Ranked list
The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Kosmische as a lineage rather than a sound. The Berlin school and its Dusseldorf and Cologne neighbours, the American, French, Japanese and Greek synthesists working from the same premises, and the later records that inherit the sequencer as an organising principle rather than borrowing it as a texture. Ambient, techno and IDM have their own lists, and several records appear on more than one. Overlap is not the test. Descent is. From the late sixties to now, because this tradition has no century boundary worth honouring.
In 1971 a group of German musicians who had been raised on Stockhausen and free jazz got hold of sequencers and started using them as a way to keep time rather than as a way to play notes. That single decision is the whole tradition. Once a machine holds the pulse, a piece can run for twenty minutes without anyone counting, and the players are free to do something other than arrive on the beat.
The English press called it krautrock, which the musicians hated, and the German press called it kosmische Musik, which they were not much fonder of. Neither name describes what actually happened. What happened is that Berlin worked out how to make music that moves without going anywhere, Dusseldorf and the countryside around Forst worked out how to make it warm, and both ideas escaped into everything from ambient to house to most of what a modern festival main stage sounds like.
The line this list holds is descent rather than resemblance. Working in analogue synthesis is not enough: modular systems, long form and patience are tools, and plenty of records use all three without belonging here at all. What qualifies a record is whether its rhythmic and structural logic comes from the Berlin school's sequencer, or from somewhere else that happens to use the same equipment.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Tangerine Dream — Phaedra1974
№ 129 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
A Moog that drifted out of tune as the room warmed up, and a title piece that turns from fog into pulse without any audible decision. The record that taught the sequencer to breathe.
Why it is number one
Virgin gave them a budget in 1973 and Tangerine Dream spent it on a Moog that would not stay in tune. The studio warmed up over the course of a session and the oscillators drifted with it, which is why Phaedra sounds alive in a way nothing sequenced after about 1980 quite manages. The title piece begins as a fog and resolves into a pulse without anyone appearing to decide it should, and once that pulse arrives it does not let go for seventeen minutes. Everything below is a response to what this record proved: that a machine holding time is not a metronome but a collaborator, and that an album could be a place rather than a sequence of events. It also happens to be the one pre-1975 record the site's main canon admits, which is a separate argument that came out the same way.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Klaus Schulze — Timewind1975
№ 141 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Two sides, two pieces, and almost nothing that could be called an event in either. Schulze treats the sequencer as weather and the listener as someone with time, and Bayreuth Return is the purest thing the Berlin school produced.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Manuel Gottsching — E2-E41984
№ 75 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
An hour of guitar and sequencer recorded in a single take the night before a flight, shelved for three years, and then adopted by house producers who had no idea what it was. The bridge out of this tradition and into the next one, built by accident.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Cluster — Zuckerzeit1974
Roedelius and Moebius with Conny Plank at the desk, and the record where the tradition stops being solemn. Short pieces, wonky rhythm boxes, melodies that sound handmade. Everything pastoral in electronic music descends from this and most of it is duller.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Harmonia — Musik von Harmonia1974
Neu!'s Rother in a farmhouse with Cluster, and the most generous record any of them made. Eno called them the world's most important band, which was overstated and not by much. Motorik and drift holding each other up for forty minutes.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Ashra — New Age of Earth1976
Gottsching alone, dissolving his guitar into synthesizer until the source is unrecoverable. Sunrain runs on a sequencer figure so buoyant it predicts trance by fifteen years, and Ocean of Tenderness is the tradition's most beautiful hour.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Popol Vuh — Hosianna Mantra1972
Florian Fricke sold his Moog and made a record with oboe, piano and a soprano instead, which should have ended his claim on this list and instead produced its most singular entry. Devotional in a way the rest of the tradition gestures at and never reaches.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Jean-Michel Jarre — Oxygene1976
Made in a Paris flat on borrowed equipment by someone the record industry had declined, and then sold in numbers nobody in Berlin came close to. The melodic wing of this music at its most direct, and considerably stranger under the tunes than its ubiquity suggests.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Neu! — Neu!1972
Klaus Dinger playing a beat that does not vary for ten minutes while Rother lets the guitar drift over it. The pulse is human rather than sequenced, which is the whole point: this is where the tradition's rhythmic logic was worked out before a machine was asked to hold it.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Klaus Schulze — Mirage1977
The winter record, and the coldest thing here. Schulze strips out the melody he had been allowing himself and leaves an hour of moving ice. Severe, unwelcoming, and the album his admirers reach for when they want to prove the point.
