Florian Schneider has died
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
One of the biggest influences on everything we call music today. RIP Florian.
http://www.aktivitaet-fanzine.com/10_kk0.html
The above link is a great resource for any Kraftwerk fans. Aktivitaet was a Kraftwerk fanzine published in the 90's.
There's some mystery about who designed their robo-speech box [1], because Schneider (and colleagues) actually patented it.
[1] Not the vocoder, but the chip-speech system used on The Mix.
If we're willing to give Steve Jobs credit for the iPhone I think we should be equally willing to give Schneider & company credit for their ideas that were instrumental - (heh) - in moving the synth field forward. The fact that many of their sounds were novel when first recorded is the strongest proof of their original contributions, if it has merely been off the shelf hardware created by others then this would not have been the case, you'd have heard those sounds from other artists before then.
It was the same process Tangerine Dream went through with Projekt Elektronik, PPG, Steinberg, and other collaborators. The band had an idea or some product feedback, and the designers implemented it.
KW's sequencers were unique in that they had rotary switches instead of pots for the sequence steps, which made them much easier to program.
A tape loop is nothing more than a primitive form of sequencer. By definition they loop a sequence. They do the exact same thing. So not having to physically change the tapes and speeds on a tape machine by programming it into a sequencer is most definitely "automating" that process. The issue with analog tape machines is that they were not fun to deal with on the road or work with live.
And no they were not "two step" sequencers. What would be the point in that? You could do that with that a single finger - on/off. The Synthorama was a 16 step analogue sequencer and they had two of them which game them a 32 bit sequence to work with[1]
A sequencer is definitely not used for anything similar to "automating tape loops". For Kraftwerk they were used mainly in the studio to created drum sequences and melodies that were much more precise than those played by the band. The whole point of the sequencer was to replace Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, and maybe some bass lines or melodies played by Ralf with a robotic sound.
Programming a sequence in an analog sequencer like a Synthanorma is way harder than changing a tape. Have you ever programmed one? Back then you didn't have presets or pitch quantization, so for melodies for example you'd have to tune each step by ear. Drum loops were easier but not as easy as changing a tape.
Using them on the road was much harder than using tapes. In fact, even several years later, bands like Depeche Mode were still taking tapes to the road because sequencers were still clunky and difficult to program live. It was only after the advent of preset programming this started to change.
Before Autobahn, Kraftwerk indeed experimented with tape loops, but for very different kinds of sounds, more of the Stockhausen variety.
The things that led to this experiment with synthesizers and sequencers were the primitive rhythm machines of the time (they were already going in this direction with songs like Tanzmusik, but they wanted with custom drum sounds and custom drum rhythms, not the Samba and Cha-Cha-Cha of the Maestro) and their use of echo in "Ralf und Florian", where the echo was used to get a perfect repetition of something played (not a loop though, since it's not something that is "left alone" like a sequencer or a tape).
And by "two step sequencers" the parent poster clearly means "two units".
Also, it's called Synthanorma, not Synthorama.
Large pepperonis can be ordered from any pizzeria, this is hardly the same kind of engagement.
Probably pretty high given that the Roland MC-8, another 16 step analog sequencer was also available in 1977 when Trans Europe Express was released. Both Yellow Magic Orchestra and Tangerine Dream used them. Both bands would have been very much on Kraftwerk's radar at that time. Tangerine Dream aside from being another influential German electronics band was also a customer of Matten & Wiecher.
Relatively few people celebrate forerunners like Morton Subotnik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Iannis Xenakis as innovators, and that is because those guys sucked. Kraftwerk rocked, and we can hear the difference.
IMO, IMO.
Everybody in electronic music was influenced by Stockhausen. But Stockhausen never got a whole lot of air play. If you listen to his stuff I think it's obvious why.
[1] http://www.maindragmusic.com/ca-1970-maestro-rhythm-king-mrk...
"The pads had no dynamics at all" doesn't mean they didn't manufacture the pads.
You seem to have an axe to grind here. IMO this is not only bad form in the HN itself, but also very distasteful in a thread about someone who just passed away. I won't answer you anymore.
Kraftwerk in many ways was the ultimate nerd band. I believe that Florian Schneider would be tickled to know his fans were painfully dissecting the minutiae and lore of his equipment.
I was also careful to point out in my original comment that I was "not trying to detract from their genius in any way."
It was simple, but it required creativity and some electronics skill (or at least a lot of trial and error and soldering).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1795693416/patch-and-tw...
Another interesting source is the Deadmau5 masterclass. What is striking is that Joel Zimmer has neither vocabulary, nor technical understanding of how modulars actually work - yet he is eminently able to use a modular synthesizer and (kind of) explain how they work. Using a large modular synthesizer is essentially assembling a synthesizer out of parts - and this requires understanding the connection between the parts and the sonic results.
