Kraftwerk

In the months surrounding 1968, two German men made each other’s acquaintance at a school of music named Akademie Remscheid.  Like the rest of Germany at the time, they were wrestling with their own identity and desperately longed to convey a message of openness, unity, and individuality in their life and their music.  Both of them having a slightly skewed musical vision from the norm and yet, classically trained musicians, their creative chemistry would soon grow into something so much more than they could have possibly ever imagined.  They formed a group called Organization as a part of the experimental, industrial, and psychedelic music scene going on in Germany at the time, called; Krautrock.  These two individuals were: Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider Esleben.

Ralf and Florian started a studio and called it Kling Klang Studio in Dusseldorf, Germany where they begin to combine their feelings about what it was to be German, how they felt as individuals, and the industrial environment in which they lived.  This new direction would be labeled as Kraftwerk, and would from that moment on, be the name that would carry their legacy for all time.

As experimentally rambunctious and striking as their music was in the years leading up to the release of Autobahn 1974, these two artists remained somewhat reclusive and hid their faces from the spotlight at every turn.  They rarely allowed themselves to be seen in their entirety.  Reputedly performing live on stage with their backs to their audience lending a somewhat mysterious air to their presence.  Their music generation was creatively, just as mysterious.  They rarely allowed visitors to their studio and often kept it’s location a secret.  Using “robots” as a sort of avatar for their presence on stage as well, made by mechanizing life-sized mannequins, they gained an almost “techno mage” sort of image that bled over into their music and the art often surrounding it.

Autobahn was released in 1974.  It would depart from the usually extreme experimentation heard in their work at this time.  They started to included hooks and melodies in the mix.  With the title track by the same name being somewhat inspired by The Beach Boys, we began to see Kraftwerk moving into a more broad audience.  This was important to their survival and longevity as they continued to grow and experiment with their musical ideas and concepts.

Now that they were using a somewhat “concept album” approach to their production efforts, their next three albums; Radioactive, Trans-Europe Express, and The Man Machine would help to peak their popularity and launch them to a transcontinental influence.

Once their sound began to spread and get heard by other musicians, in America and the rest of the world, artists struggled to recreate some of these unique soundscapes.  It proved to be more a daunting task for many, as Kraftwerk crafted their own machines and synthesizers to create the electronic sounds used in all of their music, never using any mass-produced machines.  This, to me is one of the main things that made their music so revolutionary.  It insured that you would hear sounds and nuances of electronically generated music that you had never heard before.  This led to an amazingly creative sweep of audio engineering that would herald the beginnings of the vast tree that electronic music is today.