Eleven to 24
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Tangerine Dream — Rubycon1975
The sequencer peak of the Virgin years, and for many the better record. Phaedra got there first and had further to travel.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Terry Riley — A Rainbow in Curved Air1969
The ancestor, admitted openly. Schulze and Tangerine Dream were demonstrably working from it, which is why it is here and Eno is not.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Cluster — Sowiesoso1976
Warmer and slower than Zuckerzeit, and the record the pastoral wing keeps rediscovering.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Harmonia — Deluxe1975
Louder and more rhythmic than the debut, with Mani Neumeier drumming. Nearly as good and easier to like.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Klaus Schulze — Moondawn1976
Harald Grosskopf on drums, which changes everything: the sequencer stops being alone and starts being accompanied.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Michael Rother — Flammende Herzen1977
Rother solo with Jaki Liebezeit, turning motorik into something almost pastoral. The most melodic thing in this whole field.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Laurie Spiegel — The Expanding Universe1980
Written on a Bell Labs computer system and warmer than any of that suggests. Algorithmic composition with a folk musician's ear.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Suzanne Ciani — Seven Waves1982
Buchla lyricism from someone who spent the seventies making machines talk for advertising. Reissue culture found her late and correctly.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Emeralds — Does It Look Like I'm Here?2010
The revival's best record, made in Cleveland by three people who had clearly heard everything above and were not embarrassed about it.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Kraftwerk — Autobahn1974
The twenty-two minute title piece is kosmische; the rest is the group working out how to be Kraftwerk instead. Ranked here for the first side.
- Number 21 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Cluster — Cluster1971
The debut, harsher and closer to Schnitzler-era Kluster than to anything the pair did afterwards. Foundational, and the record Zuckerzeit's argument is about rather than the one that wins it.
- Number 22 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Ashra — Correlations1979
Gottsching turns the project toward a band and toward song-length pieces, which is a real departure rather than a lesser version of New Age of Earth. Ranked lower because the patience is what that record is for, and this one trades it away deliberately.
- Number 23 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Klaus Schulze — Audentity1983
The late imperial record, absorbed into digital synthesis and still recognisably the same project. Denser than Timewind and further from the source.
- Number 24 on The 10 Best Kosmische and Berlin School Albums
Klaus Schulze — Trancefer1981
Two long pieces and a percussionist, and the point where the sequencer stops being alone for good.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Can — Future Days
Krautrock rather than kosmische. Can are a band improvising in a room and the logic is the players' rather than the machine's, which is the distinction this page turns on.
Brian Eno — Ambient 1: Music for Airports
The descent runs the wrong way. Kosmische fed Eno, and Music for Airports founds a tradition rather than continuing one, which is why it tops the ambient list instead.
№ 101 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 1 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums
Jon Hopkins — Immunity
The ambient half sits in the lineage and the spine is techno. A page that admits it admits a hundred records that share tools and nothing else.
Oneohtrix Point Never — Returnal
Early Lopatin is openly Berlin school-derived and the arpeggiated spine survives here. It sits just outside because Rifts, the record that would have settled him, gathers three prior albums and cannot be ranked.
Vangelis — Albedo 0.39
In the lineage where the film scores are not, and outside the twenty on weight rather than category.
Tangerine Dream — Zeit
Four sides of drone with almost no pulse at all. Admired more than it is played, and the least sequenced record of their imperial run.
How this list was built
Ten from 141 records considered, running from 1969 to the present. The field took in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Forst and Cologne, the French and Japanese synthesists, the American minimalists working from shared premises, and the revival that started around 2009, because a tradition that stopped in 1984 would be a museum and this one did not stop.
Two boundaries decide most of what is here. The first is descent rather than resemblance, which admits Terry Riley as an openly named ancestor and excludes Brian Eno, whose records this music fed rather than the other way round. The second separates the electronic wing from krautrock proper: Can, Faust and Amon Duul II are bands improvising in a room, and their logic is the players' rather than the machine's. Neu! is the one crossing, ranked because motorik is the rhythmic principle the sequenced records were built to reproduce and because Harmonia is half of Neu! by construction. Kraftwerk's Autobahn is ranked for its first side, which is kosmische, rather than for the rest, which is the group inventing something else. This list runs a twenty-four record band rather than the usual twenty: a regather of the pool surfaced four records that belong in contention and none that belong in the ten, and cutting four to admit four would have been arithmetic rather than judgment.
Every kosmische / berlin school record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the kosmische / berlin school genre page.