound technologies is still central. The protagonist FM, played by F.M. Einheit, percussionist for the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, tries to counter the homogenizing plan of an omnipresent fast-food chain called H-Burger, which plays muzak in its restaurants, i.e., a background music that narcotizes its customers, pushing them in a subliminal way to passive consumption, experimenting with new sound technologies. The recordings of these experiments obtained through cut-ups and montages (William Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle appear in some scenes in the film), which are transferred onto a cassette that FM secretly manages to play as background music in various fast-food restaurants, produce destabilizing effects among the customers, to the point of triggering a mass revolt in the streets of Hamburg at the end of the film. The film’s screenwriter, Klaus Maeck, explains the philosophy that inspired the production, citing William Burrough’s Decoder Handbook (1984):

I was convinced that the only valuable political work must use the enemy’s techniques. From the ‘Forward’ of the Decoder Handbook: “It’s all about subliminal manipulation, through words, pictures and sound. It is the task of the pirates to understand these techniques and use them in their own interest. […] And we should learn in time to use our video and tape recorders as Weapons”.

(Sargeant 2009, p. 202)

In today’s digital society, it is perhaps this same need for ‘otherness’ that fuels the current rediscovery of Krautrock or post-punk by new artists or young and old listeners alike, as demonstrated by current music trends which look to those genres and re-releases of albums from that period. Beyond Simon Reynolds’ (2011) analysis, this “retromania” does not represent a pure revival of the past, but probably arises from the same need, not yet dormant, to find political and existential alternatives to capitalist realism (Fisher 2009), not least through a functional transformation of sound media.