The bandage cat-and-mouse for Sunday brunch at Arnie's, a fountain-strewn and pretentiously busy restaurant, was long, and Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, masterminds abaft the German electronic-rock accumulation Kraftwerk, didn't accept abundant time. They still had to appointment a bounded free-form radio abject afore abandonment on a 5 p.m. flight to Atlanta in the bosom of their aboriginal American tour.
Schneider, dressed in a brusque atramentous clothing and knee-length gray baffled overcoat, stepped over to the maitre d' and began speaking in a blubbery accent. He displayed a postcard with a photograph of four impeccably dressed males staring trancelike into amplitude as if they had just accomplished an athrill religious vision. In the high left-hand bend of the agenda was the group's name. We were built-in immediately.
Kraftwerk, which translates as "power plant," afresh rode up the archive in this country with their Top Five anthology Autobahn, featuring the Top 20 individual of the aforementioned name. Abounding humans feel that Autobahn, forth with its cyberbanking predecessor, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, heralds a new era for bartering cyberbanking rock. The album, on Vertigo Records, is the aboriginal issued in the U.S. by the four-year-old group, who'd ahead appear three albums in West Germany.
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"Autobahn" describes a adventure on the German freeway arch in and out of Berlin, and underscores the group's affair with beating and beachcomber over agenda and rhythm. A Beach Boys almanac it is not, even admitting a bandage from the section – "Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n auf der Autobahn" ("We're driving, driving, active on the autobahn") – sounds uncannily evocative of the bandage from America's arch car group: "And she'll accept fun, fun, fun till her amoroso takes her T-Bird away." Hütter and Schneider, in fact, affirmation no U.S. groups as influences. Their favorites cover such space-rock apparel as Pink Floyd, Yes and Tangerine Dream, as able-bodied as beat classicists John Cage, Terry Riley and, particularly, agriculturist Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose beat cyberbanking plan provides a "spiritual" tie to their own.
"We do not accept ourselves as bedrock & cycle stars," Hütter, a above apprentice agitator of the Sixties, explained amid bites of his eggs florentine. "No, no, we're just clandestine people," Schneider added. "In the black we set up, about-face on the knobs and play.
"Kraftwerk is not a band," Schneider continued. "It's a concept. We alarm it 'Die Menschmaschine,' which agency 'the animal machine.' We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a car for our ideas."
Hütter's and Schneider's account circumduct about the avant-garde use of cyberbanking keyboards and bang pads to actualize music that is awful beheld and attainable (Autobahn even fabricated it assimilate the Easy Listening charts). "There's consistently this melody and we body it up to allegorize a story," said Hütter, who sees himself as the almanac agnate of a blur director. "Like a cine script, the camera puts absorption to a assertive part. Then we zoom in on it as if we were operating a huge lens."
On the anthology adaptation of "Autobahn," which as a song takes up the record's absolute aboriginal side, anniversary agreeable byword marks a anniversary on the agreeable auto jaunt. The section flows from the aboriginal calmness of "a huge valley" and "the sun animated in a bright stream" to the optical illusions acquired by amaranthine "white stripes, blooming edges" and the brusque blow of a Porsche or Mercedes dispatch past. The lyrics are in their built-in tongue, Hütter explained, because "the German language, like our own rhythms, is added machinelike, added abrupt.
"The autobahn is a absolute car for our music," Hütter said. "We did not attending for it. It just happens that we play synthesizers and we al of a abrupt saw this chat 'autobahn,' and we begin out that while we were on it we were affective and changing, like in a movie."
Obviously, Kraftwerk sees cars and added symbols of technology as added than "fun, fun, fun." "You cannot abjure technology," Hütter maintained. "There was a addiction in the backward Sixties to do so, to go aback to the country, which is understandable. But technology is still there and you accept to face it and reside with it. And we accomplish it a allotment of our music. The added you can handle it, the added you can advance yourself."
Hütter and Schneider barrage from Düsseldorf, the basic of the North Rhine-Westphalia commune of West Germany. The area's harsh, brusque contrasts amid abundant industry in one basin and beautiful, rolling landscapes in the next played a above role in abstraction their sound. Even the breadth they almanac in has been a antecedent of inspiration. "Our flat is in the average of an oil refinery," said Schneider, his eyes lighting up. "There's smoke and blaze about it and if you appear from the flat you apprehend this hissing complete all about you."
Kraftwerk financed its own U.S. tour, as Phonogram/Mercury, the American adumbrative of Vertigo, did not accede it. Actually, Kraftwerk's arrangement with Phonogram ran out several months ago and is anon getting adjourned (Phonogram has three unreleased albums in the can). Hütter and Schneider don't intend to accomplish the aforementioned affectionate of accord they did aback in 1971, if they awash the absolute rights to Kraftwerk, the aboriginal of their three European albums, to Philips Records (a Phonogram subsidiary) for $2000.
For abounding of the humans who saw Kraftwerk during their tour, one of the a lot of abnormal aspects of the accumulation was the application of two percussionists, new affiliate Karl Bartos and aboriginal affiliate Wolfgang Flür. They played electronically acclimatized pads able to simulate any boom accentuation rather than acoustically congenital boom kits. As Schneider explained it, the pads highlight the group's cyberbanking base. "We don't accomplish a acumen amid an acoustic apparatus as a antecedent of complete and any complete in the air alfresco or on a bogus tape. It's all electric energy, anyway," he said.
But the use of two percussionists may accept been one of the affidavit why the bout itself met with alloyed success. Without the accustomed sounds of Klaus Roeder's guitar and violin (he was replaced on the bout by Bartos), the accumulation was larboard alone with keyboards, bang and an casual canal and saxophone abandoned by Schneider. A San Francisco analyst wrote: "The absolute achievement was one fizz that assorted its pitch. The admirers even had adversity acute the end of numbers."
Kraftwerk's circadian access to agreement gave Schneider a antiphon to this criticism. "There is no alpha and no end in music," he said. "Some humans wish it to end. But it goes on."
This adventure apeeared in the July 3rd, 1975 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 190: July 3, 1975
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