Jump to content

Kraftwerk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 75.4.25.188 (talk) at 06:19, 12 July 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk (pronounced [ˈkʁaftvɛɐk], German for "power station") is a German musical group that has made key contributions to the development of improvisational rock and electronic music, most notably within the latter category's sub-genres known as synthpop, electro, techno, house and IDM. Early musical templates formed within the industrial and hip hop music communities have also been credited to the group.

The classic Kraftwerk sound combines driving electronic percussion and bass lines with catchy synthesized melodies and harmony, accompanied by simple lyrics which are sometimes sung through a vocoder. In the early 1970s the Kraftwerk sound was utterly revolutionary for its time, and it has had a lasting impact across nearly all genres of modern popular music.[1][2][3][4][5]

History

Kraftwerk was founded in 1970 by Florian Schneider-Esleben (flute, electro-violin) and Ralf Hütter (synthesizers), the pair setting up its Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf. The two had met as students at the Düsseldorf Conservatory in the late 1960s, participating in the German experimental music scene of the time, which the UK music press dubbed Krautrock. This term is said to be derogatory, although it has since become synonymous with most freeform German music of the period between the late 1960s to the early-mid 1970s.

Early Kraftwerk line-ups (1970–1974) fluctuated, Hütter and Schneider working with around a half-dozen other musicians over the course of recording three albums and sporadic live appearances—most notably guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger who left to form Neu!.

The input, expertise, and influence of producer/engineer Konrad "Conny" Plank was significant as well. Plank worked with many other leading German acts (including members of Can, Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia) and, largely as a result of his work with Kraftwerk, Plank's studio near Cologne (Köln) became one of the most sought-after studios in the late 1970s. Plank produced the first four Kraftwerk albums but ceased working with the band after the commercial success of Autobahn, apparently over a dispute about contracts.

File:TEE-E-front.jpg
Album cover of Trans-Europe Express (1977), English version, featuring (from left to right) Flür/Bartos/Schneider/Hütter.

Painter and graphic artist Emil Schult became a regular collaborator with the band beginning in 1973 (originally playing bass-guitar and electro-violin, then designing artwork, writing additional lyrics, and accompanying it on tour).

What is generally regarded as the classic Kraftwerk line-up formed in 1975, for the Autobahn tour. During this time, the band was presented as a quartet, with Hütter and Schneider joined by Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos as electronic percussionists. This quartet would be the band's public persona for their renowned output of the latter 1970s and early 1980s. Flür had joined the band in 1973 as a drummer, in preparation for a television appearance to promote its third album. The public debut of the group's striking custom-made electronic percussion pads, played by Flür, made their debut as well. Bartos was a student at the Robert Schumann Institute who was studying to become a classically trained percussionist in the hopes of becoming a orchestra member. Bartos also taught percussion in his spare time. During the 'Autobahn' tour of 1975, he fought through exhaustion by traveling back and forth from the US to Germany in order to take and, evntually pass his final exams. Bartos and Flür also helped to write many of the band’s most memorable songs.

The band is notoriously reclusive, so much so that it is rumored that its own record company does not have its phone numbers. Another notable example of their eccentric behavior was reported to Johnny Marr of The Smiths by Karl Bartos, who explained that anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer, since during recording the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio at a certain time on the dot, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite himself never hearing the phone ring.

“The telephone is an antiquity—you never know who is calling, there is no image, it is an outmoded product [that] constantly disrupts work.”
— Ralf Hütter [6]

After years of withdrawal from live performance, Kraftwerk began to tour again more regularly from the late 1990s onward. Hütter had wanted to play more shows over the years, but shipping all of its huge, analog equipment hindered world tours and travel outside of Europe. During this decade, the band often stated that it was working on new material—though speculation about release dates fell through several times. The growing time between recordings, the rarity of live performances, and the increasingly exacting and protracted nature of the recording process were the major reasons behind the departure of Flür and especially Bartos, whose improvisations were an essential part of the earlier Kraftwerk recordings. Following the departure of Flür and Bartos, various Kling Klang studio personnel, such as Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz, have appeared in what some have called the second classic line-up of Kraftwerk which has been active from 1992 to the present. Press and critics have noted their importance is only equalled by The Beatles.

