Sunshine Recorder

Sound Machine: How did Kraftwerk end up in a museum?

Hütter and Schneider began collaborating in the late sixties, in Düsseldorf, and in 1970 opened a studio, a loft that they called Kling Klang, near the railway station. Düsseldorf was a center for avant-garde art; Kling Klang shared a wall with Gerhard Richter’s studio, and, for breaks, they would all play foosball with Joseph Beuys. First calling themselves the Organization, they later chose Kraftwerk (“power station”), because of its implications—“energy,” “art work,” “craft”—and also because of the ubiquity on German highways of signs for power stations.

In addition, the name and its industrial aesthetic seemed like a subtle affront to the earthy English hippies who were popular at the time, bands such as Cream, the Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin, who performed versions of American blues, complete with long guitar solos. The guitarist Michael Rother, who played in an early version of Kraftwerk and later formed the influential rock band Neu! with the drummer Klaus Dinger, told me that Hütter was the first musician he had met who “had the same feeling about melody and harmony that I’d held inside me that was not based on blues or the structure of American-British pop music.” Living in postwar Germany, and alert to the problems of the immediate past and the proximate present, musicians were trying to establish a German pop language from thin air. Mimicking Anglo-American musical poses was cheesy, but anything that sounded overtly Germanic evoked dangerous historical memories. What the groups of Kraftwerk’s cohort settled on, in common, was reduction and repetition: no guitar solos.

Kraftwerk’s early records were not particularly melodic and only intermittently rhythmic. Pieces were built around keyboard tones, flute, guitar noises, the sound of breathing, and occasional stretches of drumming. “Autobahn,” the band’s fourth album, from 1974, was its first to move decisively toward pop, though not as it was practiced at the time. Bits of flute and guitar remained, but most of the music was generated by drum machines and synthesizers, which Hütter and Schneider had begun to modify themselves. By the time “Radioactivity” was released, in 1975, the guitar and flute were gone, and the machines took over for good. While the chorus of “Autobahn”—“Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn”—was a reference to the Beach Boys and their “fun fun fun,” Kraftwerk rarely sang in harmony, and almost every vocal was processed through some kind of machine.

They saw their work as “confronting the mirror of the tape machine” and representing Alltag—everyday life. Their shows, which often took place in art galleries, were rarely traditional. Hütter sometimes rubbed a microphone across his face. “Depending on the length of my beard, it would make stronger sounds,” he said. At one show, their collaborator Emil Schult circled a gallery space on roller skates and beamed wireless signals into the sound system while Hütter and Schneider played keyboards. At another, the band set up a drum machine and weighed down the keys of a synthesizer before leaving the stage. Hütter told the Rolling Stone reporter Mike Rubin that “the audience at the party was so wild they kept dancing to the machine.”

But the band’s passion was for recording, and it did so obsessively, with the gifted engineer Conny Plank. In Dave Tompkins’s “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” a history of synthetic voice processing, Schneider says, “The mysterious thing about these machines, sometimes when you use them, you feel like a secret agent of sounds. We closed our studio—nobody could go inside. We were very paranoid.” The work paid off. As democratic and empowering as drum machines may be, there are very few pop records that sound as exquisitely balanced as Kraftwerk’s.