Kraftwerk (album)
| power plant | ||||
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| Kraftwerk studio album | ||||
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Publication |
1970 |
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admission |
1970 |
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| Label (s) | Philips | |||
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Format (s) |
LP |
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Title (number) |
4th |
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running time |
39:39 |
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| occupation |
Ralf Hütter : Organ , Tubon Florian Schneider : Flute , Violin Klaus Dinger : Drums Andreas Hohmann: Drums |
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Studio (s) |
Kling Klang Studio |
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Kraftwerk is the self-titled debut album by the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk . It was produced by Conny Plank and was released in 1970.
History of origin
In 1968 Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider met at the Art Academy in Remscheid and together they attended an improvisation course at the Conservatory in Düsseldorf , where Hütter was trained on the electronic organ and Schneider on the flute . Early musical influences alongside his studies included the musique concrète of the composers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer , which Schneider discovered in his parents' record collection , as well as a concert at Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne .
Schneider and Hütter realized their common interest in improvisation and avant-garde music together with Basil Hammoudi , Butch Hauf and Alfred Möricks with the founding of the group Organization and the 1970 RCA Victor album Tone Float , on whose cover the traffic cone initially used by Kraftwerk as a logo has already been used. Although the musical direction corresponded to the experimental zeitgeist of the Krautrock popular in West Germany at the beginning of the 1970s , the album was a commercial failure. This was due to the fact that the record company only sold in England and the LP was therefore only available as an import in Germany.
Due to the negative experiences with organization , which manifested themselves on the one hand through the difficult decision-making due to the democratic structures within a five-piece band and the musically unconvincing result of purely improvised music, Schneider and Hütter decided to found a new formation with the German name Kraftwerk , to consciously represent a “German identity” in what was perceived as “Americanized” culture in Germany during the post-war period , whereby right-wing populist tendencies were clearly rejected.
To develop new musical ideas, Kraftwerk founded the Kling-Klang-Studio in Düsseldorf and has already won over the record company Philips and the producer Conny Plank for a planned release. At first the search for a new drummer turned out to be difficult, so Schneider tried to experiment with electronic rhythm machines, which could be used successfully on later albums. Andreas Hohmann and Klaus Dinger could ultimately be hired as drummers , with whom the tracks written by Schneider and Hütter were recorded in July and August 1970 and the self-titled album Kraftwerk was released on record in the same year .
Due to the musical reorientation with electronic pop music that Kraftwerk initiated with the 1974 album Autobahn , Tone Float (1970), Kraftwerk (1970) as well as Kraftwerk 2 (1972) and Ralf and Florian (1973) have so far only been released as records and not as CD has been re-released.
Music style and further development
At Kraftwerk , the group developed the style adopted on Tone Float with improvisational and noisy elements and enriched the musical spectrum with repetitive figures and persistent soundscapes that correspond to the typical characteristics of Krautrock . Due to the purely acoustic instrumentation with organ , tubon (Hütter), flute , violin (Schneider) and drums (Hohmann, Dinger), the contrast to the later complete works , in the Kraftwerk especially on the albums Trans Europa Express (1977), Die Mensch -Maschine (1978) and Computerwelt (1981) pioneered the creation and establishment of electronic pop music with the help of synthesizers and drum computers .
The first title of the album, Ruckzuck was as the theme song of political television program registration D used.
After various personnel changes, in which Kraftwerk was briefly supported by bassist Eberhard Kranemann after Andreas Hohmann left the group, who joined the jazz rock band Ibliss , Ralf Hütter also left the group for six months. Guitarist Michael Rother was accepted as a new member . In 1971, Kraftwerk appeared in the line-up of Schneider, Dinger and Rother on the German music television program Beat-Club , with the featured title recoil Gondolier , which is not included on Kraftwerk , on the recording Frontiers Of Progressive Rock with other pieces by Emerson, Lake and Palmer , King Crimson , The Nice , Soft Machine and Yes was available on the market. After Hütter and Schneider found each other again to work on the successor Kraftwerk 2 , Rother and Dinger left the group and later achieved Neu! international recognition.
Cover
The cover designed by Ralf Hütter is decorated with a traffic cone with a bright orange color on a white background. The word "Kraftwerk" lies in black letters across the motif. The following album Kraftwerk 2 uses the same motif with a green traffic cone. The explicit depiction of a banal everyday object with only a minimal change in color can be traced back to the motif work of Pop Art artist Andy Warhol , who created entire series of individual, marginally different motifs.
The traffic cone is also shown on the official studio albums Tone Float (1970) and Ralf and Florian (1973). The traffic cone has also been used on other, partly unofficial compilation and "best-of" compilations.
Track list
A side
- In no time - 7:47
- Stratovarius - 12:10
B side
- Mega heart - 9:30
- From heaven high - 10:12
All titles were written by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider.
Web links
- Kraftwerk at Allmusic (English)
- Reviews of Kraftwerk on the baby blue pages
- zem.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Pascal Bussy: Kraftwerk. Synthesizers, sounds and samples - the unusual career of a German band . Munich 1995, pp. 21-22.
- ↑ Bussy, pp. 23-25.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 29.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 32.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 36.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 40.
- ↑ cit. n. Eberhard Kranemann in: Rüdiger Esch: Electri_City. Electronic music from Düsseldorf 1970–1986. With a foreword by Wolfgang Flür. With numerous illustrations. 2nd Edition. Berlin 2014, p. 41.
- ↑ Andreas Borcholte: Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf: The smile of the robot . Spiegel Online , January 12, 2013; accessed on July 23, 2015.
- ↑ informatik.uni-hamburg.de ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. accessed on July 23, 2015.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 42.
- ↑ Beat club frontiers of progressive rock: ELP, King Crimson, Nice, Soft Machine, Yes, Kraftwerk YouTube , accessed July 23, 2015.
- ^ Julian Weber: On the death of the musician Klaus Dinger. Maestro of Apache taz.de , accessed on July 23, 2015.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 39.
- ↑ Bussy, p. 44.
- ↑ Overview of the compilations & best-of publications from Kraftwerk . musik-sammler.de, accessed on September 2, 2015.
