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'They avoided, with their straight faces and their art determination, their documentary approach and their presence of mind, the rock-and-blues Anglo-American pressure that was, in the late sixties, dominating the sound of non-classical new music. Committed to carrying on German culture from where it had been violently amputated in the thirties by the Nazis, determined to find a new German identity in a country just revocering from the carnage and guilt of the Second World War, they looked towards the purity and beauty of the German Bauhaus movement and the rigorous experimental curiosity and technological power of leading German avant-garde composer Stockhausen. From Bauhaus they took the philosophy that the work of artists should not be a simple reflection of individual creativity but should be inseparable from the surrounding technology and community. They carried forward Stockhausen's work in developing the technological means for producing electronic music, and a sensitivity to how sounds from the new environment could be involved in the music. By taking Germanic sources from the thirties and fifties, they were commenting on the book-ends to either sides of the demonised role of the Germans in the forties.'
Paul Morley
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