Kraftwerk

In the year of our lord 1974, German electronic music has already sown its most fertile seeds, between cosmic couriers and intrepid kraut-rockers. And yet it remains chilly, elitist music, for the chosen few. Only by passing through the Kraftwerk Autobahn will it become “volksmusik”, popular and universal music. Yes, because Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the two ineffable symbionts from Dusseldorf, managed to pull off a gigantic feat: fusing the warm, primitive pulse of Afro/Black music with the coldest, most rarefied atmospheres of white music. An immense, mad, near-impossible undertaking. And yet they pulled it off... Two decades later, Derrick May, one of the gurus of the new dance scene, would declare that techno is nothing more than “George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator”...

Kraftwerk are music in motion, avant-garde in the true sense of the term (“being ahead”), not in its snobbish interpretation (“music that's difficult to listen to”) trotted out for the benefit of a handful of bored critics. From their beginnings through to their arrival at synthetic pop, the two men from Dusseldorf remained at the helm of the group, tireless pedallers in search of new hybrids and sonic alchemies. Half-serious androids of rock, half men-half machines, Ralf and Florian travelled their own deeply personal “autobahn”, driven by the experimental impulses of the Teutonic school (Stockhausen, “kosmische musik”) and projected towards music that didn't yet exist (new wave, synth-pop, hip-hop, dance, house, trance, techno...).

In 1970, having completed their classical studies, the two young pupils of Stockhausen were already leading a group called Organisation, backed by three percussionists. “Tone Float” is the only work they released, marked by tentative electronic experiments. Ralf and Florian then decided to stake everything on building the legendary Kling Klang Studio, a warehouse devoted to graphic installations and electronic music which, starting out with a few old tape recorders, drum machines and other futuristic gadgets, quickly became the engine room of the Kraftwerk project. The first two albums (“1” and “2”) fall within the emerging German school alongside Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Cluster & co., and laid the groundwork for the future birth of “industrial” music. “Ralf & Florian”, from 1973, is instead a transitional work, heading towards that perfect distillation of the Kraftwerk sound that is “Autobahn”.

Enriched by the introduction of the Moog, “Autobahn” is a masterpiece of balance unmatched in the history of electronic rock. A balance between noise and melody, avant-garde experimentation and pop, ancestral dances and “concrete” rhythms, humanism and cybernetics, technology and art. Described by Ralf Hütter as “a kind of raga meant to be listened to in the car”, the album is a symphony for engines. Engines that roar, that murmur sounds and noises in hypnotic harmony. “Düsseldorf, the city we live in, is the centre of the largest industrial area in Germany,” the pair explained. “Our music is the music of urban reality, with the rhythms and sounds produced by factories, trains and cars. We work within this context and are influenced by it, like labourers of music, for eight to ten hours a day in our recording studio. We love the computers and machines we've built ourselves, and we have an almost erotic relationship with them.” Mitteleuropean romanticism, futurist aesthetics and a typically “soul” sensibility all converge on the Kraftwerk Autobahn to give birth to the sound of the future.

The union of man and machine, then, as the destination of New Music. But not only that. “Autobahn” conjures the metropolitan visions of Fritz Lang, the prophecies of a cybernetic future that would crowd the work of key electronic artists to come, such as Devo, Ultravox and Berlin-era Bowie. There are also clear traces of the minimalism of Eno, Glass and Reich, albeit pushed to almost parodic extremes, along with the lysergic-space adventure of the Floyd's “Interstellar Overdrive”. Yet everything holds together with remarkable cohesion and unity. Dry, clinical sounds, or smoothly seductive ones, are filtered and metabolised through a use of electronics aimed at creating a new “total” art form: a universal language, a koine (or “Esperanto”, as Eddy Cilìa describes it on OndaRock) for the global village.

