By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 27, 2005
HAVING deprogrammed and unplugged themselves for much of the '80s and '90s, German electronic pop pioneers Kraftwerk reappeared at the start of the new millennium. But where 20 years before they'd fought for space on stages cluttered with tons of temperamental analog equipment, they returned to stages bare except for a single widescreen video screen and four identical lecterns bearing laptops.
Says co-founder Ralf Hutter, "the technology has developed in our creative direction, so to speak."
Back then, "we were very far away from performing the sound from our records and [their legendary] Kling Klang Studio standards in a live situation," Hutter says, recalling an era when "the equipment was very fragile and would fall apart or would take so long and be so complicated to put together. At the same time, it got heavier and heavier -- and we didn't have roadies in the beginning, of course. After touring [in the early '80s], we couldn't perform, so we concentrated on other work in the studio."
In the '90s, Kraftwerk started playing occasional dates, "but the equipment was still really heavy," Hutter says. "Now, we are very mobile, very minimal. We have been able to play in [high outdoor] temperature in Australia and in Tokyo in an ice-cold exhibition park with gloves, so we're really happy [because] everything is functioning very, very well."
Kraftwerk (German for "power station") formed in 1968 at Dusseldorf Conservatory, when classical music students Hutter and Florian Schneider found themselves drawn to experimental music and free jazz. They started toying with tape recorders and echo machines, though their hard-to-find 1971 debut album only suggests the future, featuring manipulated violin, flute, organ and actual drummers, replaced a year later by primitive drum machines. Acoustic instruments soon gave way to synthesizers -- Kraftwerk's members were among the first pop musicians to abandon traditional rock instrumentation for what was then still-new synthesizer/electronic technology.
With the addition of Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, Kraftwerk brought electronic music into the mainstream with 1974's "Autobahn," whose 22-minute all-synth title track became an international hit. Also the first pop record to feature the vocoder, "Autobahn" kicked off a five-album hot streak that included "Radio-Activity," "Trans-Europe Express," "The Man-Machine" and 1981's "Computer World," which anticipated a world we now take for granted. Along the way, the band changed the pulse of modern music.
Hutter and Schneider -- who remain the only active founding members, augmented over the last decade by Kling Klang Studio mates Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz -- had been fascinated with machines and the rhythms of industry while growing up in post-World War II Germany. They eventually dubbed their music -- which featured precise yet weirdly funky rhythms, simple melodies and lyric minimalism -- "industrial folk music." The musicians dubbed themselves "sound chemists" while championing the new technology of everyday life.
"On the creative side, that was our possibility, to work with these music machines," Hutter explains. "Like we say, sometimes we play the machines and sometimes the machines play us. [The idea was] to be in a real dialogue and listen to the wonders of technology in the way that natural laws are applied in the music -- the physical laws of music and sound in combination with artistic ideas -- and not just ignore everything. Our idea was really this combination of men and machines, and for us, it has worked very well."
And, he says, "ours is the creative side of machines, making music with pocket calculators and computers and creating interesting images and art forms. That's the main essence of what it's all about and has been since Bach did the 'Well Tempered Piano' at a time when the piano was the latest invention."
To some, it may smack of overstatement to compare Kraftwerk to Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, James Brown and the Beatles as among the most influential pop figures of the 20th century, but their DNA is identifiable in everything from techno, house, trance, trip-hop and synthpop to hip-hop. In 1982, pioneering DJ Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock" blended rap with the melody and beat from Kraftwerk singles "Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers," respectively, creating a seminal rap recording and one of the most frequently sampled tracks in history. Whether you think of the New Romantics and the synthpop movements of the '80s or today's rave culture, it's hard to imagine what modern music would sound like without Kraftwerk's innovations. What was brand-new in the mid-'70s is no longer an anomaly: Electro culture is everywhere, and Kraftwerk is its daddy.
"Maybe that's a little overstating," Hutter counters humbly. "We try to do our contribution."
Yet just as their sound was beginning to take hold, Kraftwerk retreated from public life, sealing themselves away in Kling Klang, a brick warehouse that's unlisted and unfindable, its location something of a holy grail among Kraftwerk devotees. It has no phone, no fax, no receptionist and no street entrance; any mail that finds its way there is returned unopened.