A Web site, www.kraftwerk.com appeared in November 1996, with further development work occurring since 1999 and the resumption of audio releases by the group. Like the parallel releases of both German and English language recordings, the Web site now is accessible with either international (.com) or German (.de) suffixes. There also has been a separate merchandise site www.klingklang.com since Kraftwerk gained control of that domain name from a previous owner.

In summer 1999, the single "Tour de France" was finally released on CD, signalling the resumption of public activity. Also at this time, the group signed a new music publishing contract with Sony-ATV Music.

File:Kraftwerk drumpads small.jpg
The electronic drum pads in use during a performance in 1975.

The single Expo 2000, its first new song in 13 years, was released in December 1999 and was subsequently remixed by contemporary techno musicians such as Underground Resistance and Orbital. It should be noted that the only artist permitted to remix the band’s recordings prior to that time was François Kevorkian.

In 2000, ex-member Flür published his autobiography in Germany, Kraftwerk: I Was a Robot, which revealed many previously unreported details about life in the band. This book met with hostility and litigation from Hütter and Schneider, who disputed several of its claims (e.g., that Flür had built the band's first electronic drum pads) and objected to the public discussion of personal information.

In August 2003, the band finally released Tour de France Soundtracks, its first album of new material since 1986's Electric Café.

In June 2005, the band’s first-ever official live album, Minimum-Maximum, which was compiled from the shows during the band's tour of spring 2004, received extremely positive reviews. Most of the tracks featured had been heavily reworked and remodeled from the existing studio versions. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album. Released with the album was a Minimum-Maximum DVD, featuring live footage of the band performing the Minimum-Maximum tracks in various venues all over the world.

Current line-up

  • Ralf Hütter – Hammond-organ, synthesizers, electronic instruments, lead-vocals.
  • Florian Schneider – Synthesizers, electronic instruments, flute, electro-violin, vocoder.
  • Fritz Hilpert – Sound engineer, electronic percussion (1987–).
  • Henning Schmitz – Sound engineer (1978-), electronic percussion & keyboards (Late 1991-)


Music

Though most famous for its Synth-pop albums, Kraftwerk began as a Krautrock jam band in the vein of Can or Neu! Its first three albums were more free-form experimental rock without the pop hooks or the more disciplined strong structure of their later work. Kraftwerk, released in 1970, and Kraftwerk 2, released in 1972, were mostly exploratory jam music, played on a variety of traditional instruments including guitar, bass, electric organ, flute, and violin. Post-production modifications to these recordings were then used to distort the sound of the instruments, particularly audio-tape manipulation and multiple dubbings of one instrument on the same track. Both albums are purely instrumental.

With Ralf und Florian, released in 1973, the band began to move closer to its classic sound, relying more heavily on synthesizers and drum machines. Although almost entirely instrumental, the album marks Kraftwerk's first use of the vocoder, which would, in time, become one of its musical signatures.

Their breakthrough, both musically and popularly, came in 1974 with the Autobahn album and its 22-minute title track, featuring the motorik beat (you can hear a sample on the album's page), which was a worldwide hit and demonstrated their increasing reliance on synthesizers and electronics. This preceded a trio of albums that would exert a huge influence on popular music—Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), and The Man-Machine (1978).

Kraftwerk's lyrics deal with post-war European urban life and technology—traveling by car on the Autobahn, traveling by train, using home computers, and the like. Usually, the lyrics are very minimal but reveal both an innocent celebration of, and a knowing caution about, the modern world, as well as playing an integral role in the rhythmic structure of the songs. Many of Kraftwerk's songs express the paradoxical nature of modern urban life—a strong sense of alienation existing side-by-side with a celebration of the joys of modern technology.

Kraftwerk was one of the first pop-oriented acts to record using pure electronic (or electronically processed) instruments and sounds exclusively. Many of the vocals in Kraftwerk songs are processed through a vocoder or generated using speech synthesis software. In addition, a Texas Instruments Language Translator[7] was used to generate synthetic speech on its 1981 album Computer World—not a Speak and Spell as is commonly believed (though its bleeps do occur at the beginning of "Home Computer").[8]

File:EC-D-front.jpg
The German language version of Electric Café (1986).

