| They're
otherwise engaged with a season of their own gigs at the Cite de la Musique,
the museum and cultural centre of music in Paris. Performing on the BDO
bill instead, to the disbelief of long-suffering local fanatics of the outfit,
are the famously reclusive human members of Kraftwerk: founders Ralf Hutter
and Florian Schneider, along with long-serving co-musik arbeiter (music
workers) Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz. Sitting in the near-dark of
Kraftwerk's tour van outside the Big Day Out in Auckland, the real Ralf
Hutter slowly swings his arms to demonstrate the motion of his robotic clone
back in Paris. |
| "They
do a slow motorist dance, which some people call Tai Chi,"
he says. "They have our faces". |
| The
54-year-old Hütter - in his quiet, near-perfect English - is politely
dealing with the notion that his robots have made him and his fellow Kraftwerkers
ageless, immortal. |
| "In
a way, yes,"
he says. "Also, in German there is a saying: `Ewig
wahrt am langsten' - forever lasts longest. It has to do with automation.
Also, where I am doing an interview, the robots can do a photo session,
do some filming, so it's an industrial art process. That's where that [the
robots] comes from". |
| An
interview with Hutter - a rare event - sounds and feels like a drawn-out
scene from a Stanley Kubrick film. He's as much a computer scientist as
he is an innovative musician, techno oracle and hands-on inventor. The themes
are a constant, all in line with the Kraftwerk manifesto which has essentially
remained unchanged throughout the outfit's 33 years. Take the following
revelatory exchange. |
| -
Are you recording new material? |
|
- "Yes. All the time". |
| -
So, when might we ...? |
| -
"Well, it's planned for this year". |
| -
An album? |
| (No
response) |
| -
Can you give a sense of what it's sounding like? |
| -
"We are working on it". |
| -
Anything? |
| -
"Very forward". |
| Hutter
says they might even do some work on this soon-to-be-released album while
in Australia. These days, Kraftwerk's beloved technology has advanced so
far that they can carry around their famed Kling Klang studios on their
laptop computers. This, Kraftwerk has always maintained, was music's destiny.
Of course, their fans have heard this talk about a new album before, an
untitled record even making it to EMI's soon-to-be-released list in 2000.
Nothing eventuated, although the world did get a new song that time around,
Expo 2000. The single included remixes by Kraftwerk proteges Orbital and
Detroit's Underground Resistence. