Robots That Know How To Get Funky

2009-12-16 (수) 12:00:00

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By MIKE RUBIN

Since its founding in 1970 in Dusseldorf, Germany, by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk has carried on a careerlong obsession with the fusion of man and technology.

It would take four more years (and three largely instrumental records of electro-acoustic improvisation) before Kraftwerk heralded the coming of electronic pop on its landmark 1974 album “Autobahn,” and another four years before the members proclaimed themselves automatons on “The Robots,” the band’s de facto theme song from 1978’s “The Man-Machine” album.

“This rhythm, industrial rhythm, that’s what inspires me,” Mr. Hutter, 63, said. “It’s in the nature of the machines. Machines are funky.”

Few bands have done more to promote that once incongruous concept than Kraftwerk. David Bowie channeled the band’s chilly vibes for his late ‘70s “Berlin Trilogy,” and in the early 1980s synth pop groups like Human League and Depeche Mode both followed suit.

Kraftwerk also became the unlikely godfather of American hip-hop and black electronic dance music, inspiring pioneers in the South Bronx and Detroit. Today Kraftwerk’s resonance can be heard in works as varied as Radiohead and the Auto-Tuned hip-hop of Kanye West and T-Pain.

“Kraftwerk were a huge influence on the early hip-hop scene, and they basically invented electro, which has had a huge influence on contemporary R&B and pop,” the techno artist Moby said. “Kraftwerk are to contemporary electronic music what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are to contemporary rock music.”

Yet Kraftwerk remains relatively anonymous . In an hourlong phone conversation last month from Kraftwerk’s studio outside Dusseldorf, Mr. Hutter was polite but revealed little on topics ranging from the band’s creative hibernation of the last quarter-century (only two albums of new material since 1981’s “Computer World”) to Mr. Schneider’s departure from the group last year . “It’s important for me that the music speak for itself,” he said.

This month the music should do just that with the release of “The Catalogue” (Astralwerks/EMI), a boxed set of newly remastered versions of the band’s last eight albums, beginning with “Autobahn” and including all of the records with the so-called classic Kraftwerk lineup: Mr. Hutter, Mr. Schneider and the electronic percussionists Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos.

Mad Mike Banks, founder of the Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance, said he considered the song “Numbers,” from “Computer World,” the “secret code of electronic funk.”

“That track hit home in Detroit so hard,” Mr. Banks said. “They had just created the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in.”

From Dusseldorf, Mr. Hutter said he’s fascinated “that this music from two industrial centers of the world, with different cultures and different history, suddenly there’s an inspiration and a flow going back and forth. It’s fantastic.

“All this positive energy, this feedback coming back to me, is charging our battery, and now we’re full of energy. It keeps my Ralf robot going.”

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