Kraftwerk This page intentionally left blank Kraftwerk Music Non-Stop edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie N E W Y O R K · L O N D O N 2011 The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2011 Sean Albiez, David Pattie and contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kraftwerk : music non-stop / edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6507-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-6507-X (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9136-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-9136-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kraftwerk (Musical group) 2. Kraftwerk (Musical group)—Influence. 3. Synthpop (Music)—Germany—History and criticism. I. Albiez, Sean. II. Pattie, David, 1963- III. Title. ML421.K73K73 2010 782.42166092’2—dc22 2010019842 ISBN: HB: 978- 1- 4411- 6507- 7 PB: 978- 1- 4411- 9136- 6 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc For Celie, Joe, Jacqui and Cameron ( who can sing ‘Trans-Europe Express’ ) This page intentionally left blank vii Contents List of Contributors ........................................................................................ ix Introduction: The (Ger)man Machines David Pattie ......................................................................................... 1 I. Music, Technology and Culture 1. Autobahn and Heimatklänge: Soundtracking the FRG Sean Albiez and Kyrre Tromm Lindvig ........................................... 15 2. Kraftwerk and the Image of the Modern David Cunningham ........................................................................... 44 3. Kraftwerk – the Decline of the Pop Star Pertti Grönholm ................................................................................. 63 4. Authentic Replicants: Brothers between Decades between Kraftwerk(s) Simon Piasecki and Robert Wilsmore .............................................. 80 5. Kraftwerk: Technology and Composition Carsten Brocker (translated by Michael Patterson) ........................ 97 6. Kraftwerk: Playing the Machines David Pattie ..................................................................................... 119 II. Influences and Legacies 7. Europe Non- Stop: West Germany, Britain and the Rise of Synthpop, 1975–81 Sean Albiez ....................................................................................... 139 8. Vorsprung durch Technik – Kraftwerk and the British Fixation with Germany Richard Witts ................................................................................... 163 CONTENTS viii 9. ‘Dragged into the Dance’ – the Role of Kraftwerk in the Development of Electro-Funk Joseph Toltz ....................................................................................... 181 10. Average White Band: Kraftwerk and the Politics of Race Mark Duffett .................................................................................... 194 11. Trans-Europa Express : Tracing the Trance Machine Hillegonda Rietveld ......................................................................... 214 Discography .................................................................................................. 231 Index ............................................................................................................... 237 ix Contributors Sean Albiez is senior lecturer in popular music at Southampton Solent University. His research and publications include work on German, British and French electronic popular music; Detroit techno; John Lydon and post- punk; electronica, glitch and idm; Madonna; and British punk. He was a member of the industrial-electro-EBM band WMTID in the 1980s, and currently produces electronic music as obe:lus . Further information can be found at www.seanalbiez.com. Carsten Brocker studied Jazz-Piano and Music Education at the Hochschule für Musik ‘Carl Maria von Weber’ in Dresden and Music Science and Art History at the Technische Universität Dresden, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin. He is working on a doctoral thesis about the interdependence between popular electronic music and electronic instruments. He has performed as a pianist and keyboardist all over Europe; he also works as a music scientist and sound designer. He lives in Berlin. David Cunningham is principal lecturer in cultural and critical studies at the University of Westminster and Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture. He is an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy and has published widely on modernism, aesthetics and the avant- garde, including the co-edited collections Adorno and Literature (2006) and Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005). Mark Duffett teaches in popular music at the University of Chester. With a research background in Elvis fandom, he has written articles for various jour- nals including Popular Music and Society , Convergence and Popular Music . He has also contributed a chapter on Bill Grundy’s interview with the Sex Pistols to a forthcoming book on British television, edited by Ian Inglis. Pertti Grönholm is adjunct professor (docent) in the Department of General History in the University of Turku, Finland. His research is into the politics of history and cultural memory; the political use of historical representa- tions; and historiography, especially in the former Soviet Union, Russia and CONTRIBUTORS x the Baltic States in the twentieth century. He has written popular articles on Kraftwerk, Krautrock and electronic dance music for music magazines and newspapers, and has lectured on the history of electronic music. Kyrre Tromm Lindvig is a trained musician, musicologist and journalist based in Oslo, Norway. He completed his PhD, entitled ‘Wir fahren auf der