So Krautrock came about in 1960s Germany with bands like Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can. This electronic-based music mainly originated in Dusseldorf, West Germany.
I'm interested to know how it came about, how did it effect and influence the different generations within the FRD at the time? Did it ever spread to the GDR? If so how did those styles differ?
How did it change after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron curtain in '89 & the 1990s. Lastly how did spawn so many intricate wide ranging genres and musicians we see today from Brian Eno and Ambient music, Acid House and the M20 raves of the' 90s, Shoegaze and dreampop to experimental genes like Lowercase where I heard one artist has a whole album where he folds paper different ways?
Thank you!
I'm not sure about the premise of your question, ie. that Krautrock spawned electronic (dance) music. In Germany - at least in avantgarde serialist circles - electronic music was already considered it's own genre in the early 50s. I also wouldn't necessarily call Kraftwerk's music from Autobahn onwards krautrock - if anything, they increasingly moved away from guitars towards pure electronics in the vein of what the Studio WDR (Stockhausen etc.) had been doing. Of course, what remains Kraftwerk's pioneering feat is the fusion of electronics, pop elements and drum machines - in Germany, there was (and to some extent, still is) a large cultural divide between what is considered "serious music" (ernste Musik) and "entertainment music" (Unterhaltungsmusik). To someone like Stockhausen, that carried with him a phobia of repetition for his entire life, plopping simple, repeating 4/4 rhythms under electronics was to approach some sort of musical fascism. As such, Krautrock and Kraftwerk really opened the gate for electronic 80s pop, in Germany above all Neue Deutsche Welle.
However, Kraftwerk's influence on post-1989 dance music is rather indirect. It's not that kids at 90s-raves were blasting Kraftwerk but rather that Kraftwerk and other European electro-pop had been played by adventerous radio DJs in the American midwest and played a large part in the formation of techno and house - Derrick May often jokingly refers to Techno as "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator".
As for your question on the GDR, youth in the GDR generally listened to as much west-German radio as they could and bootlegs and smuggled music were a hot commodity, but - while there were a few eastern Block made synthesizers - the tools to make electronic music in the vein of Kraftwerk just weren't really there.