Kraftwerk, The Early Years '68

Florian Schneider:
"I studied seriously up to a certain level, then I found it boring, I looked for other things , I found that the flute was too limiting... Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesizer. Much later I threw the flute away, it was a sort of process."

Ralf Hütter:
"We were very lucky, at the time there were electronic music concerts, happenings, the Fluxus group etc. It was very normal, we played on the same circuit, the galleries. When we began we didn't have any engagements in the traditional music world, we were engaged in the artistic world, galleries, universities, etc."

Michael Karoli of Can remembers one such multi-media event as being one of the first early connections between the two groups:
"The first time I remember meeting them was in the summer of 1968. I remember Ralf being very communicative, but Florian didn't speak so much. It was the time when they were involved with their band Organisation. Malcolm Mooney had just joined us and we were to play at the preview of a painting exhibition. We had not brought many instruments with us, so we played one long piece on their instruments for about 15 minutes. As far as I can remember this was Can's first public appearance. Later when they had formed Kraftwerk, they came to Schloss Norvenich four or five times and we played jam sessions together in the afternoons."

Ralf Hütter:
"We didn't really have a strategy, we rushed into making industrial music, abandoning all our other activities from before - our education, our classical background. It was a total rapture for us. Neither then nor now did we think about the future, or about some strategy.Why would we think about the future?"

1968, when it all started
If you really would like to understand the history that created the Legends, you must understand the situation in post-war Germany in the end of the sixties. Most German bands played cover versions of British or American songs and they only added some foreign accents. A new generation of young West Germans where living in the shadows of the "cold war" and the tension between East and West. There was a will to recapturing a German cultural identity and that caused a new wave of music and films. There are three bands that has a lasting influence on todays music and those experimental legends include Tangerine Dream (I was once a member of their Fan-Club), Can and of course Kraftwerk.

Can, the first experimental band
The first band to emerge was Can and they where formed in Cologne in 1968. Most of the members where classically trained and they performed music with improvisational layers of sound together with a steady rock beat as a base. This new "rock like" music with little or no structure sounded unlike everything that hit the charts. This music inspired many German bands and UK music press tagged it as "Kraut Rock". Kraftwerk arised from this experimental explosion as the natural link between electronic pop music and German avant-garde.

Organisation, a mixture of sounds
The history of Kraftwerk begins when Florian Schneider-Esleben and Ralf Hütter met in Remschied, near Düsseldorf, at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Arts). They are both classically trained musicians and they went on to study at the Düsseldorf Conservatory. They formed a group called Organisation whose early music was a mixture of sounds, feedback and rythm. The band took part in various performances at art galleries and universities.

1969
Back in 1969 the experimental wave of German music was creating some commercial interest and recording deals where signed. This was a world which was very different from the UK or USA rock scene. Many of the German music students considered themselves as performance artists who were making a musical art statement. One of the most notable influences on all early German rock groups was Karlheinz Stockhausen. As leader of the Darmstadt school, his influence on the electronic music field was immense. His experiments with electronic sounds were also influential on rock musicians further afield - his picture being one of those included on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper LP. I have heard that it exists a bootleg with a concert featuring Stockhausen and Kraftwerk playing together in '71 or '72. The bootleg has six tracks, three Kraftwerk songs played by Stockhausen and three Stockhausen songs played by Kraftwerk!

1970
In early 1970 Ralf and Florian chosed to record a LP as members of the band Organisation. The line up was Fred Monics on drums, Butch Hauf on bass, Basil Hammoudi on vocals, Florian on flute and violin and Ralf on organ. They signed to the English label RCA and that was an unexpected step for a German band in those days. The front cover featured a pseudo-mythological drawing by the mysteriously named Comus, of the sort that was fairly common place on LP sleeves in the early '70s.

Tone Float

The LP Tone-Float was only available as import in Germany and it failed to sell many copies. I think that the album is interesting but it lacks direction and it has a lot of weird noises. It's available as a bootleg CD and is a must for every fan, but I don't recommend it as an introduction to the Kraftwerk sound.

I thought earlier that the self titled album KRAFTWERK was their first album and it was recorded in the autumn of the same year. Now appearing as a duo, Kraftwerk (Power Plant), Ralf and Florian could concentrate on the ideas that created the famous Kraftwerk sound.

KRAFTWERK

KlingKlang, the birth of a studio

An important thing happened this year, they established their own studio in the center of Düsseldorf.

In the same building as it is today, it was set up in a 60 sq meter rented loft in close proximity to the main railway station. This studio was the beginning of the KlingKlang studio. After fitting out the room with sound insulation material they started recording sounds on stereo tape machines and cassette recorders with a view to taking the tapes to a fully equipped studio for final mixing.

Back to homepage

This page hosted by