| Triad
- Is the term "space rock" applicable to your music? |
| Ralf
Hütter - We are part of the industrial generation. We grew up.
. . |
| Florian
Schneider - ... very impressed by these machinery rhythms that
we used in our music, the mechanical aspects of life. Technology is no enemy
to us. We use technology as it is. We also like nature but you cannot say
the technology is any better or worse than nature. You have to accept all
of these things as they are in the world today. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We have aspects in our music that refer to space, like
Kometenmelodie, but we also have some very earthly aspects that are very
direct and not from outer space but from inner space like from the human
being and the body, and very close to every day life. |
| Florian
Schneider - We see films and we go out and get optical impressions
and so this often has an influence on our music and it becomes an acoustic
film or acoustic poetry. That's the way that we try to express what we have
seen and what we have heard. Several years ago we were on tour and it happened
that we just came off the Autobahn after a long ride and when we came in
to play we had this speed in our music. Our hearts were still beating fast
so the whole rhythm became very fast. |
| Triad
- The spinning of a roulette wheel is the basis for another one of your
tunes. |
| Ralf
Hütter - Yes, movement. The idea is to capture non-static phenomenon
because music itself is a non-static phenomenon. It deals with time and
movement in time. It can never be the same. |
| Triad
- Does dance have a part in your music? |
| Ralf
Hütter - Yes, in Germany some modern ballet companies have used
our music to create their own versions of ballet for this music. |
| Florian
Schneider - The choreography was like a computer dance,. like
robot dance. Very mechanical in its movement on stage. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We also kind of dance when we perform. It's not that
we actually move our bodies but it's this awareness of your whole body.
You feel like a dancer. |
| Florian
Schneider - Your brain is dancing. The electronics are dancing
around in the speakers. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We've had this idea for a long time but it has only
been in the past year that we've been able to create what we feel is a loudspeaker
orchestra. This is what we consider Kraftwerk to be, a non-acoustic electronic
loudspeaker orchestra. The whole thing is one instrument. We play mixers,
we play tapes, we play phasers, we play the whole apparatus of Kraftwerk.
That's the instrument. Including the lights and the atmosphere. |
| Florian
Schneider - Sometimes I can taste the sounds. There are a lot
more feelings than just the feeling going through the ears. The whole body
can feel the sounds. |
|
Ralf Hütter- Imagine the trees. What
do the trees sounds like? You don't even have to make the sound audible.
You can just write out the suggestions and the reader can imagine the sound
or reproduce the sounds spiritually in his brain. |
| Triad
- Do you listen to other kinds of music other than electronic? |
| Ralf
Hütter - Oh yes. Sometimes we listen to the radio and we also
listen to life, to noise, or to what people normally regard as noise, which
is of course the source for environmental music. If you walk down the street
you can hear a symphony if you are open enough to listen to it. |
| Florian
Schneider - That's what you learn from working with electronics.
You go to the source of the sounds and your ears are trained to analyze
any sound. We hear a plane passing overhead and I know all of the phenomenon
that go into the make-up of the sound, the phasings, the echos. All these
things that happen in nature. |
| Ralf
Hütter - . . . and the more you learn the more you enjoy it.
You can always discover new sounds that you've never heard before. It's
amazing sometimes when you listen to the context of the sounds. It could
be the animals in the park, with the cars and the people mixing together.
|
| Florian
Schneider - The association field is very large in music, meaning
that somebody can make some special sound put them on tape and broadcast
them to 50 people or 100 or 1,000 and each one of those people has a different
impression of the sounds they have heard. It's not like the cinema where
nearly everybody sees the same thing. I think the optical is much more fixed
but when you have music you have so many different sorts of musics in the
brains of the people. |
| Ralf
Hütter - Yes, musics. Many musics. |
| Florian
Schneider - When you are on stage you can focus the music to
all these different brains, but you know there are a lot of different receptions.
Some people fall asleep, some people are excited, others don't like it and
go out, others come back, some stay in their seats. So there are a lot of
different reactions to the same thing. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We improvise in the way it is used in Oriental and raga
music. It's not harmonically structured. |
|
Florian Schneider - We prefer to make
sounds. Sound symphonies. We use a lot of natural harmonies. . . like from
the overtone scale. We try to do things simply, the simpler the better.
We tried to do a lot of complicated bullshit in the past where everybody
tried to play as many notes as they can in a second or a minute, but after
awhile we came down to the essential thing. |
| Ralf
Hütter - You have to face yourself to come to the point where
you really think about what it is that you want to do. Not to hide behind
too many notes or to hide behind ... |
|
Florian Schneider - ... the speaker cabinets.
|
| Ralf
Hütter - ... to open up to the simplest things. |
| Florian
Schneider - We don't like these sort of bombastic sounds, we
prefer more refined sounds. |
| Ralf
Hütter - It took years of development, step by step, for us to
get to what we are doing now. And it will take more steps to do something
else. |
| Florian
Schneider- We started out with acoustic instruments. We had a
lot of friends who have played with us in the past, and so life goes on
and some of them leave and others join. We finally came to a point where
we decided that we didn't want these loud drum kits on stage with us. Then
for a year we played with just the two of us. We used a rhythm machine but
this was not entirely satisfactory. It would be good for one piece but too
boring to use for a whole evening, and so we decided to build electronic
drums because we wanted to have rhythms in our music. We designed and built
them and are now playing with two electronic percussionists in the group.
|
| Ralf
Hütter - It gives a lot of possibilities to change the sound
because electronic music is created out of white noise, so you can take
whatever frequencies you like, or you want, for your particular concept
of music - and with these electronic instruments you can pick out the frequencies
that suit you. Like a painter, you can choose whatever colors of the spectrum
you like for that projection of your painting. |
| Florian
Schneider - We are working with a painter now who can realize
some of our optic visions. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We don't think of ourselves as musicians, but rather
as people who create out of the different media or ways of expressing yourself,
whether it is painting, poetry, music, or even film. The ideal is to communicate
to people. |
| Florian
Schneider - We don't really know where this whole thing will
drift, perhaps more to optics or to words. |
| Ralf
Hütter - We are waiting for the video disc, which will soon be
available in Germany. This will probably be the next step we want to go
on to because we have so many visual ideas along with the music and they
both influence one another. |
 |
| Interview
to Paul Smaisys - 1975 |
|
