Kraftwerk (album)

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Kraftwerk

Studio album by Kraftwerk
Released	1970
Recorded	July-September 1970 (Germany)
Genre	Electronic music, Krautrock
Length	39:39
Label	Philips
Producer(s)	Conny Plank & Kraftwerk
All Music Guide link
Kraftwerk chronology
Tone Float (1970)	Kraftwerk (1970)	Kraftwerk 2 (1972)

Kraftwerk is the first album by Kraftwerk. It was released in Germany in 1970, produced by the influential Konrad "Conny" Plank.

Hütter and Schneider managed to go through two drummers during the album, Andreas Hohmann and Klaus Dinger. Their playing gives a hard, dynamic, almost brutal edge to the music in places. This proves to be quite distinct from Hutter and Schneider's previous band Organisation, or the following pair of Kraftwerk albums, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf und Florian which were both recorded entirely as a duo by Hutter and Schneider. According to later interviews with Dinger, he plays on side two, while Hohmann plays on side one, which was completed before Dinger joined the sessions.

The other instrumentation contains a lot of Hütter's Hammond organ and an electronic bass instrument called a 'tubon', whilst Schneider supplied manipulated flute ("Ruckzuck" is driven by a powerful multi-dubbed flute riff), electric violin and guitar, these instruments often connected to further electronics via an EMS pitch-to-voltage converter.

The album features no vocals, and "Ruckzuck" is the closest the album comes to a commercial rock song.

The cover design, credited to Ralf Hütter, is a curious nod to the influence of Andy Warhol and the then contemporary Pop Art movement, featuring a fluorescent-coloured traffic cone drawn in a Warhol-esque manner. The image on the inside of the gatefold sleeve is of a powerplant electricity substation, photographed by Düsseldorf conceptualist artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their photographic 'Typologies' series that celebrated the industrial and urban environment – and by extension, the society that built it – by showing multiple variations of ordinarily mundane building types.

Guitarist Michael Rother joined the band after this album, and remarkably, around the same time Hütter actually left the band for a few months in 1971. The 3-piece Kraftwerk line up of Schneider, Dinger & Rother made a TV appearance on Bremen TV show Beat-Club. After this, Dinger and Rother left to form revered band Neu!, with Hütter rejoining Schneider to continue Kraftwerk, both parties recording under the mentoring of Conny Plank.

No material from this album has been performed in the band's live set since the Autobahn tour of 1975, and to date, the album has not been reissued on compact disc, with the band seemingly reluctant to consider it a part of their canon (Schneider described the early albums as "archaeology"). However, pirated CDs of the album have been widely available since the mid-1990s on the Germanofon and Crown labels.

In 2006, a bootleg CD of the Hutter-less version of Kraftwerk, featuring Rother, Dinger and Schneider, surfaced. According to several sources, including Michael Rother himself (http://www.michaelrother.de/forums/archive/index.php?t-127.html), the material on this CD was recorded for Radio Bremen in June 1974. The CD is called K4 and has been widely circulated on the Internet. It presents a far different picture of the band than either of their first and second albums, with the music bearing more of a resemblance to a kind of heavy metal version of Neu than anything Kraftwerk subsequently recorded.

1 Track listing
2 Credits
3 Miscellanea
4 Release details

[edit] Track listing

"Ruckzuck" - 7:47 (translates as "Very quickly" with a slight connotation of "Push-pull")
"Stratovarius" - 12:10 (pun on Stratocaster guitars and Stradivarius violins)
"Megaherz" - 9:30 ("Mega-heart" - a pun on "Megahertz", the unit of frequency)
"Vom Himmel hoch" - 10:12 ("From Heaven above" - the first words of Luther's famous Christmas hymn)

[edit] Credits

Ralf Hütter – organ, tubon; cover design.
Florian Schneider-Esleben – flute, violin, electric percussion.
Andreas Hohmann – drums.
Klaus Dinger – drums.
Konrad "Conny" Plank – sound engineer & production.
Klaus Löhmer – assistant sound engineer.

[edit] Miscellanea

The song Ruckzuck was the theme song for the defunct PBS show Newton's Apple, out of Minneapolis, MN.

[edit] Release details

Country	Date	Label	Format	Catalog
Germany	November 1970	Philips	Vinyl	6305 058	Gatefold sleeve
France	1973	Philips	Vinyl	9118 002	Single sleeve
United Kingdom	March 1973	Vertigo	Vinyl	6441 077	A combination of Kraftwerk's first two German albums