Krautrock and the Sublime

By Erik Davis

The following is included in Krautrock, a beautifully produced book edited by Nikos Kotsopoulos just out from Black Dog publishing:

Imagine you are standing alone on a craggy windswept sea cliff beneath a moonless night sky. You spread your arms out at your side like superhero wings and you slowly begin to ascend, a dreamlike absorption into the dark embrace of the galaxy. Your pace quickens until you are rocketing through the stars like a spectral eyeball shot out of a quantum canon. The immensity of space swallows you up, and as nearly all of the perceptual frameworks you normally use to process reality evaporate, you become profoundly and ecstatically disoriented. Boundaries melt, nowhere is up or down, and your immense speed has morphed into a glacial drift. Your tiny mind is blown as you attempt to compass the conundrum of the infinite, and to plumb the meaning of the flickering flash of awareness you call your life in light of this vast void of shifting three-dimensional geometries, this empty and shattered immensity, this cosmos.