- Understanding how to combine various elements making up a synthesizer in a musically relevant way is necessary but not sufficient to design synthesizers.
I think an experienced modular synth sound designer is closer to the needed skillset than someone who is able to design circuitry. Not least because an experienced sound designer will know how the thing is used and what artists want from it.
The mid to late 80s is kind of a good illustration of what happens when engineers geek out (and product managers are tempted to skimp on user interfaces) and artists are not properly part of the process. Compare the many FM synths (and synths using FM combined with various technologies) to subtractive analog synths from 5-6 years earlier.
Then look at the prevalence of presets recordings (Jean Michel Jarre's "Revolutions" is essentially a parade of Roland D-50 presets). This is very telling of how the design and technology changed how artists used synthesizers.
Designing a synthesizer requires a combination of the two, but to me it seems that the latter is a more rare skillset than the former. There are a lot of synthesizers on the market, but relatively few that are seen as particularly good. If you dive into the universe that is Eurorack modules you will quickly realize just how much stuff there is. And not nearly all of it is very good.
(There is, of course, some fetishising over famous originals that fetch a pretty penny today. For instance a 45+ year old ARP 2600 will easily set you back $10,000 - and the re-issue costs about $4,000).
A good example is the Moog ladder filter. A mistake was made in the design so the circuit didn't work as intended. However, Robert Moog decided that the mistake was really a happy accident that made the filter more musically relevant and unique. This requires understanding both the electronics and what is musically important.
It is also important to remember that there was no abundance of synthesizers at the time, so there were few expectations as to how a synth should sound or how the artist would use it.
In your Deadmau5 example ... I think we might be saying roughly the same thing. Once you buy all those modules, who needs an EE? The circuit problems should hopefully be hidden at that point.
...as long as you don't connect anything to mains power or irreplacable modular synths :-)
This feels a little extreme. Artists can obviously collaborate with engineers on musical instrument design. The contribution is real even if the artist is clueless about like how the oscillators are temperature compensated.
One of my favorite Kraftwerk songs is probably “pocket calculator.” [1]
I think only Aphex Twin pulled off such a stunt as well, where he walked to the stage, pressed a button to start the music, then walked off. But Kraftwerk would do it for an entire tour.
(Though not, I assume, during the "Robots" sequence, which I assume is recorded. And I think that's actually the whole point of that sequence.)
Here's a recentish live performance of "Computer Love"
I've also seen them a few times, twice open air and what surprised my most was the absolute insane sound quality. They are insane perfectionists and I was just blown away.
Arguably the most important and influential "band", which ever existed.
It felt high tech but low effort, and I know folks are okay with that, but it all felt so trade-show/product demo and not rock show. I would have been happier if it was a bar and not an arena.
This may be because: The Knife and New Order, though. Much better shows ..
/ymmv
Anyway, the show was great!
(Those audience reactions!)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ABOMrTgPNZA
This connection is especially obvious when you see the previous incarnation—Organization—in color: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eB-sl6ZLpo
(Though I gotta say that among early krautrock my favorite are Silver Apples, who were outstanding and far ahead of their time, but sank into complete obscurity after two albums.)
Still programming, still find Kraftwerk inspiring. Thank you Florien and Rest in Peace. Your music changed my life.
"Crime, Travel, Communication, Entertainment"
I always thought that song was about the "love" one feels using a computer. The relationship between a programmer and a machine. Perhaps I was just hearing what I wanted to hear though.
It's definitely about both. They've always enjoyed writing songs with multiple meanings. Before it was re-written for the live tour, the original lyrics of "Radio activity" are about both Radioactivity, and "Radio Activity".
My family were lucky enough to have a BBC model B, a home computer developed for the show and the eventual proving ground for the ARM processor.
Kraftwerk and the Beeb were bound up in my head as a child.
For me Kraftwerk sound like the white hot future rushing into our world (...and also playing Chuckie Egg and Elite with my Dad!).
Deutsche Bank
FBI
Scotland Yard
Business
Money
Numbers
People
Here is Ralf und Florian's patent for the electronic drum machine: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD244717S/en
These guys were the musical version of Jules Verne or HG Wells. Truly visionary.
Lots of things are obvious in hindsight, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of hard work behind them.
Trying to politely explain to them that the fiction they had already read was the derivative work, while on the inside I was screaming:
Look here, you little shit.
I know we bristled at this in school, but I think there is in fact something to the idea of presenting a discipline to people in a Cliff's Notes version of chronological order. Otherwise you may never see the value in the foundational works in that area (or as the case here, artistic medium).
It was a real next-level engineering super-talent. It doesn't even matter if it was deliberate. The fact that it happened so reliably is enough.
And thus: techno (and house) and their progeny.
