The debt that today’s music world owes to Kraftwerk is beyond reckoning. That stretch of work that Germany's premiere man-machines released between 1974 (beginning with Autobahn) and culminating with 1981’s prescient Computer World is regarded by many as the foundation of modern electronic music.
However, being a part of the band itself - and pushing at the frontiers of sonics, synthesis and technology - wasn’t always a thrill.
A couple of years back, we caught up with former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos to talk about his latest project (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), but we also spent some time reflecting with Karl on those epoch-making days when he stood, red-shirted, alongside Ralf, Florian and Wolfgang.
Karl then shared his perspective on why that golden period of seemingly boundless creativity came to an end…
“With Kraftwerk, we had that concept of the man machine, which was taken from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis about the female robot called Futura, but we (Kraftwerk) were playing together in a room and looking each other in the eye. We put our communication into music,” Bartos told us.
In Karl’s view, it was the onrush of digitalisation, and new computer-based production processes, that got in the way of that eye-to-human-eye creativity.
“The turning point for us was digitalisation, and when Kraftwerk became an institution we stopped being contemporary [laughs]. Instead we became salesmen of nostalgia.”
Kraftwerk’s eager embrace and advocation of new technology then, ends up being something of a cautionary tale. As the four men found themselves slowly becoming supplanted by the machines…
“You know, when the computer turned up it was the dream of a businessman,” Karl told us. “In the beginning we often called our studio an electronic garden, but that garden developed into a factory farming industry. When we wrote Computer World we were still human beings playing together.
“With Kraftwerk, we’d turn up at the studio and start playing and we’d have an aim,” said Bartos. “Or we’d even just celebrate the improvisation. We’d talk to each other, have fun, look each other in the eye and transfer all that into music. That was the whole secret! The idea was that the computer would give us more time for creativity, but it was just the opposite. We spent too much time with the organisation of sound and with the computer technology. The human beings were not at the centre of everything, the computer was. And we were serving the computer industry.”
It was for this reason, and the leisurely pace adopted by Kraftwerk's head honchos Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider when making remix album The Mix in 1990, that Karl (and fellow robot, Wolfgang Flür) ultimately departed.
“We didn’t speak to each other and there were many engineers coming into the studio. It’s like every business now thinks they need a computer. It’s not true, but the industry is so clever that they’re selling their computers to everybody… to shops and schoolkids. They all think that this is our future but that’s not true, as the future is what we make it.
“Some of my partners in Kraftwerk believed so much that it was progress, but I actually couldn’t follow that. I think innovation and progress are not synonyms. Would you consider the machine-gun or the atomic bomb as being progress for human beings? I’m not so sure about that.”