It also pioneered the use of backing tracks that were generated by the electronic sequencing of purely synthetic sounds.

Notably, all of their albums from Radio-activity onward have been recorded in separate versions: one with German vocals for sale in Germany, and one with English vocals for international sale, with occasional other language variations when conceptually appropriate. The single "Tour de France" featured lyrics in French (as does the 2003 album Tour de France Soundtracks). The German-language versions are Kraftwerk's attempt to provide an alternative to the dominant Anglo-American influence in rock and pop music:

‘So you see another group, like Tangerine Dream, although [it is] German, [it has] an English[-language] name, so [it creates] on-stage an Anglo–American identity, which we completely deny. We want the whole World to know that we are from Germany, because the German mentality – which is more advanced – will always be part of our behaviour. We create out of the German language, the mother-language, which is very mechanical; we use it as the basic structure of our music.’
— Ralf Hütter[9]

Live shows

Live performance always has played an important part in Kraftwerk's activities. Also, despite its live shows generally being based around formal songs and compositions, live improvisation often plays a noticeable role in its performances. This trait can be traced back to the group’s roots in the experimental krautrock scene of the late 1960s, but significantly, it has continued to be a part of its playing even as it makes ever greater use of digital and computer-controlled sequencing in its performances. Some of the band's familiar compositions have been observed to have developed from live improvisations at their concerts or sound-checks.

Early gigs (1970–1974)

Early in the group's career, between 1970 and 1974, the group made sporadic live appearances, mostly in its native Germany, with a variety of line-ups. A few of these performances were for television broadcasts. The only constant figure in these line-ups was Schneider, whose main instrument at the time was the flute, but who also played violin and guitar, processed through a varied array of electronic effects. Hütter (who left the band for six months in 1971) played Synthesizer keyboards (including Farfisa organ and electric piano). At least some of its performances were made as a duo, using a simple beat-box-type electronic drum machine with preset rhythms taken from an electric organ. Various other musicians who appeared on stage as part of the group during these years included Klaus Dinger (acoustic drums), Andreas Hohmann (acoustic drums), Michael Rother (electric guitar), Charly Weiss (drums), Eberhard Kranemann (bass guitar), Plato Kostic (bass guitar), Emil Schult (electro-violin, electric guitar), Klaus Roeder (electric violin, electric guitar), and Wolfgang Flür (electronic percussion).

Documentation of this period in the group's history is sparse, with Hütter and Schneider not keen to talk about it in interviews. A few bootleg recordings are in circulation. The only official released material is its 1971 performance on the German Beat Club TV show, which is available on DVD.

Tours with the quartet line-up (1975–1981)

1975 saw a turning point in Kraftwerk's live shows. For the first time, with financial support from its record company, they were able to undertake a multi-date tour to promote the Autobahn album. This tour took them across the Atlantic to the USA for the first time. The tour also saw a new, stable, live line-up in the form of a quartet. Hütter and Schneider both mainly played keyboard parts on synthesizers such as the MiniMoog and ARP Odyssey, with Schneider's use of flute diminishing. The two of them also sang vocals on stage for the first time, with Schneider also using a vocoder live. Wolfgang Flür and new recruit Karl Bartos performed live electronic percussion using custom-made (and, at the time, unique) sensor pads hit with metal sticks to complete a circuit and trigger analog synthetic percussion circuits (initially cannibalized from the aforementioned organ beat box). Bartos also used a metallophone-like instrument.

Between 1975 and 1981, Kraftwerk toured regularly to accompany each of its album releases (the exception being for The Man-Machine), with the same Hütter-Schneider-Bartos-Flür line-up. Emil Schult generally fulfilled the role of tour manager. As this period progressed, the band's set focussed increasingly on song-based material, with vocals, using less acoustic instrumentation, and increasing amounts of sequenced and automated electronic equipment for percussion and musical lines. Its approach generally was to use the sequencing equipment interactively, however, allowing them still to improvise. Flür was heavily involved in designing customized modular housing and packaging for the group's equipment, culminating in the Computer World tour of 1981, where the band effectively packed up its entire Kling Klang studio and took it on the road with them. The band also developed an increasing use of visual elements in the live shows during this period. This included back-projected slides and films, increasingly synchronized with the music as the technology developed, an experimental light-beam activated drum cage allowing Flür to trigger electronic percussion through arm gestures, use of hand-held miniaturized instruments during the set, and, perhaps most famously, the use of replica mannequins of themselves to perform onstage during the song "The Robots."