OK, more precisely, that's not entirely fair. Early electro-funk (say, NYC 1978-1983) and even early hip hop did use these devices. But they were generally in studios and not widely used by everybody and their friend that just wanted to make a jam. By the time the 90s hit, the used market for 303/909 etc was primed and ready to burst.
Rattly cheap drum machines were all over the scene in the late 70s and 80s. None of them had the lasting impact of the 808 and 909.
There's a reason for that - the same reason that explains why the Jupiter-8 and Juno series synths are legends, while competing synths from Kawai and Korg are mostly forgotten.
The context from which you're listening to it is partly defined by it.
(I really don't want to get in to a "who is better/more important/whatever" argument. If choosing Led Zeppelin as a comparison bothers you, please substitute for taste.)
I was a huge fan and they were my first "real" concert in 1977, at the infamous Day on the Green where Bonham and Grant were arrested for beating up a BGP employee. Get off my lawn! :-)
I think it’s a sign of their brilliance. Their music is like an algorithm or scientific theory. Being more complex would not make it better.
For example (and IMHO) if you’re trying to make a techno track you’re not going to make anything better than Numbers.
Numbers isn’t techno. Techno as genre didn’t exist before some guys in Detroit heard that track.
Numbers is what techno wants to be. You can’t remake Citizen Kane and improve it. You can only do something different.
Which guys? I'd like to go digging in music history.
Hutter has acknowledged listening to those WDR broadcasts out of Cologne. Just to connect the dots Conny Plank, Kraftwerk's producer on Autobahn was an engineer at GDR. Karlheinz Stockhausen who was a Kraftwerek influence and hugely important figure in his own right ran the WDR. The WDR history and its importance to electronic music is pretty fascinating. You can read about it here:
http://120years.net/wdr-electronic-music-studio-germany-1951...
and
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/08/stockhausen-ph...
Dusseldorf also had the Kunstacademie which was run by Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who regularly held "art happening." These art happenings were also some of Kraftwerk's first gigs.
Beyond that the whole German prog rock scene that sprang up around Dusseldorf and Cologne at that time with bands like Can, Neu! and Faust was all about experimentation.
Not only Kraftwerk are among my favorite artists, but my 8-month-old baby loves Autobahn.
Kraftwerk, in my opinion, invented modern music and will be the classical music of our times.
There have been moments of my life where I would listen morgen spaziergang for hours in loop, it was the only thing that could get me through the day without rage bursts.
It's my Linus cover.
Through them I discovered all the bands I love, from the most experimental electronic ones to David Bowie.
His contribution in taking "intelligent music" (sorry, can't find a better term) from something for the eiltè to something POP will be fully appreciated only when we'll be long gone.
Gute reise Meister
The power plant will be producing its magic energy forever
But this is not "tragic". People die. Florian was going to die. He wasn't young. He totally transformed the world of popular music. He had an awesome life, and now it is over. That's not tragic, it's just the nature of being alive.
He died of cancer, a terrible way to go and even though he wasn't part of Kraftwerk since 2008, I think his solo works were more relevant than ever.
Like this one
We lost someone who was higly influential and spoke boldly, but humbly, in support of the light side.
Not a good day for humanity, in one of the worst periods in modern times.
My friend and I wanted to extend the song so we could dance to it. So using a stereo system that had a cassette deck that could record from the turntable, I would cue the cassette to record, pause, then release the turntable, unpause the cassette, record the bit in the song we wanted to extend, and wash-rinse-repeat until we had the length we wanted.
This of course led to me down a long path of making beats, mixing tracks, and general electro-acoustic music shenanigans :)
Rest in peace Florian.
Kraftwerk is more political than the simplistic English lyrics would portray. It was then that I had new found appreciation for their craft. Praxis.
English is much more compact, so there is quite a bit of filler words to match the music.
Sie ist ein Model und sie sieht gut aus Ich nähm sie heut gerne mit zu mir nach Haus Sie wirkt so kühl, an sie kommt niemand ran Doch vor der Kamera da zeigt sie was sie kann
Sie trinkt in Nachtclubs immer Sekt (Korrekt!) Und hat hier alle Männer abgecheckt Im Scheinwerferlicht ihr junges Lächeln strahlt Sie sieht gut aus und Schönheit wird bezahlt
Sie stellt sich zur Schau für das Konsumprodukt Und wird von Millionen Augen angeguckt Ihr neues Titelbild ist einfach fabelhaft Ich muß sie wieder seh'n, ich weiß sie hat's geschafft
vs
She's a model and she's looking good I'd like to take her home that's understood She plays hard to get, she smiles from time to time It only takes a camera to change her mind
She's going out tonight but drinking just champagne And she has been checking nearly all the men She's playing her game and you can hear them say She is looking good, for beauty we will pay
She's posing for consumer products now and then For every camera she gives the best she can I saw her on the cover of a magazine Now, she's a big success, I want to meet her again
--
The deeper layer of the lyrics is almost completely absent in the English version.
