Kraftwerk Interview

(first published in Triad Magazine June 1975)

While the casual listener may be quick to draw comparisons to Pink Floyd and "space music" in general, in reality there is far more to Kraftwerk than that. Space is only a part of the total Kraftwerk concept, for it also includes Time and Mechanics, and not only time and space, but visual and other sensory phenomenon. They are working with artists in other fields in conjunction with their music and are anxious to begin producing video discs of their art. Lyrics are becoming a more regular part of their music.

Autobahn has a fully descriptive character taking the listener for a quick cruise down Germany's famed superhighway. It becomes and indistinguishable blend of vision and reality, as it begins with a slam of a car door and proceeds to imitate the sounds of the cars whizzing down the road. The mysterious whispering tones of "Kometenmelodie" soar lightly into the ether and leave the listener with a grandious spatial experience.

They perceive commonplace occurrences and transform them into dramatic situations. Just as writers and poets play with words and phrases, painters play with colors and perspectives, and sculptors play with shapes and forms, so Kraftwerk plays with sounds. The qualities attributed to the arts are equally applicable to their music. It is shaped, phrased, colored, molded, mixed and modified into a unified experience. The music is sketched on broadly fundamental lines leaving leaving the setting and filling in, to a great extent, to the listener. In such such a vague and ethereal art Kraftwerk excels in transforming the commonplace sounds of daily life to a stirring and spiritual experience.

Interview with Ralf Hutter
and Florian Schneider
by Saul Smaizys

Triad

-is the term "space rock" applicable to your music?

Ralf

-We are part of the Industrial generation. We grew up. . .

Florian

-. . . very impressed by these machinery rhythms that we used in our music, the mechanical aspects of life. Technology is no enemy to us. We use technology as it is. We also like nature but you cannot say the Technology is any better or worse than nature. You have to accept all of these things as they are in the world today.

Ralf

-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 every day life.

Florian

-We see films and we go out and get optical impressions and so this often has an influence on our music and it becomes an acoustic film or acoustic poetry. That's the way that we try to express what we have seen and what we have heard. Several years ago we were on tour and it happened that we just came off the Autobahn after a long ride and when we came in to play we had this speed in our music. Our hearts were still beating fast so the whole rhythm became very fast.

Triad

-The spinning of a roulette wheel is the basis for another one of your tunes.

Ralf

-Yes, movement. The idea is to capture non-static phenomenon because music itself is a non-static phenomenon. It deals with time and movement in time. It can never be the same.

Triad

-Does dance have a part in your music?

Ralf

-Yes, in Germany some modern ballet companies have used our music to create their own versions of ballet for this music.

Florian

-The choreography was like a computer dance,. like robot dance. Very mechanical in its movement on stage.

Ralf

-We also kind of dance when we perform. It's not that we actually move our bodies but it's this awareness of your whole body. You feel like a dancer.

Florian

-Your brain is dancing. The electronics are dancing around in the speakers.

Ralf

-We've had this idea for a long time but it has only been in the past year that we've been able to create what we feel is a loudspeaker orchestra. This is what we consider Kraftwerk to be, a non-acoustic electronic loudspeaker orchestra.

Ralf

-The whole thing is one instrument. We play mixers, we play tapes, we play phasers, we play the whole apparatus of Kraftwerk. That's the instrument. Including the lights and the atmosphere.

Florian

-Sometimes I can taste the sounds. There are a lot more feelings than just the feeling going through the ears. The whole body can feel the sounds.

Ralf

-Imagine the trees. What do the trees sounds like? You don't even have to make the sound audible. You can just write out the suggestions and the reader can imagine the sound or reproduce the sounds spiritually in his brain.

Triad

-Do you listen to other kinds of music other than electronic?

Ralf

-Oh yes. Sometimes we listen to the radio and we also listen to life, to noise, or to what people normally regard as noise, which is of course the source for environmental music. If you walk down the street you can hear a symphony if you are open enough to listen to it.

Florian

-That's what you learn from working with electronics. You go to the source of the sounds and your ears are trained to analyze any sound. We hear a plane passing overhead and I know all of the phenomenon that go into the make-up of the sound, the phasings, the echos. All these things that happen in nature. . .

Ralf

-. . . and the more you learn the more you enjoy it. You can always discover new sounds that you've never heard before. It's amazing sometimes when you listen to the context of the sounds. It could be the animals in the park, with the cars and the people mixing together.

Florian

-The association field is very large in music, meaning that somebody can make some special sound put them on tape and broadcast them to 50 people or 100 or 1,000 and each one of those people has a different impression of the sounds they have heard. It's not like the cinema where nearly everybody sees the same thing. I think the optical is much more fixed but when you have music you have so many different sorts of musics in the brains of the people.

Ralf

-Yes, musics. Many musics.

Florian

-When you are on stage you can focus the music to all these different brains, but you know there are a lot of different receptions. Some people fall asleep, some people are excited, others don't like it and go out, others come back, some stay in their seats. So there are a lot of different reactions to the same thing.

Ralf

-We improvise in the way it is used in Oriental and raga music. It's not harmonically structured.

Florian

-We prefer to make sounds. Sound symphonies. We use a lot of natural harmonies. . . like from the overtone scale. We try to do things simply, the simpler the better. We tried to do a lot of complicated bullshit in the past where everybody tried to play as many notes as they can in a second or a minute, but after awhile we came down to the essential thing.

Ralf

-You have to face yourself to come to the point where you really think about what it is that you want to do. Not to hide behind too many notes or to hide behind . . .

Florian

-. . . the speaker cabinets.

Ralf

-. . . to open up to the simplest things.

Florian

-We don't like these sort of bombastic sounds, we prefer more refined sounds.

Ralf

-It took years of development, step by step, for us to get to what we are doing now. And it will take more steps to do something else.

Florian

-We started out with acoustic instruments. We had a lot of friends who have played with us in the past, and so life goes on and some of them leave and others join. We finally came to a point where we decided that we didn't want these loud drum kits on stage with us. Then for a year we played with just the two of us. We used a rhythm machine but this was not entirely satisfactory. It would be good for one piece but too boring to use for a whole evening, and so we decided to build electronic drums because we wanted to have rhythms in our music. We designed and built them and are now playing with two electronic percussionists in the group.

Ralf

-It gives a lot of possibilities to change the sound because electronic music is created out of white noise, so you can take whatever frequencies you like, or you want, for your particular concept of music - and with these electronic instruments you can pick out the frequencies that suit you. Like a painter, you can choose whatever colors of the spectrum you like for that projection of your painting.

Florian

-We are working with a painter now who can realize some of our optic visions.

Ralf

-We don't think of ourselves as musicians, but rather as people who create out of the different media or ways of expressing yourself, whether it is painting, poetry, music, or even film. The ideal is to communicate to people.

Florian

-We don't really know where this whole thing will drift, perhaps more to optics or to words.

Ralf

-We are waiting for the video disc, which will soon be available in Germany. This will probably be the next step we want to go on to because we have so many visual ideas along with the music and they both influence one another.