For 15 years, Kraftwerk sightings were as infrequent as Kraftwerk interviews and releases. For a group that seemed to thrive on notions of motion -- cars on "Autobahn," trains on "Trans-Europe Express," bicycles on 1983's "Tour de France" single -- Kraftwerk suddenly seemed to be going nowhere really slowly. Hutter and Schneider emerged as cycling fanatics who seemed to be far more interested in riding than recording (in his autobiography, Bartos cited that as a major factor in his leaving the group).
Poetically, Kraftwerk's first album in 17 years, 2003's "Tour de France Soundtracks," was a musical celebration of the centennial anniversary of the world's most famous cycle race, as well as the 20th anniversary of Kraftwerk's own "Tour de France," a song originally intended for an album titled "Techno-Pop." That album was abandoned after Hutter almost died after splitting his skull in a 1982 bike crash; only the single came out. Soon after, Kraftwerk got caught up in the digital revolution, and, after retrenching, released what might have become its final album, 1986's ill-received "Electric Cafe." But like a well-greased bicycle wheel that refuses to stop spinning, "Tour de France" came to fruition as "Tour de France Soundtracks," with identical cover art.
"It was 'the unfinished symphony,' " Hutter says. "It was like a film script put aside with a single in '83. Then with the anniversary, the idea came back: Now is the time we must do it and really finish this album."
Tracks like "Elektro Kardiogramm," "Vitamin," "Aero Dynamik" and "Titanium" proved to be comfortingly familiar, but Kraftwerk's perfectionism kept "Tour de France Soundtracks" from coming out until weeks after the Tour itself had crossed the finish line. But nothing could diminish Kraftwerk's pleasure at being part of the race, sometimes literally, in the race director's helicopter or lead car.
"Sometimes in the German press, [Tour rider] Jan Ulrich gets called 'Kraftwerk on wheels,' " Hutter notes proudly. "We know all these roads in the French and Italian mountains because we've ridden them ourselves -- of course in our rhythm and with our friends. So we have been inside the Tour de France, and we did the final mix right when we got back into the studio."
That's not all they've been doing at Kling Klang. Kraftwerk oversaw the digital transfer of the band's vast archives of recordings and sound sources from degenerating master tapes. Much of that was to allow the creation of a mobile Kling Klang, substituting portable laptops for cumbersome analog gear that at one point weighed six tons and was none the more reliable for it. Now if there's a problem, Kraftwerk just reboots.
Additionally, they digitally remastered the entire Kraftwerk catalogue, which will be available as single albums or as a complete set. And a five-city tour that includes shows Monday and Tuesday at the 9:30 club celebrates the June 7 release of "Minimum-Maximum," the band's first live recording. The 22-track double CD was recorded during last year's world tour and refutes the notion that a Kraftwerk show could be played by preprogrammed robots, though robot doubles will make their traditional appearance on, what else, "We Are the Robots."
Hutter says "connecting the visual elements in performance is also very important for us. When we started in the late '60s, we used projectors with photos or drawings, and we've always designed our videos, working with artists and computer graphics, incorporating all kinds of visual elements [also digitally retouched]. It's really like electronic architecture."
All of that, Hutter says, has made performing a lot more fun in recent years.
"Now we produce loudspeaker music, and we can hear it the way it was composed, where before that was only possible on a studio recording. But there was always more to these compositions, and it really comes into the room with 'Trans-Europe Express' or 'Man-Machine,' where the humming of the cars and the environmental quality of the music surround you."
As for the old equipment, it's safe.
"At certain times we exchanged certain modules or old analog synthesizers, when we were out of production or they were out of function. We couldn't even sell them because no one wanted them, so we kept them in our archives. We have a little Kling Klang museum where we have all the prototypes and our original synthesizers from the 'Autobahn' days, all these sequencers with old material. They're all functioning, and we can use them in connection with the digital equipment. The La Cite de la Musique [museum] in Paris wanted us to give it to them, with the robots, but we're still using it so we can't do that."
And that Kraftwerk museum . . . is it open to the public?
"No, it's underneath our studio," Hutter laughs. "The doors are closed."
KRAFTWERK -- Appearing Monday and Tuesday at the 9:30 club.