Kraftwerk - The Esperanto of the global village

"We'll only release something when we consider it relevant to us or to the public," Ralf Hutter said a few years back, reiterating that Kraftwerk were still at work on new compositions. The possibility that this might never happen must be considered. The doubt shared by every fan - that the Dusseldorf group may no longer be able to foresee, as they always have, the music of the future - must have struck them too, and would explain a creative block whose length has, I believe, no precedent in the history of pop.

One might even wish that from the Kling-Klang Studios only silence and memories should still emerge, because it would be a rather depressing sight to see the most innovative group of all time operating from the rearguard. No one has exerted an influence on the development of modern popular music - volksmusik, as the Dusseldorf group always claimed to play - comparable to that of Kraftwerk. Not the Velvet Underground, who did make rock grow up but whose influence never crossed its own borders; nor the Beatles, who were the first to grant pop cultural dignity and will forever remain its greatest icon. Before crying blasphemy, consider what follows. Without their influence, direct or indirect through Bowie, new wave would have developed quite differently. Devo, Ultravox, the early Simple Minds, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, D.A.F. are simply inconceivable if we posit the non-existence of Kraftwerk. Their lesson shaped the movement's extreme wings: on one side the sunny pop of Human League, on the other the dark avant-garde of Cabaret Voltaire. At the same time, they showed the way to the Moroder/Bellotte duo, authors of all of Donna Summer's hits, and thus smuggled electronics into disco. And in dance music too, they influenced both the most commercial sectors and the underground at once: electro was their invention (the most striking tribute: Fearless Four building Rockin' it on the foundations of The Man-Machine) and Washington's go-go scene (the most brazen tribute: Trouble Funk helping themselves to Trans Europe Express) found in the German group an occasional but important source. Hip-hop's pioneers devoured their records, and Afrika Bambaataa wrote one of the genre's earliest classics, Planet Rock, crossing Trans-Europe Express (again? Grandmaster Flash used it too) with Captain Sky's Supersperm: kraut-rock and p-funk met and spawned the first of countless, magnificent mutant bastards. And this brings us to the Nineties, to the famous definition of techno given by one of its masters, Derrick May: "Techno is George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck together in an elevator." Without the Dusseldorf group, the Detroit school - the likes of Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig - which gave birth to house and techno is simply unimaginable. And since without fathers there can be no offspring, Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk vanish too, by extension. No 808 State, no L.F.O, no Orbital. On the ambient side: bye bye Aphex Twin.

Let's take a step back. Let's return to Motor Town. Notice that the aforementioned founders of techno, in the common perception considered white music, are all Black. Here we arrive at the core of this reflection, already touched on when discussing early electro and hip-hop: while it's undeniable that throughout this century's music history, from early jazz and blues onward, it was almost always Black artists who blazed the trails later walked (and often appropriated) by white artists, it is equally true that Kraftwerk represent an exception - the only one. They are the only white artists to have influenced Black artists who in turn went on to influence other white artists. This is what makes their presence so pervasive in music today: they haven't made a record in over ten years, and yet they're everywhere, as important as ever.

Anyone surprised by the union between a music that is warm par excellence, namely black music, and a music as cold as the electronics championed by these men from Dusseldorf has missed most of what they're about — almost all of it. They may have heard them, but they've never truly listened. If they had, they would have perceived the deep humanity pulsing at the heart of the Kraftwerk machine. There is in it a romanticism typically Mitteleuropean, but also a feeling that is unmistakably soul. Granted: it's not the soul of Otis Redding or James Brown, but it's a relative of theirs, and this explains why at New York's Ritz in 1981 (probably the most important concert in Kraftwerk's history) the audience was predominantly Black. "It was funky," is how Bambaataa remembers it.

Ecumenical in how they addressed, through music, an audience of every race, Kraftwerk were always just as ecumenical in the writing of their lyrics, as essential as the architecture of their songs and very often penned in multiple languages. Not just German and English but also French, Italian, Japanese. German specificity is the load-bearing beam of the universality of songs with a subtle, bittersweet irony that is, underneath it all, optimistic like an Asimov novel.

And here is the last point I want to dwell on before moving on to an examination of the Dusseldorf group's output: while Kraftwerk's music remains projected forward, their lyrics and imagery have always smacked more of ‘retro-futurism' than of actual modernity. Theirs is a vision of the future that comes from a past in which it was still possible to imagine prosperous, orderly times to come, made of clean cities, vast green spaces, eight-lane highways regulated by giant electronic brains. Before the oil war and the microchip. Before Blade Runner. Before cyberpunk. Before we realized we were screwed. Anyone who knows that unforgettable William Gibson story, The Gernsback Continuum (in Burning Chrome), will understand.