Autobahn – Kraftwerk and constructions of Germanness’, at the University of Oslo in 2008. He also holds undergraduate degrees in rhetoric, classi- cal percussion, philosophy and harmony. He has released two records as a drummer with the acclaimed Norwegian jazz band Quarter Past and is the co- founder of the synthesizer band Agregat. David Pattie is professor of drama at the University of Chester. He is the author of The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett (2001) and Rock Music in Performance (2007), and has published widely on a number of top- ics: Popular music, Scottish theatre, contemporary writing for the stage, and performance in popular culture. Simon Piasecki has worked as a painter, performance artist and academic; he is currently senior lecturer and award leader for the Art, Event, Performance degree at Leeds Metropolitan University. He first met Robert Wilsmore in 1994 as an academic and then as a collaborator in the BET4 Artists collec- tive, showing work in France, Germany and the UK. He has since performed widely throughout Europe and Russia. He has previously published numer- ous conference papers, articles and chapters. Simon is married and has four children who have heard quite enough of Kraftwerk. Hillegonda Rietveld is reader in Cultural Studies at London South Bank University, UK, where she teaches topics related to sonic culture. Her publi- cations address the development and experience of electronic dance music cultures and she is the author of This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies (Ashgate, 1998). She has been involved profession- ally in club and DJ culture since 1982, when she released her first electronic recording for Factory Records, as part of Quando Quango. Kraftwerk’s Trans- Europe Express (1977) has been an important source of musical inspiration. Joseph Toltz is a professional singer based in Sydney. He has written articles on a diverse range of subjects including the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe (1994), the Czech children’s opera Brundibár (2004) and the Jewish approach to visiting the sick (2007). He is in the final stages of his PhD, ‘A hidden testimony: musical experience and memory in Holocaust survivors’, where he has interviewed 85 survivors living in Australia, the UK, the US and Israel. He is currently teaching courses on popular music and CONTRIBUTORS xi musicology at the University of Sydney and Conservatorium of Music, and has a keen interest in the development of dance music culture in Australia from the early 1980s. Robert Wilsmore is head of Creative Practice in the Faculty of Arts at York St John University. His practice and research engage with performance, com- position, musicology, collaboration and pedagogy. He has collaborated with Simon Piasecki for over a decade; in 2009 Simon pulled him down 199 stone steps in Whitby, Yorkshire, and later that year Robert had Simon kidnapped as part of the latter’s Twice Rendered project. Robert has one sibling, an elder brother Stuart, who runs the business set up by their father in their hometown of Chipping Sodbury. Richard Witts lectures in music at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Velvet Underground – a Study (Equinox/University of Indiana Press, 2008), and he is the biographer of the German chanteuse Nico (Virgin Books, 1994). Richard was active as a musician in Manchester, where he co- founded the Manchester Musicians’ Collective and played in the post-punk band the Passage (http://www.thepassage.co.uk). This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction: The (Ger)man Machines David Pattie In July 2006, the Observer ’s monthly music magazine ran a list of the 50 most influential albums in the history of popular music; at #3, wedged securely between the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper ’ s Lonely Hearts Club Band and NWA’s Straight Outta Compton , was Kraftwerk’s 1977 release, Trans- Europe Express [This] paean to the beauty of mechanised movement and European civilisation was a moving and exquisite album in itself. And, through a sample on Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal ‘Planet Rock’, the German eggheads joined the dots with black American electro, giving rise to entire new genres. (Anon., 2006) At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kraftwerk’s position as electronic pioneers is as lofty and as secure as these comments suggest. (If further confirmation were needed, when Q magazine the following year celebrated its twenty-first anniversary with an edition that rounded up the 21 most important artists of the Rock era, Kraftwerk, entirely predictably, were there.) However, such high esteem would have come as something of a surprise to at least some of those writing about the band in the 1970s. A throwaway comment in 1977’s Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopedia of Rock refers to ‘the precise clean beat of the electronic pads [which] simulates [the] gadget-ridden advanced technological environment that their fans presumably live in’ (Logan and Woffinden, 1977, p. 134). Lester Bangs, in a deeply ambivalent interview with the band for Creem in 1975 (an interview cited frequently in the chapters that follow), explained the band’s initial success in the States by invoking two pernicious German stereotypes: the rapacious conqueror and the ruthlessly efficient Teuton (Bangs, 1975). KRAFTWERK: MUSIC NON-STOP 2 For a band whose status (at least in the English-speaking world) could so easily have been that of novelty one-hit wonders, and whose modus operandi was greeted with great suspicion by influential sections of the popular music press, to have reached the secure position that Kraftwerk have suggests that a number of factors, musical, technological