A new book charting the history of krautrock will be published by Black Dog next month.

Edited by Nikolaos Kotsopoulos, Krautrock: Cosmic Rock And Its Legacy features written contributions from the likes of Ken Hollings, Michael Faber and David Stubbs, and testimonials from a range of modern-day devotees including Gavin Russom and Add N to (X)’s Ann Shenton.

According to Black Dog, the looks at kraut’s journey "from its roots in free jazz, psychedelia and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, to the groundbreaking experiments of Faust, Kraftwerk (pictured above) and Can.

"Never a genre or a movement per se, Krautrock encompassed a very wild and diverse range of sounds, attitudes, and past musics, from free jazz to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from dada to Fluxus, from German Romanticism to the Mothers of Invention. The musicians operated outside any known categories, breaking new ground and turning their backs to both their country’s past and the conventions of Anglo-American rock. Their vision fired the imaginations of generations of musicians after them: Cabaret Voltaire, Brian Eno, Nurse with Wound, PiL, DAF, Einstürzende Neubauten, to only name a few, have all acknowledged their debt to Krautrock’s uncompromising, outsider ethics and far-out sounds."

Clocking in at 192 pages with 220 pictures (in colour and in black and white), Krautrock: Cosmic Rock And Its Legacy certainly looks to be a desirable volume, but it remains to seen whether it will live up to the high standard set by the reigning bibles of krautrock scholarship – Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler (1995) and Steven and Alan Freeman’s The Crack In The Cosmic Egg (1996). Both of these books, penned when there was a death of information about krautrock and its more marginal figures, are now out of print – original copies go for crazy amounts on eBay.

We’ve got two copies of Krautrock to give away. Visit our competitions page now to enter the prize draw.