Kraftwerk article (Starlog's FUTURE magazine)

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STARLOG/FUTURE October 1978

GERMANY'S MUSIC MACHINES MARCH ON (author uncredited)

A lot of contemporary music's harshest critics accuse it of being both redundant and dehumanizing. Most rock stars totally resent those accussations...but not Kraftwerk, a German band that is admittedly different than most. "It's all true," says Ralf Hutter. "We are very cold. We are robots. That's how we feel. It's automatic music."

Kraftwerk is a contemporary foursome (Ralf, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flur) that defies description. Selling hundreds of thousands of records, the group breaks every rule of rock and roll. The quartet looks like the short haired offspring of the German youth movement of the thirties, plays over-extended electronic melodies and never moves while performing on stage. Despite the band's eccentric style, however, they attract a large (albeit confused) youthful following.

"Kraftwerk's sound is hard to comprehend," says Ralf, "because it goes beyond musical categories. It doesn't fit into the guitar-hero culture. I think our music has more to do with science, science fiction or futurism than with traditional musicmanship. Mainly we are turning knobs and using filters, oscillators, switches, faders and cables. When we are on stage, we're not jumping around and playing loud music. We are standing there, creating sound."

Describing the "sound" created by Kraftwerk (a German word meaning "electric power plant") is nearly impossible. Unearthly drumming rumbles unobtrusively in the background while unsynthesized rhythms and distorted vocals drone from speaker to speaker. The finished product sounds like a duet between Robby the Robot and several of 2001's humming monoliths.

"Our sound is very metallic," admits Florian. "We use standard synthesizers but we also use a lot of automatic music programming machines. We used a lot of devices gathered from the computer data field which are not exactly musical instruments but have been modified by some inventor friends of ours. We use a synthetic drum system. We also use the human voice as an instrument."

"We modify vocals by using computers," Ralf adds. "We also make use of the singing typewriter. It's a computer terminal part. We took a terminal keyboard and connected it with different dublications of sounds made by the human voice. In storage, we have all the ingredients for a vocal. By pressing different keys, you can create different vocal lines. You can also modify the pitch of the voice so it goes much further than even opera singing. A singer or an instrument has a certain musical range, whereas we have the whole range of soundwaves available. Because we are not limited in terms of sound range, we often don't know who is playing what. Between the four of us, the sound becomes universal."

Kraftwerk's universal robotics actually began quite innocently enough when it's members were young boys playing traditional German classical music. "But Germany is a very scientific country," Ralf explains. "There is always an emphasis put on scientists. We feel like the sons of Wernher von Braun."

"When we were children, there was a nearby radio station that used to play live broadcasts of the experimental composer Stockhausen. We learned about electronic music when we were very young."

As a result, the teenaged version of the current Kraftwerk abandoned traditional music ideas very quickly, starting their own Kling Klang studios to record their embryonic works. "We thought it would be better to continue to progress than sit around and wait for someone from the outside to come in and discover us," recalls Ralf.

Gradually, the band began evolving into their present state; a state wherein tradition is considered verboten. "We don't think in terms of music," Ralf says. "We are interested in the world of sounds. We listen to anything that produces sounds. We call this 'tape consciousness,' because we feel that we have inborn microphones in our ears, like tape recorders. We walk around and record both the inner and outer sounds and then reproduce all this in our electronic music machines. We think of ourselves as builders of sound."

"We were very much influenced by the futuristic silent films of Fritz Lang; Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse. We feel that we are the sons of that type of SF cinema. We are the band of 'Metropolis'. Back in the twenties, people were thinking technologically about about the future in physics, film, radio, chemistry, mass transport...everything but music. We feel that our music is a continuation of this early futurism. When you go and see 'Star Wars', with all it's science-fiction gadgets, we feel embarrassed to listen to the music...nineteenth century strings! THAT music for THAT film!? Historically, we feel that if there was a music group in "Metropolis", maybe Kraftwerk would have been that band."

Ralf is at a loss to explain why it has taken electronic music so long to develop, to catch up, but adds, "The sound producing materials were just not available in the twenties. It wasn't until the 1950's that creative people began experimenting, and many of them were former radio engineers. Remember that a lot of the first electronic instruments weren't really instruments but pieces of broadcasting equipment; oscillators, antennas, tuning instruments. Even when electronic instruments were being pioneered, people wound up playing silly things like 'The Star Spangled Banner' on them. You still have silliness like Walter Carlos playing Bach on a synthesizer. Why take a piece of futuristic hardware and use it to mimic something from the past?"

On their newest album, Man-Machine, Kraftwerk takes their metallic concepts to their fullest extremes. "The machines are a part of us and we are part of the machines," Ralf expounds. "They play us, and we play with them. We are brothers. They are not our slaves. We work together, helping each other to create."

"People fear losing their humanity to technology. That's nonsense. A human being in contact with a machine becomes more of a human. There is so much to be discovered about human beings from machines. They mirror our personalities and we, in turn, mirror the image of the machine. Today's society is technologized, no matter how you might want to avoid that fact. If you dismiss technology as a toy, you're only acting out of fear. It's basically man's fear of being dominated or his desire to dominate that causes so much harm in regards to technology. Whereas if you cultivate a symbiotic relationship with machines, everyone benefits. When you're working with machines, your most basic elements are revealed. There's no room for pretention. You get to the basic structure. That's why a man-machine union is so healthy."

In Kraftwerk's eyes, their sound is nothing short of the sound of tomorrow. Sleek. Ever changing, yet constant. Dehumanized. With success now assured and their fans yearning for new albums yearly, there seems to be no stopping Kraftwerk from their futuristic designs.

Well, almost. In France recently, when the band decided to play overtime on stage, a nearby guard did manage to come up with a way of knocking the foursome cold. And just how did this one frail human succeed in bringing the electronic sons of 'Metropolis' to their knees before a capacity crowd of ardent fans? Ralf shrugs his shoulders in dismay, "He pulled out our plug."

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[Ollie Stench]

thanks!

[hutter]

It's a rerun, but what the hey.