“Musica electronic/ Figura ritmica/ Arte politica/ dall’era atomica” (from Electric Cafe; in Italian)

The records, then. The first was, until a few months ago, the most mysterious of the lot, one that both does and doesn't belong to the discography. In the sense that both Hutter and Schneider appear on it, but when it came out, Kraftwerk (the name cleverly plastered on the CD reissue) didn't exist yet. The group was called Organisation and, besides the two Germans (the former on organ, the latter on flute and violin), it included a bassist (Butch Hauf) and two English percussionists (Basil Hammoudi and Fred Monicks). The album was released in 1970 by the British Rca label, is titled Tone Float, and for a quarter of a century was one of the rarest and most mythologized items in all of krautrock. Its legend has held up to the test of rediscovery. The long title track in particular, an orientalist-tinged improvisation that unfolds over tumbling percussion, is striking, but the cosmic Silver Forest and Noitasinagro — to which the organ lends a churchy flavour and the violin a great deal of melancholy — are also worth admiring. And yet, as beautiful, as gorgeous as the record is, had Hutter and Schneider done nothing else, it would be remembered simply as an interesting period freak-out. Nothing more.

Back in Dusseldorf (where the two had met at the local conservatory, where among others they had attended Stockhausen's classes), the pair found new accomplices in Andreas Hohmann and Klaus Dinger, renamed themselves Kraftwerk, opened the Kling-Klang Studios, brought in Conny Plank (who had already produced the Organisation LP and would stay with them through Autobahn), and set to work on their self-titled debut.

Among die-hard rockists ("The fate of new ideas is to begin as heresies and end as superstitions," Thomas Huxley) a little fable circulates according to which there's a good Kraftwerk and a bad Kraftwerk. The former made avant-garde music, the latter sold their soul to synthetic pop for a bit of cash. The dividing line between the "before" and the "after" is supposedly Autobahn. Having noted that it is precisely what they made from that record onward that makes Kraftwerk what they are, it must immediately be added that there are no ruptures in their history, only evolution within continuity. The austere cover of the first LP (featuring nothing but a traffic cone, the kind used to mark off accident sites or roadworks) could easily belong to the Kraftwerk of that hypothetical "after," just as the opening of Ruckzuck could, with its flute tracing geometric trajectories over a tight rhythmic pulse and electronic keyboards that now evoke factory clangour, now sketch out melodies that could belong to a string quartet (the Balanescu Quartet's reinterpretation of some of the Dusseldorf group's classics lies far off in time, but in the earliest chapter of this story the instruments are already being tuned for it). Stratovarius oscillates between a minuet in slow motion and cacophonous delirium, passing through gypsy sorrows along the way. Megaherz is a drone that rises until it releases an organ and then a flute that hovers over silence before closing the circle by reigniting the drone. Von Himmel Hoch, finally: noise and industrial music waiting just around the corner. Talk about a memorable debut.

The album, recorded between July and September 1970, was released by Philips the following year. In the meantime, Michael Rother had replaced Hohmann and, together with Dinger, pushed for the quartet's music to tighten up and, while keeping its experimental impulses intact, to graft them onto a somewhat more conventional rock foundation. Schneider agreed with him. Hutter left. The new lineup worked for six months, putting just over half an hour of music on tape that remains unreleased to this day, and appearing in May on the television programme "Beat Club." The track performed on that occasion, Vor dem blauen Bock, was added as a bonus to the CD edition of Tone Float and is the only surviving testimony of the 1971 incarnation of Kraftwerk. Luckily for us, since in the shuffle — besides not upending the last quarter century of pop music — we gain another great band: Rother and Dinger go on to found Neu!, while Schneider and Hutter team back up.

From this moment on, Kraftwerk would be just the two of them. Anyone called in to collaborate would be kept in a subordinate role, including Wolfgang Flur (present since Autobahn) and Karl Bartos (who arrived with Radioactivity and, from The Man-Machine onward, has often been credited as a co-writer).

2 was put together at the end of September '71 and came out a few months later. The cover is nearly identical to that of its predecessor. Only the colours change, white and green instead of white and red. The move, meant to highlight continuity and serial logic in the group's output, backfired somewhat as a marketing strategy (many people didn't even realize it was a new LP), but conceptually it's a stroke of genius. As is Klingklang, which monopolizes the entire first side and shares with Sly & The Family Stone's Family Affair the record of being the first pop composition to feature an electronic drum machine. Its sprawling central section already announces Autobahn. Already.

