Kraftwerk, as pictured on the front of The Man-Machine, 1978. L-R: Carl Bartos, Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür
“WE WERE FINDING KRAFTWERK, SETTING UP THE STUDIO, FINDING MUSICIANS, DISCOVERING COMPOSITION, THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, HUMAN VOICE, SYNTHETIC VOICE” RALF HÜTTER
The story of Kraftwerk is not dissimilar to that of any other band; like many, it stems from pretty ordinary beginnings. There’s not an awful lot to do in Düsseldorf, and there was even less back in the late 1960s. At this time, other key, just-beginning German acts around the country were operating independently of each other… and yet they’d all eventually come to be insultingly labelled as ‘krautrock’ as a whole.
Back in Düsseldorf, Florian Schneider (flutes, synthesisers, violin) and Ralf Hütter (organ, synthesisers) met as students at the Robert Schumann Hochschule. Participating in the local experimental music and art scene, they formed Organisation with Basil Hammoudi (glockenspiel, conga gong, musical box, bongos, percussion, vocals), Butch Hauf (bass and something mysteriously called ‘shaky tube’), and Fred Monicks (drums and percussion), although this was not Schneider’s first foray into music, having been in the amazingly named PISSOFF in 1968.
TWO BECOME FOUR
The transition into Kraftwerk began pretty much immediately. Heavily influenced by art duo Gilbert and George, Hütter and Schneider sought to make Kraftwerk a life and art experience. The first two albums – Kraftwerk (released 1970) and Kraftwerk 2 (1972) – were produced by Conny Plank and were mostly experimental freeform affairs. As Hütter explained to Uncut in 2009, “We were finding Kraftwerk, setting up the Kling Klang studio, finding musicians to work with, discovering composition, discovering the German language, human voice, synthetic voice. Me and Florian had our Kling Klang studio since 1970. And one day we said: ‘OK, there must be a mothership, a laboratory, a studio HQ where we put things together.’”
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