Radio
1 : Of all the bands that are currently riding
on the crest of an electronic wave, which do you think took the most from
what you were doing years and years ago? |
Ralf
Hütter: That's difficult to answer, because
we feel more like electronics are everywhere. We basically record what's
around us: trains, cars, airwaves, everything. And we don't think that these
sounds belong to us or that anybody can take them away from us, or take
advantage of this because we feel it's really belonging everywhere, bringing
people together. At the moment we feel very much encouraged to hear that
there's a lot of energy in electronic music happening in England, because
the last time we came here - six years ago - we were attacked for what we
were doing at that time. And I think now there's so much energy coming back
to us from all the people and the young industrial bands. I think we feel
very much encouraged by this whole movement.
It's our life to communicate & to record & make these things happen,
and therefore we don't feel ripped off that way. |
| Radio
1 : What would interest me would be to discover
what actually influenced you before you formed Kraftwerk. |
| Ralf
Hütter: We live in Düsseldorf which
is right next to Köln. And there's this electronic radio studio, and
they were putting out all those strange electronic sounds during the night,
and at a fairly young age we saw a couple of electronic performances by
composers of that school. So to us it was the next step to do: after classically
working piano or flute or any of those instruments then immediately going
electronic. It wasn't such a big step for us as it might seem. In other
countries where there's not so much of an electronic scene happening, so
we are like maybe the second generation of electronic people, because the
older guys, Stockhausen or Pierre Schaeffer... and we had seen in the Düsseldorf
Arts centre a couple of these performances from Fluxus happenings, and I
think that gave us the idea of going electronic. I always like to work sounds
and experiment. |
| Radio
1 : And I guess that would hold constant for the
other three members of the band aswell. Looking from the auditorium point
of view, you're all very much "of a muchness", you're all very
similar people. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, we all have the same size clothes.
We can exchange clothes very well. Only I think Karl has bigger shoes! (laughs) |
| Radio
1 : To a very great degree, the only differential
that exists between any members of the band when you watch is that the two
people who concentrate on the percussion - which of course is electronic
- actually move their legs. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes. In order to stay in time and
rhythm. And sometimes they operate pedals, because the loudness is done
with foot pedals, so they move their feet quite a lot. I play different
keyboards, I have four pedals. So I might get a transplant and have another
two feet extra. |
| Radio
1 : Some people might suggest that the way you
present your music is quite sterile. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, there is certainly that quality
about our music beacuse basically we are very shy, and also I think the
electronic medium made us make a different style of performance. It's more
mental than physical. The music is like walking a tightrope, and if I switch
too much with those knobs, then immediately the balance of the whole group
is changed. These electronic instruments are super-sensitive; I think they
are psychologically very sensitive to any vibration that comes from the
person operating them. In fact they are used in psychotherapy, and therefore
we try to play them in a softer way. It's like a ballet, an electronic ballet,
where we move the fingers on the keyboards and the knobs, and the whole
movement is not so big. |
| Radio
1 : You seem to portray with your music a lot
more depth than might actually appear from what one hears when one sits
in the audience. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, our music is more minimalistic.
We try to do the most basic sounds possible to transport certain ideas.
In Germany it's called "Gerade Aus". That's "straight ahead". |
| Radio
1 : You really more - I think - want to inspire
people to create their own imagery... |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, and also create their own music,
that's also what we try to do. Because in Germany the electronics is now
picked up by some very young people, and everybody can start with their
small synthesisers and some headphones. It's not expensive, and you can
play in your apartment. You can make cassettes and send them to your friends,
and there's a lot happening in Germany, and in England now, of course. And
that's part of the ideas we try to do. Because we started from zero. We
didn't learn electronics in some school. |
| Radio
1 : How much of what is actually being seen on
this tour is your studio? |
| Ralf
Hütter: It's our whole studio in transport
cases. That's why we've taken three years to make this all transportable.
It's all interconnected with cables, and so we actually "play studio".
We don't play music, we "play studio". That's what we call it. |
| Radio
1 : You very much use the voice as an instrument
to lull people into a mood, I think. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes,
we're not good at singing so we try to use our voices as they were in their
quality. In germany it's called "spretschgesang". So that's a
mixture between singing & talking: "sing-talking" or "talk-singing". |
| Radio
1 : You utilise umpteen languages. I heard you
tonight speaking in Russian, and in German and English, and also in Spanish,
but in short bursts of all those languages. |
| Ralf
Hütter: The western world is dominated by
Anglo-American speech. And us being German, we had to use other languages,
and then we discovered the special psychological context of different languages.
Because we sometimes record our songs in different languages: French, and
now on the last album we did for the first time Japanese. We feel that changes
our music completely, so we have different variations of our music, and
some of the languages go even better sometimes with our music than others. |
| Radio
1 : How far removed are you from conventional
instrumentation? |
| Ralf
Hütter: We have found, or we have been working
on finding the right medium to really put our ideas across, and I can say
now that with the latest step in computers, now we can play anything. The
only limitations that we have is in our own mind or imagination. If we have
no ideas then we don't know what to play. And sometimes we try to play in
that mood also, then the machines play themselves and we listen to what
they have to say. And sometimes they play very nice segments! And we leave
them playing and... even leave the studio sometimes and go to the cinema,
and then we come back and it's still playing. We have changed in the meantime
because we have done something else; seen a film or something, and we have
come back, and we sometimes discover certain things that way. Really, sometimes
we work that way. By not knowing what we play and just... listening. We
had been working the last 3 years on the ideas of computer music and Computer
World, and then last Christmas we went by chance through the department
stores in Dusseldorf and we saw those little calculators going "beep
beep" and "bleep blop", and we bought some of those and plugged
them into our studio. We had been working more toward this complex computer
music and suddenly we were standing there with those "bleep bleep bleep"
pocket calculators. And we immediately wrote the song. "I do this and
that and... pressing a special key it plays a little melody", and we
wrote the song and immediately recorded it. |
| Radio
1 : Who do you listen to wh makes "conventional"
music? |
| Ralf
Hütter: We listen to very little music. We
mostly listen to ethnic music..Turkish: if you live in Germany you find
cassetes in place where only Turkish people go, or Arabian type of things...
some African. We sometimes go to discotheques because we like to do mechanical
dances and this type of rhythmic stuff. So we listen sometimes to black
music. But nothing special in particular. Because we consider ourselves
"musical workers". So we work every day from 5 until 1-2 in the
morning in the studio, and then when we get out of there, I think we listen
a lot to silence... |
| |
| Interview
to Tommy Vance - 1981 |
Transcription
by Harvey Williams - England |
|
