Hollywood, pushed the association, using this music in sci-fi movies and scientific documentaries. The association became more evident - in the early 1970s - when the press (music mags + mainstream) started  associate the unheard sounds of the synths to a metaphysical dimension. Becoming one of the founding paradoxes of the music that we will call "cosmic": to get to a sort of inner illumination, we were told, focus on the timbre of the instrument, the sound - that is, music depends on Technique.

 

At a conceptual level the "Cosmic Couriers" (Tangerine Dream always, but at the beginning also a little Popol Vuh, even if they would later deny the technical trip going acoustically quite a bit) claimed that an oscillator could synthesize True Knowledge better than Hariprasad Chaurasia's breath blowing through his bansuri.

 

The trend initially was initially intertwined with the lysergic fad ('66'/'72) and an apodictic "search for the Truth." Then it broke away from the initial "purity of essence" of their entheogenic ideology, drifting toward being a series of "synt demos" of increasingly new features for musical instruments that more and more started looking like the dashboard of a NASA mission.

 

For others, the term "Kraut-Rock" was apparently coined by the press office of Mail Order Virgin, who added a "Kraut-rock" section to their catalog. This "birther" version was questioned in 2003 by Zappi Diermeier of Faust who - interviewed by the English music magazine Wire - claimed on the contrary that it was Faust that invented the term. Accordingly to him they choise the name...

 

"because it combined the only two things that we were not: kraut, in the sense of old-generation Germans, and rock."

 

The term "Die Kosmischen Kuriere" - which later became a style: the “Cosmic Couriers” - was instead the name of the record company invented in 1973 by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, an ex-DJ who from Holland (?) found his mecca in Germany by founding Ohr.

 

Kaiser was the type who proudly declared to the press that he was not late with respect to the next fashion (the cosmic one, precisely), he who had not missed - he said - neither the beat fashion, nor the psychedelic one. Fashions that Froese and Baumann also followed, even “playing whatever they asked” to the soldiers of the US “army and navy” stationed in Berlin.

 

“Cosmic” for Kaiser implied a vision (I quote Ulrich Adelt from “Krautrock”, 2016) “of a deterritorialized and post-national cosmological identity that involved the use of hallucinogens and the creation of new sounds, especially with the synthesizer.”

 

But if you look closely, the term “cosmic” was launched - right during the symbolic height of the “space race” - to firmly stake out the vast territory of synthetic timbres (all to be conquered) generated by these new instruments of the emerging consumer electronics industry.

 

In essence, the "cosmic sound" became a new cliché of musical arrangement based on colors, timbres, in short a set of sounds associated until then with a small and unpopular avant-garde of researchers. Now these difficult and arrhythmic sounds had been appropriately smoothed out, polished, rhythmic and brought into a context of assonant harmonies and slowed down “pop” melodies, with hints of dissonances that in the Sixties had been slightly inspired by Webern or Stockhausen and company and already spread - in homeopathic doses - in great blockbuster films such as Kubrick's “2001” or “Planet of the Apes.”

 

Besides, the Floyds themselves, from the early or late beginnings (1967), had already studied astronomy, planets and satellites, or not?