Stereolab – Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
This is slightly later, but I was getting into krautrock – I have Kraftwerk on my list here as well, but I was listening to things like Neu! and Tangerine Dream – and I think Stereolab helped spark my interest in that era of music. But they’re about more than krautrock – even though they were influenced by Neu!, they were also heavily influenced by Tropicalia, Brazilian music, and by French chanson and by any number of strange pop genres. They’re a band that’s very hard to classify and a band that I also have a lot of respect for.

They’re a fantastic gateway drug.

That’s not a bad way of putting it. I think a lot of people discovered Brazilian music, for example, through Stereolab. I certainly did. I was aware of krautrock through Kraftwerk, but I was less aware of things like Cluster and Harmonia, and Stereolab stoked the flames of my interest in that whole incredibly fertile period of German music in the 70s.