[sdiy] We are the Mummies (was: Freak at Home)

[Czech Martin]

don't worry too much. this is all about pop music.
and pop music is absolutely irrelevant.
so all the arguments to who invented what is even
more irrelevant. it simply does not matter.

nearly all of the interesting sounds of electronic music
could be heard back in 1955 to 1964. Simply because
the equipment was there.
but of course not in a childish, minimalistic pop
manner where the structure is often simpler
than most nursery rhymes are...


m.c.

-----Original Message-----
From: jbv [mailto:jbv.silences at club-internet.fr]
Sent: Freitag, 9. Mai 2003 13:35
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: [sdiy] We are the Mummies (was: Freak at Home)





> isn't that why they took those robots on stage from the
> early 80's?

Only dummies were used in the early 80's. Robots appeared in the early 90's.

>i almost got to play on one of their pocket calculators they
>handed to the crowd.

I did manage to press a couple of Florian's pocket calculator in 1981...

>Not to harp on a subject thats definatly a matter of taste and opinion, but
>have you listened to the really early Kraftwerk?  Like Ralf&Florien or
>Kraftwerk2?
>Dont get me wrong, I like Wolfgang's
>contributions too, but when he came on board they definatly had started to
>break away from the Tangerine Dream-esk sounds that they had been known
>for previously.

Gasp ! This is pure revisionism !
KW has always been light years away from TD and other "kosmische music".
Actually, their big influence in the early 70's was NEU!, the only truly
innovative
duo of krautrock... Ralf & Florian never really managed to approach similar
brilliant & innovative concepts. After that, they tried to catch up with
various
trends (the Beach Boys with "Autobahn", "Pop Corn" with "Radio-activity",
Gorgio Moroder with "Man Machine", the worlwide underground minimal synth
with "Computer World", "Art of Noise" and all the 80's crap with "Electric
Cafe")
but everything failed... The only 2 songs that are still worth listening to are

"TEE" and "Tour de France" (the latter for the lyrics).

Man, several years ago (1998) I got tired (and was almost banned from the
KW mailing list) of all these young morons who consider them as the "godfathers

of thechno"... Actually, I remember seeing them in their first gig outside
Germany
(in Paris feb. 1973 at the krautrock festival set up by french mag Actuel) :
they
were just a couple of unknown newbies... A couple of years later, they
understood
that the only way to make a carreer in the music biz was to work on their image

rather than on their music, and then they invented the Kling-Klang studio, the
dummies, the robots and all that stuff... Actually, they should have named
themselves
"Propaganda"...

I saw them several times over the years (in Paris in 73 & 81), in Zürich in 91,
in Linz
& Karlsruhe in 97, in Tokyo, L.A. and San Francisco in 98... and everytime
there was less and less meat around the bones... In 97 they were just
representatives
for Doepfer gear, and these days they just seem to promote VST plug-ins (or
whatever).
The last great show was 1981, at least for the great imagery of the KK studio
live on stage. But even at that time, I'm quite sure that most of the show was
pre-recorded. I perfectly remember seeing a 16 tracks tape recorder backstage
and I thought "wow! they tape every gig for their archives or something".
But now, after seeing several gigs in a row during the 98 tour (where obviously

75% or more of the show was pre-recorded), I'm convinced that they were
faking to play, and that they've always been...
I have a short video excerpt of the Paris 1973 gig, in which they perform
"Kling Klang", and obviously they play VERY little (but the audience was too
stoned to notice)...

Putting robots on stage in place of humans was a sexy & exciting concept in
1978 (because it was out of reach). But nowadays, what is it all about ?
Triggering samples and MIDI sequences ? What a joke !
A much more exciting approach would have been to flood the web with a
remix of their song "Von Himmel hoch" from their 1st album as soon as
US troops started to bomb Iraq... Just a suggestion...

Nowadays, their live appearances are just a good opportunity for EMI to sell
their back catalog and to maintain that stupid myth of "techno pionneers" for
the young generations of brainless consumers. Ralf & Florian, as well as many
other pseudo-innovators of the 70's, are just trying to sell a few more albums
before they get retired...
Elvis Presley was doing better in Las Vegas 30 years ago...

And I for myself, I find a great pleasure cluttering the archives of various
mailing lists with anti-Kraftwerk propaganda.

IMHO, in all the Kraftwerk saga, the truly innovators were NEU!, Emil Schult,
Conny Plank, and (in some ways) Wolfgang Flür. For more details, just
read Wolfgang's book "I was a robot" (the 1st edition, since I've heard
that Ralf & Florian managed to have some chapters erased from further editions
of that book after a lawsuit)...

JB