Several bootleg recordings of this period have been widely available, some even in major retail stores, particularly from the Autobahn and Computer World tours.

1990s and beyond

The completion of the 1981 Computer World tour then precipitated an almost decade-long hiatus in Kraftwerk's live activities. The unit did not perform again until 1990, by which time Flür had left the band three years earlier and was replaced by Fritz Hilpert. The next proper tour was in 1991, for the album The Mix. By this time, Bartos also had left the line-up. Hütter and Schneider wished to continue the Synth-pop quartet style of presentation, and recruited Portuguese Fernando Abrantes, who was soon replaced by Henning Schmitz, to take to the stage with them. In addition to their live duties, Hilpert and Schmitz fufill the role of sound engineers.

From this point, the band's equipment increasingly reduced manual playing, replacing it with interactive control of sequencing equipment. Hütter retains the most manual performance, still playing selected musical lines by hand on a controller keyboard and singing live vocals and having a repeating Ostinato. Much of Schneider's live vocoding has been replaced by software-controlled speech-synthesis techniques. By 2002, the band was touring using four laptop computers, running all of its sequencing, sound-generating, and visual-display software. Back-projected computer-generated video, synchronized with the songs, was an increasingly integral component of the show. The band also continued to develop its robots, which by now featured computer-controlled mechanical pivoting limbs, allowing them to dance.

The increased availability and sophistication of portable digital recording equipment means that bootlegs from this period are numerous, despite the band's efforts to prevent such recordings. In 2005, the band released its first official live album, Minimum-Maximum, recorded on its 2004 world tour.

A DVD of their 2004 world tour, Minimum-Maximum (DVD), also is available.

Discography

See main page: Kraftwerk discography

Albums

Miscellaneous albums

  • 1975: Exceller 8 (UK single album compilation of uniquely edited tracks from 1970–74)
  • 1976: Doppelalbum (German double album compilation, with tracks from 1970–74)
  • 1976: Pop Lions (German single album compilation)
  • 1979: Highrail (German single album compilation, with tracks from 1970–74)
  • 1981: Elektro Kinetik - Reflections (UK single album compilation, with tracks from 1972–74)
  • 1997: Klang Box (UK compilation box set of four 12" singles, with tracks from 1977–86)
  • 1998: Concert Classics (live single album recording from the 1975 US tour)
  • 2007: 8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk (Tribute compilation approved by Ralf & Florian themselves [1])

Non-album releases

See Also

El Baile Alemán - Señor Coconut album consisting of Latin-style covers of Kraftwerk songs.

  • Chicago electronic duo Microfilm released an original track Ralf & Florian, an homage to the founders of Kraftwerk, as the b-side to their digital single Chicago, itself an electropop cover of a track by American folksinger Sufjan Stevens.

Official Kraftwerk links:

Other associates:

  • klaus-roeder.org – Website of avant-garde classical guitarist Klaus Röder, former kraftwerk member.
  • Early Kraftwerk – Former associate Eberhard Kranemann reminisces about the Düsseldorf music scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  • emilschult.com – Website of artist Emil Schult.

Further information:

  1. ^ The Guardian, Desperately Seeking Kraftwerk
  2. ^ NME, Kraftwerk : Minimum-Maximum Live
  3. ^ John McCready on Kraftwerk
  4. ^ Harrington, Richard (Friday, May 27, 2005). "These Days, Kraftwerk is Packing Light". Washington post. p. WE08. Retrieved 2006-07-06. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ Gill, Andy. "KRAFTWERK:".
  6. ^ Interviewed in Liberation magazine, 1991
  7. ^ http://www.datamath.org/Speech/LanguageTranslator.htm Datamath.org Retrieved on 06-02-07
  8. ^ http://kraftwerk.hu/faq/equipment.html Kraftwerk.hu Retrieved on 06-02-07
  9. ^ Interview by Lester Bangs: "Kraftwerkfeature", Creem magazine, September 1975
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kraftwerk&oldid=144129123"