Kraftwerk Catalogue Plus

Since the news broke last week of Florien Schneider's passing, I've been revisiting my Kraftwerk collection, that is, the Catalogue albums, plus the three pre-Autobahn albums that Hütter and Schneider have long declined to re-issue. My CD album editions pre-date the 2009 remasters (which I've heard mixed reports about), but the discs sound absolutely fine and far better than my old LPs which were prone to skips and increasingly distracting surface noise. Kraftwerk made their albums sound so beautifully refined and luxurious, that any extraneous noise becomes a distraction. I long held the image of Kraftwerk recording their music in pristine white lab coats in an ultra clean laboratory. Needless to say it was quite a jolt when I finally saw pictures of the group at Kling Klang, dressed smart casual and the studio brimming with electronic and traditional instruments fed by a writhing mass of cables snaking across the floor.

In addition to the Catalogue albums, there is of course Kraftwerk 1, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf and Florian. I think it was Hütter who brutally dismissed these early albums as "rubbish", which is ludicrous of course - all three are essential documents of German electronica and are strongly recommended to adventurous ears. A cursory listen to these albums (which in the absence of official releases are easily available to stream and download at least), might suggest this noisier, more experimental side of Kraftwerk doesn't sit well with the electronic purity and the precision beats and rhythms of the Catalogue albums. Certainly, there are parts of the first two albums in particular, that seem anathema to Hütter and Schneider's later methodology, with sections of music that sound like they strayed from one of Kluster's proto-Industrial improvisations. One might even hear a guitar plucked Derek Bailey-style here and there. Atem off Kraftwerk 2, is an electronically treated recording of someone breathing, and I presume it was this kind of sonic weirdness that prompted Steve Stapleton to place Kraftwerk on the Nurse With Would List. But with a closer listen to these albums, you can get a sense of the near future - the train-like rhythms of Ruckzuck, and the robot chit-chat heard on Vom Himmel Hoch, both from Kraftwerk 1, the gorgeous melody on the trance-like Tanzmusik on Ralf and Florian, anticipate the music Kraftwerk became famous for. What's most pleasing about listening to these three early albums again after wading through the Catalogue is the sense of the group evolving towards the more familiar Kraftwerk. It was as if Hütter and Schneider had to pass through that experimental phase of the first two albums, before arriving at the warmth of Ralf and Florian and onward to Autobahn...

Fun fun fun on the Autobahn

Listening to Kraftwerk's Autobahn this evening and it occurred to me that the album came out the same year as J.G. Ballard's novel Concrete Island. The connective tissue between album and novel is the motorway, but it's interesting that both assume diametrically opposed positions - Autobahn's title track presents the motorway as a technological landscape in harmony with nature - the image of clean Bauhaus lines unspooling across the German countryside. Ballard imagined the "elaborately signalled landscape" of the motorway as something far more sinister - a high-speed network of relentless and aggressive 24/7 traffic flow that could not be halted, even if a person's life depended on it, the predicament the protagonist of Concrete Island finds himself in as he swerves off the motorway onto a stretch of disused and forgotten wasteland between interchanges. I wondered had Ballard heard Kraftwerk's album but it's seems unlikely. Ballard doesn't mention Kraftwerk in any interviews and in a 1978 interview Ballard himself admitted "I don’t listen to music. It’s a blind spot." Still I like to imagine Kraftwerk, or Kraftwerk dummies playing electronic music to the guests at Vermillion Sands...