Released a year later, Ralf & Florian smooths out the edges. Kraftwerk's music is now, as well as surprising and often unheard-of, pleasurable. The echoes of the Far East heard in Elektrisches Roulette and Ananas Symphonie sound, paradoxically, more authentic than the postcard Japan that the Yellow Magic Orchestra would sketch a few years down the line (not to mention others, like Yello, who owe Kraftwerk next to everything). In the latter track there's a real rarity in the Dusseldorf group's catalogue: a guitar. A slide guitar, no less.

"The Kraftwerk sound is a mix of funky rhythms, musique concrète and pop" (Florian Schneider)

The Pineapple Symphony is the last orchestral exercise before the symphony of engines that is Autobahn — suite, song and LP all at once. Cut down to seven-inch length from the album's 22'42" to the usual duration of a single, the title track caused a sensation worldwide in 1974, the United States above all. Before that, the Dusseldorf group's popularity had been confined to Germany, and even there it was modest: 60,000 copies sold of the first LP, 50,000 of the second, 100,000 of the third. Just enough to pay the musicians' household bills and upgrade the hardware at the Kling-Klang Studios. Hutter and Schneider would no longer have to perform acrobatics just to afford a tape recorder or an electronic instrument.

Autobahn turns the minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young into pop. It's catchy and experimental, glacial and sensual. Romantic. Like Morgenspaziergang, while Kometenmelodie carries the cosmic sweep its title demands, and the unsettling Mitternacht, which separates the two, throws a bridge back to the early work.

Just as Autobahn is compact, Radioactivity, which followed a year later and inaugurated the relationship with Emi, is fragmentary. A transitional record, much like Ralf & Florian had been. Five of its twelve tracks don't even reach a minute and a half. The title track is almost a new Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd, back when they had something to say), and stands as an exemplary mediation between the extremes represented by the sine-wave sound of Radio Sterne and the dreamy melody of Ohm Sweet Ohm. I hope the irony of the title hasn't been lost on you.

“The sound of a running train is music. We want to make people aware of the reality around them by putting the sounds of cars and trains into our compositions. I find there's a great beauty in them” (Ralf Hutter)

After Radioactivity, Kraftwerk fall silent for two years (we'll get used to far more formidable silences from them). They emerge from their Kling-Klang seclusion with, in retrospect, the most significant album of 1977 under their arm — a year that, commercially, belonged to disco and, artistically, to punk. Trans-Europe Express is their masterpiece; the title track, a planetary-sized hit at the time, is the finest example of mimetic music ever conceived. But the whole album is extraordinary: Europe Endless will teach a great deal to Ultravox; The Hall Of Mirrors to Japan; Showroom Dummies to Devo. “Our goal is to write the perfect pop song for all the tribes of the global village” (Florian Schneider).

That goal was hit squarely in 1978 with The Model, the opening track of side two of The Man-Machine: a melody of such astonishing flexibility that it lent itself to reinterpretation by Snakefinger as well as by Big Black and the Balanescu Quartet. A truly global-village song: Japanese and Thai versions are known to exist.

The rest of the album, which boasts a cover — inspired by the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky — worthy of hanging in any modern art museum, is almost as good as its peak moment. It opens with The Robots, hypnotic and (naturally) robotic, and closes with the quasi-Gregorian suggestions of the title track; in between sit the irresistible disco drive of Spacelab and Metropolis and the crepuscular tones of Neon Lights.

One could also say that with The Man-Machine, Kraftwerk's forward momentum ran its course. The gaps between releases stretched out enormously — three years before Computer World, five before Electric Cafe, and another five before the sprawling compilation The Mix — and the thirteen songs Hutter and Schneider produced over nineteen years — splitting the six tracks of Computer World from the six of Electric Cafe is the single Tour de France — add nothing to their canon. The template of The Man-Machine (itself six songs) is faithfully replicated. And yet one really wouldn't want to do without Computer World and Electric Cafe: they deliver immense tracks (Computer Love is almost on a par with The Model) and command admiration for an economy of form that has achieved a kind of classicism.

(Kindly provided by the author, taken from issue 2 of the New Series of “Blow Up”)

In 2003 Kraftwerk returned to the scene with a new album, Tour De France Soundtracks, and a series of concerts, capped off by the double live album Minimum Maximum.

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