Kraftwerk:

After their first band Organisation they started a music group called Kraftwerk (meaning power plant) which was to seed a whole new movement in the history of music. Later on Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür joined the group.

Their music is exclusively played on synthesizers and also many interesting sound generating devices are used such as voice alterers, generators and even pocket calculators!! Early Kraftwerk used also instruments such as flute, guitars and a vibraphone. Kraftwerk use almost always simple beats and very catchy melodies that are memorized almost after the first time you hear one of their songs. All this is topped by some rich in variety sound effects samples and simplistic vocals with lyrics short and sometimes funny sounding but profound. Fewer songs are ambient or even totally experimental without a beat or a particular melody.

Almost every kind of electronic music in the next years to come was influenced by Kraftwerk. As far as their themes go, KRAFTWERK are envisioning and inspired by a future world were everything is computer and machine driven. Computer World(1981) is an example. The songs talk about everything from business(computer world), everyday life (home computer) and going further to personal relationships (Computer Love) driven or maybe worsened by computers in a computer world, something that in 1981 was just a product of their imagination but today it’s everyday life. This predictive album itself may sometimes give the listener a feeling that computers wrote some of the tracks.

Overall they transmit melancholic ideas about the close co-existance of man and technology in this new world they foresee but this melancholic effect may lead to nostalgia and even those bitter-sweet emotions. The interpretation of their basically simple music may be a part of what is making Kraftwerk a very interesting music group and inspiring people to think about those issues while trying to explain the feelings, emotions and mood generated by the listening of their records.

From the mid-seventies to the late eighties after some continuous and successful albums Kraftwerk virtually stopped producing albums. Their most interesting records (and my listening suggestions at the same time) are considered to be COMPUTER WORLD , TRANS EUROPE EXPRESS and THE MAN MACHINE.

An interesting fact about Kraftwerk is the international editions of their albums, where the only thing changing is the language of the lyrics and the track titles of course (and even a bonus track in Trans Europa Express). So various recordings have a collectibility value too and sometimes are hard to find.

For anybody interested in electronic music Kraftwerk is the band to get to know first. People that enjoy rock music will most probably like Kraftwerk too. Marios Maroulis 1/03

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