Funniest one I remember is, in Computerwelt, Flensburg und das BKA / Haben unsere Daten da... where BKA is the federal German police and Flensburg is the city where they held some data about people (or still do, I don't know).
Having "Punkte in Flensburg" thus means one got caught driving too fast, under the influence or over a red light etc.
If you collect too many points you lose your drivers license and have to do a test and psychological exam to get it back.
This test usually called the "Idiotentest" because you drive like an idiot and you (deservedly) get treated like an idiot by the agency.
The whole affair is really annoying, expensive and takes quite some time.
If you fail the psychological exam (they find out you are an alcoholic for examle) you might never get the license back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mix_(Kraftwerk_album)
There is so much genius on this particular album. Critics weren't happy, but to me it was just perfection.
It had a massive impact on me in terms of opening my mind to possibilities of musical structure in `popular' music other than song form (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.).
Of course there is jazz form (head, solos on same form, head) and disco 12" form (the song, the dubbed out section, the reprise). And Kraftwerk's structures have a lot in common with the latter. But there is an incredible perfection and tightness (despite the extended durations) of form on all the tracks on that album.
Exactly. I think the reviewers just didn't get the whole concept.. just redoing old tracks, in a better way.
It's kind of the software way of life (v1, v2, etc - you keep iterating, by default).
It's also similar to how Mike Oldfield keeps working on variations of Tubular bells, and they do keep getting more and more interesting.
(I also happen to believe that massive introduction of nuclear power is the only thing that will make the earth comfortably habitable for our grand-children, but that's a topic for another thread.)
Which is why this is my favorite version of the song. They kind of evolved it with the Hiroshima accident.
As I get older I start to appreciate the early synth groups a lot more. Spend many hours listen to Kraftwerk over the decades.
RIP Florian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0lIlROWro8
This song got some commercial rotation in Spain in the day, and the videoclip was mesmerizing.
Great live show which was robotically exactly as I thought it would look like, complete with Sony laptops.
the band had an amazing run from 1974 to 1991. it sure is strange, though, that past that point, they pretty much stopped making new music.
the most charitable interpretation i can come up with is that they had created all the music that they needed to. or maybe, with the dawn of widely-available computers and much cheaper music synthesis, they could no longer stay five years ahead of the competition, and opted to bow out instead.
https://www.nts.live/shows/the-do-you-breakfast-show/episode...
Edit: As pointed out the english-singing rock band Scorpions from Germany is far more popular.
Drummer Herman Rarebell's solo album "Herman Ze German" was a good clue :-)
s/German/German-singing and you might have a point.
(Or is Rammstein a much bigger and the Neubauten a much less significant act than I think? ;))
Go wash out your mouth with soap.
An influencer in this context is someone whose IG feed, had there been IG back in the day, would have told you to check the latest from this crazy German band from Dusseldorf.
Ralf & Florian weren't influencers, they were inventors, pioneers, ground breaking visionaries (even if they didn't know it themselves most of the time).
What others got wrong in this thread is that they never actually built something themselves but they had the ideas and the people surrounding them that could make those ideas reality (those guys in Bonn). They were students of Karlheinz Stockhausen and you could absolutely hear that. If you listen to some of their first recordings[2], imagine this would be played on a synth instead of traditional instruments... and now you got KW like you know it.
If you are interested in some of the history about the scene in Düsseldorf you should def. watch "Keine Atempause – Düsseldorf, der Ratinger Hof und die neue Musik"[3]. Ratinger Hof was a mixture of artists, musicians and all kinds of crazy people. Funny (private) side note: When i was drinking wine with the dad of an old friend of mine, he told me that during his studies he was the driver for some of the now most famous artists (Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, etc.) and musicians back then. This guy had some crazy stories and since i know my friend for 20 years it was mind blowing that his dad drove some of my favorite artists/musicians and he never talked about it. ahhh.. so much memories.. Ralf and Florian are/were very kind persons and it always was nice to talk to them. They modeled much of the sound as we know it today.
This whole area (Cologne/Bonn/Düsseldorf) is very rich when it comes to modern music. There once was a "Studio für elektronische Musik" (Studio for Electronic Music)[4] by the WDR (german radio/television). In the later years there were only "private" tours (thanks to Volker Müller - the sound engineer of Stockhausen!) and it saddens me that it's not open to the public anymore. They moved all of it outside of Cologne and now it's rotting in some basement. Real history that's just abandoned...[5]
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_bhcpE91A [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_field_synthesis [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNoFHdlMrtI [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lrdFOHRxuE [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_for_Electronic_Music_(W... [5] - https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eingemottet-in-kellerra...