[sdiy] Freak at Home

[Charles Twist]

Isn't Kraftwerk meant to be the epitome of German humour?
Charles (stirring it)


At 09:24 09/05/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>jhaible wrote:
>>>So you don't like Kraftwerk, eh?
>>
>>I'm afraid I'm not a Kraftwerk fan, no.
>
>I'm afraid I'm going to have to ban you now ;-)
>
>
>>I was always leaning more on the mystical / "cosmical" / organic
>>side of electronic music than on the technical side. (stange for
>>someone who also builds machines ...)
>>Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream (Zeit !!), Popol Vuh, Brian Eno
>>were the heroes of my youth. (Even Vangelis and some Kitaro.)
>>Maybe I'm doing Kraftwerk wrong (in that case I apologize), but
>>I always had the impression that their focus was on the coldness,
>>un-human-ness and technical nature of electronic music, while
>>the above mentioned artist tried to achieve the opposite.
>>All right: The "cosmos" which was evoked by Tangerine Dream
>>was a cold one, too - but certainly a very different kind of "cold".
>>Hard to put into words - I better stop now.
>
>Well, it's a bit off-topic, but I'm allowing myself one message
>about this. I'm a looooong time Kraftwerk "fan" (awful word for
>a grown man).
>
>Kraftwerk does technology-inspired music, but people tend to take them
>rather too seriously. It's Kraftwerk's own fault of course, they
>created a rather extreme image. But guys playing pocket calculators
>on top of their head on stage are not what they appear. More
>importantly, their albums don't bore me at all after all these years.
>I'm still very fond of Trans Europa Express, especially Europa Endlos
>I still have to try and recreate. They did very clever things with
>a timed echo there... And isn't Radio Aktivitaet a fun album, full
>of little experiments.
>
>I went to Paris last September, Kraftwerk played live. I was aghast
>to see they scrapped the big Kling-Klang studio on stage. Now it's
>just 4 guys and 4 laptops. I'm afraid musically there was nothing new
>(to my ears), many tracks sounded *exactly* like on previous performances.
>It looked like a canned performance mostly. What a difference with their
>great concerts in the early 80's, when they really did werk on stage.
>Worse even, the guys on stage did not seem to enjoy themselves. Just
>standing there, like dummies. Sad!
>
>--
>Rick Jansen
>__
>rja at euronet.nl    http://www.euronet.nl/~rja
>____________________________________________
>S&H's a module and s&h's looking good