The Hollywood movie industry was the first economic actor to push the 'association' - that is associating this new spacey, electronically-generated music with sci-fi movies and space-race documentaries.

 

An association that became more evident - in the early 1970s - when music mags and mainstream media both started associate the novel sounds of synthesizers to a metaphysical dimension. This contributed to the birth of the founding paradox of this music, that we might call "cosmic":  in order for you to get to a sort of inner illumination and find your true self (and your meaning within the universe,) we were told to pay attention and focus on the timbre of the instruments, not as much as to the composition - that is, music as a function of Technique. 

 

At a conceptual level the "Cosmic Couriers" (Tangerine Dream for sure, but at their very beginning also Popol Vuh, even if Popol Vuh would later deny any technical trip by turning to acoustic instruments) claimed that an oscillator could synthesize "True Knowledge" (whatever that may be) better than Hariprasad Chaurasia's breath blowing through his bansuri.

 

The musical trend 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 chose that 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 to caqpitalize on the next fashion (the cosmic one, precisely), since he had not missed any prior fashion: neither the 'beat', 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  from Ulrich Adelt and his “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.

 

Ultimately, these difficult and arrhythmic "cosmic" sounds had been appropriately smoothed out, polished, and brought into a context of assonant harmonies and slowed-down “pop” melodies, with hints of dissonances - a note that in the Sixties had been used (slightly inspired by Webern, Stockhausen & C.) and already spread - in homeopathic doses - in blockbuster movies such as Kubrick's “2001” or the “Planet of the Apes.”

 

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

 

(...)