Kosmische Musik, German for cosmic music, describes a strand of early-1970s West German electronic and experimental rock, centred largely on Berlin. The phrase appeared in 1971 in the sleeve notes of Tangerine Dream’s Alpha Centauri, issued by the Ohr label, and in 1972 Ohr used it as the title of a compilation featuring Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel and Popol Vuh. It is narrower than krautrock, the catch-all label popularised by the British music press for the wider scene.
The music favoured enormous, unreal acoustic spaces, timbres unlike any acoustic instrument and slow transformation, achieved with Moog and EMS synthesisers, tape and effects. Two Ohr releases of 1972 stand especially close to drone: Tangerine Dream’s Zeit, a set of long, almost motionless pieces, and Schulze’s Irrlicht, built largely from manipulated acoustic sources. The retrospective name Berlin School came much later and was never used by the musicians at the time.