The pulsing artery of the record is the long title track “Autobahn” (over 22 minutes): a shimmering suite built on the combination of the sounds of moving cars (engines, tyres, horns) with the sinuous melodies of keyboards and flute, with the relentless pulse of the drum machine pumping out an almost consistently uniform rhythm. The listener is left with the feeling of being carried along on a long journey, relaxing and hypnotic at once. The chorus (“Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn / We drive drive drive on the motorway”) is murmured in a clinical, monotone way, almost simulating the repetitiveness of motorway driving. And the little chant of “fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n” openly echoes the “fun, fun, fun” of the Beach Boys (one of Kraftwerk's unlikely reference points). It's probably the greatest driving song of all time.

The entire lyric of “Autobahn” is plainly tongue-in-cheek, sardonic: “Ahead of us a wide valley stretches out / the sun shines with sparkling rays... / the road is a grey ribbon with white lines and a green border / now we turn on the radio / sounds come out of the speaker”. But behind the apparent nonsense lies Kraftwerk's naive optimism. As Cilìa writes: “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 spotless cities, vast green spaces, eight-lane motorways regulated by giant electronic brains. Before the oil crisis and the microchip. Before 'Blade Runner'. Before cyberpunk. Before we realised we were screwed.” The album cover itself, designed by Emil Schult, follows the same logic: a “pastoral-industrial” combination of hills and motorway, with an old Volkswagen driving along and a new Mercedes travelling in the opposite direction. As if to say: the Germany that was, and the one that will be.

The rest of the album is less “defined” and more abstract, poised between cosmic digressions in the style of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and moments of greater rhythmic intensity. The two “Kometenmelodie” tracks are excursions into ambient soundscapes, carried along by a cosmic breath (the first slower and more atmospheric, the second faster and more upbeat). The sinister “Mitternacht” picks up the experiments of the Dusseldorf pioneers' early work, with its slowed-down pace and its web of electronic effects (echoes, bleeps, creaks, metallic noises): it could easily serve as the soundtrack to an old vintage horror film. The morning stroll of “Morgenspaziergang” closes the album on an eccentric note, amid birdsong, the splash of a pond (all rigorously electronic) and the delicate melodies of Schneider's flute.

David Bowie would pick up Kraftwerk's baton: influenced directly by “Autobahn” (by his own admission), he threw himself headlong into a fusion of rhythm and blues and electronics starting with “Station to Station” (1976). And new wave hadn't even arrived yet...

Some ayatollahs of “alternative” rock would like to suggest that there was a before (“avant-garde”) and an after (“pop-commercial drift”) for Kraftwerk, with “Autobahn” supposedly the watershed between the two periods (but more on the “after” side than the “before”...). Nothing could be further from the truth. To debunk such nonsense, it's enough to remember that, without Kraftwerk, nobody would have dared to make pop music through sampling. And half the music of the Eighties and Nineties (from Ultravox to the Chemical Brothers) would never have seen the light of day. If that counts for nothing... And if what is light years ahead of its contemporaries and capable of influencing later generations isn't “avant-garde”, then what is? But that's not all. It is precisely by combining avant-garde and pop that the two men from Dusseldorf changed the history of rock forever, since the earlier electronic experiments (even the boldest moments of “1” and “2”) were, deep down, not much more forward-looking than what Tangerine Dream, Can and Schulze were doing at the same time.

No “pop drift”, then. The Kraftwerk project was a continuous leap forward, into the future, whatever musical direction they decided to follow at any given time. Even the albums released in the second half of the decade (“Radioactivity”, “Trans Europe Express”, “The Man Machine”) would, in fact, prove epoch-making. In the Eighties, inaugurated by the enigmatic “Computer World”, the African-American scene, from rap to techno, would appropriate their insights. Kraftwerk themselves would close out that era by releasing the less brilliant “Electric Cafè” in 1986. But they had already given music history their contribution. Never taking themselves too seriously, indeed always poking fun at themselves, they even appeared on one of the final editions of “Canzonissima”: pale faces, red lips and shirts, black ties, with mannequins identical to themselves seated among the audience... Forget machines, forget cold electronics: looked at closely, Kraftwerk are simply the human face of the avant-garde.

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31/10/2006