and social, have coalesced to the band’s undoubted advantage. Moreover, these factors seem to have worked to create what might be termed a ‘Kraftwerk mythology’, almost without the help of the musicians themselves; after a peak period of creativity in the mid to late 1970s, the group’s rate of release slowed markedly, drying up completely for much of the 1990s. The group’s two founder members – Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider – were notoriously hard to contact apart from the flurry of interviews that inevitably accompanied each release and tour; even Schneider’s departure in November 2008 was not accompanied by the usual round of press conferences, statements and interviews (the band did not announce that he had left until early January the following year). And yet Kraftwerk have proved enduringly influential: as the above quotes sug- gest, they are a touchstone in popular music history – and that position is as much to do with the context in which their music was produced as it is the music itself. This collection draws together a number of essays on the music, its context and its influence; the contributors address the components of the Kraftwerk sound and the creation of the Kraftwerk image, and the influence the band have had on succeeding generations of musicians, especially in Britain and the States. In other words, it looks both at the band itself, and also at the ‘Kraftwerk-Effekt’ (a term usefully coined by Alex Seago in 2004). These two areas are, of course, profoundly interrelated. Kraftwerk have managed to cre- ate a remarkably unified artistic project from a disparate variety of sources. As David Toop put it in 2003, the group’s output reflects . . . their absorption of Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, Fluxus, German electronic music, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Fritz Lang, visionary architects such as Herman Finsterlin and Bruno Taut and the minimalist machine of the Bauhaus – all fused into a technologically fetishised gesamptkunstwerk, [ sic ], the pop equivalent of Bauhaus Totaltheatre [ sic ]. (Toop, 2003, p. 115) The group’s work, in turn, has become an integral part of the aural landscape of late twentieth- and early twenty-first- century popular music. As Seago argues, Kraftwerk are an early example of a by now general shift away from Anglo- American popular music forms as the sole template for the global development of popular music, and a shift towards a ‘glocal . . . pop aesthetic with technological, economic and cultural roots distinctly different from those of the traditional Anglo-American pop axis’ (Seago, 2004, p. 90). Introduction: The (Ger)man Machines 3 However, in Kraftwerk’s case, this argument can be taken further. As a number of commentators (Reynolds, 1998, 1999, 2005; Toop, 1999, 2001, 2003) have pointed out, and as the quote at the beginning of this introduction suggests, Kraftwerk have managed to exert a profound and lasting influence on the Anglo-American pop axis itself. Derrick May famously described early Detroit techno as sounding ‘like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company’ (Reynolds, 1999, p. 14). 1 The synthpop and electro sound of the 1980s bears Kraftwerk’s unmistakeable stamp; something of their influence is clearly audible in late 1970s British post- punk, and reappears, like a particularly assertive strand of musical DNA, in the post- punk revival of the early years of this century; and in 2010 when Dr Dre was asked what he was listening to for musical inspira- tion he replied, ‘Right now it’s Kraftwerk’ (Tardio, 2010). The sheer range and scope of the band’s influence seems to suggest something more than the refining of a new musical style; it suggests that there is something endlessly generative in both the band’s music and its image. In the next section of this introduction I will argue that this derives from the peculiar, and peculiarly difficult, cultural conditions in which the band formed. Kraftwerk, in other words, are unimaginable outside of the immediate context of German soci- ety in the late 1960s and early 1970s; not simply because they reflected the ethos of the time directly in their work, but because their relation to German culture was intrinsically complex – certainly, far more complex and nuanced than the other German experimental groups of the time. Locating Kraftwerk As noted in Applegate and Potter (2002), music has held a special place in German culture, as an essential expression of the German psyche. However, as with so much else, this assumption was profoundly shaken by the events of the Nazi period; post-1945, previous assumptions about music’s special status were called into question. For example, Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Dr Faustus allegorized the country’s descent into Nazism through the life of a modernist composer whose career followed two incommensurate trajec- tories (a commitment to an abstracted, intellectualized compositional style, based on Schoenberg’s twelve-note system; a life lived mostly in a traditional German rural setting – an idyll so exaggerated as to be almost absurd). However, it could not be said that, musically, the late forties and fifties saw a full-scale turning away from the past. Some musicians and composers might have sought a new musical language untainted by Nazism (perhaps the best example of this is the growth of interest in atonal, experimental and electronic music – see below), but, according to Fred Ritzel (1998), the popular songs of the period seemed to be governed by a willed blindness to the Nazi period. KRAFTWERK: MUSIC NON-STOP 4 In these songs the Germans are portrayed, somewhat awkwardly, as innocent and naïve primitives, who nevertheless possess many sought-after cultural assets. We are led to believe that it is these cultural traditions and not the barbarisms of the immediate past which should determine our vision of the German future . . . In short, a study of post- war German popular music shows us in what vague, ambivalent and contradictory forms the ‘Ghosts of the Past’ were brought back to life. The key – troubling – message was ‘We are still the same old bunch!’ (Ritzel, 1998, pp. 307–8) For musicians who grew to maturity in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of ‘Germanness in music’ was tainted, either by its past associations, or by the use that was made of it in the culture of the time. As Wolfgang Flür put it in a 2007 Radio 4 documentary (Wright, 2007), all that was available to aspiring musicians, certainly as far as indigenous popular music was concerned, were on the one hand the Schlager (see Albiez and Lindvig in this collection), and on the other reworked copies of American and British popular songs. That the reality was rather more complex (for example, British musicians especially found Germany a better environment for performance than their own country; and that the apparently opposing forms of rock and roll and Schlager intermingled more than Flür suggests [Larkey, 2002]) was beside the point; for a significant number of young musicians, neither the country’s musical past nor its musical present were untainted. Given this, it is unsurprising that those musicians should turn to a vari- ety of musical models which seemed to suggest a way out of this apparent impasse; musical forms which managed to ally themselves with all that was politically and artistically progressive in Western culture at the time, and which were sufficiently distanced from other forms of German music and the heritage those forms implied. And it is ironic that, when this music began to receive attention from the English-speaking music press, that it should receive the dismissive (and rather bigoted) label of ‘Krautrock’ 2 – as though, once again, the music produced by a generation of young German musicians in the late sixties and early seventies was, first of all, an expression of their national character. The term Krautrock is not only rather derogatory but it is also (as genre labels tend to be) rather vague – and open to ex post facto simplification. For example, the current definition of the genre on the website allmusic.com reads as follows: Kraut Rock refers to the legions of German bands of the early ’70s that expanded the sonic possibilities of art and progressive rock. Instead of following in the direction of their British and American counterparts, Introduction: The (Ger)man Machines 5 who were moving toward jazz and classical-based compositions and concept albums, the German bands became more mechanical and electronic. (Anon., n.d.) This is a rather good summary of the elements of Krautrock that have proved to be lastingly influential; the commitment to experimentation, the use of emergent electronic technology, the emphasis on rhythmic repeti- tion (expressed most clearly in Can’s extended improvisations, and in the motorik style of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Harmonia). However, it does not capture the sheer complexity of the musical activity of the time. The bands and musicians who have emerged as the standard-bearers of the form – Tangerine Dream, Can, Faust, the two incarnations of Amon Düül, Neu!, Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze, et al. – were part of an extremely diverse musical culture, which embraced the jazz- and soul-influenced progressive rock of bands such as Guru Guru and Xhol Caravan, the proto-Heavy Metal of the Scorpions and the Pink Floyd-tinged space rock of Eloy. Common to all the musicians under this general heading, though, was a greater or lesser commitment to what Edward Macan (1997) describes as a progressive ideology; a commitment to expanding the scope of popular music, both by pushing at the boundaries of composition and available technology, but also by creating a synthesis of previously (more or less) distinct musical categories – jazz, classical, electronic/experimental, and so on. There were, as one might expect, some nationally specific inflexions in the German adop- tion of the progressive model. Unsurprisingly, given the federal organization of West Germany (and the absence of a strong, culturally dominant capital city), the German music scene was geographically quite diverse; Berlin, the old capital, had a thriving musical culture, but the scenes in Cologne, Munich and Düsseldorf were equally healthy. Secondly, the political turmoil of the late 1960s was, as one might expect, filtered through the particular circumstances in which the country found itself. As Michael Rother put it in 1998: In Europe it was the time of huge social disturbances, political dem- onstrations (Berlin, Paris, Prague), the reflection upon overcoming of existing structures in general and the desire for a new beginning . . . This Zeitgeist is reflected in our music. (Gross, 1998) In practice, this meant that progressive German bands tended to eschew musical influences which were important constituent elements of progres- sive rock in Britain. British groups like ELP (Emerson Lake & Palmer) drew directly from the Western classical tradition; Jethro Tull harked back to folk; Yes, Genesis and Renaissance referenced the pastoral tradition in British composition. However, German bands favoured the non-indigenous KRAFTWERK: MUSIC NON-STOP 6 (Frank Zappa, Deep Purple, the Moody Blues, et al. ), or the overtly experi- mental (Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, with whom Holger Czukay studied before he joined Can, or the Pink Floyd of A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma ). The national, and entirely understandable, ‘desire for a new beginning’ in other words was manifest in the musical choices that the German rock groups of the period made; musical forms that linked the bands to a discredited past were replaced by forms which seemed to provide the musical raw material for such a rebirth. German musicians were also well placed to take advantage of other attempts to create new music – attempts that had begun the moment that World War II ended. In 1946, Wolfgang Steinecke founded a series of study courses at Darmstadt, in Hesse (the Ferienkurse für Internationale Neue Musik Darmstadt, or Vacation Courses for International New Music in Darmstadt; the name underwent two changes, before settling on the almost identical Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt in 1964); the twin aims of the course were, helpfully, clearly reflected in all the versions of the title. The courses aimed to reconnect German musicians and composers with musical trends and ideas that had been banned for most of the past 12 years; and they set out to be international – a crucial factor to empha- size, given the Nazi preoccupation with all things German. At Darmstadt, serialism soon became the musical language of choice; in other parts of the country, and, it is fair to say, for a younger generation of musicians, the drive was towards more extreme forms of atonality. In Cologne, a studio sponsored by the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) and devoted to experimental music opened in 1952. The organization had close links to Darmstadt (lectures in support of the initiative had been delivered there before the studio opened), and the most famous composer to be associated with the WDR studio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, also lectured at Darmstadt in 1953. The work at Cologne, though, came quickly to focus on electronic music; those who worked at the studio borrowed from serialism and explored the idea that music was, at base, manipulated, structured sound. They employed various techniques – tape manipulation, the use of sine-wave generators, and so on – to control not only the arrangement of notes in sequence, but also their pitch, timbre, duration and type of attack. Stockhausen, writing in 1956 about the first major work to emerge from the Cologne studio ( Gesang der Junglinge ), described the composition as an ‘[attempt] to form the direction and movement of sound in space, and to make them accessible as a new direc- tion for musical experience’ (Chadabe, 1997, p. 40). A description of music as sound which was echoed, decades later, by Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream (Stieg, 1994), and Can’s founder member Holger Czukay (Czukay, 1997). Why, though, this interest in the expressive power of electronically manipulated sound? Partly the answer comes, once again, from the immedi- ate past; the idea of a musical language which relied on conventional notions Introduction: The (Ger)man Machines 7 of melodic and (especially) harmonic structure was tainted by its association with the cultural policies of the Nazi regime. Also, and paradoxically, a com- mitment to the atonal-linked post-war German music to the spirit of cultural experimentation of the Weimar years; it simultaneously denied one version of German history, and reaffirmed another. There was, though, another factor that contributed to the growing interest in experimental and electronic music; one that was, for the early Kraftwerk, far closer to home. By the 1960s, the German economy was booming: in particular, the industrial heartland of the Ruhr had become one of the most economically successful regions in Europe. For bands and musicians who grew up in the region, technology was entirely quotidian. In an interview with Triad magazine in 1975, Hütter and Schneider were asked where they stood in relation to the musical label ‘space rock’ – a term applied to a number of other German bands of the time. Their answer is instructive: Hütter: We have aspects in our music that refer to space, like ‘Kometenmelodie’, but we also have some very earthly aspects that are very direct and not from outer space but from inner space like from the human being and the body, and very close to everyday life. (Smaisys, 1975) The experience of growing up in a location where new technologies were applied directly, of being part of the ‘industrial generation’, gave Kraftwerk’s music a subtly different orientation to that of other German bands of the period. Tangerine Dream, for example, would give their music titles which emphasized the aura of otherworldliness, which was very much part of the image of the band (‘Fly and Return to Comas Sola’, from Alpha Centurai , ‘Birth of Liquid Pleiades’, from Zeit ). In contrast, the titles of some early Kraftwerk tracks seem like labels from a maintenance manual (‘Megaherz’, from Kraftwerk 2 , for example). Characteristically, Tangerine Dream’s early music (before the band’s discovery of sequencers on the title track of the album Phaedra ) is based on musical elements that drift (the title track of Alpha Centauri ) and drone (all four tracks on Zeit ). Kraftwerk’s early music, on the other hand, seems closer to the working through of a mechanical system. For example, ‘Ruckzuck’ ( Kraftwerk 1 ) is structured around the relation between the flute and the other instruments; as the flute speeds up, the other instruments chase it, until the system abruptly breaks down. In other words, the immediate musical and cultural context within which the band found themselves was one that placed its greatest emphasis on newness of all kinds: a new approach to composition, to technology and to music’s place in German culture. What is interesting (and what is explored in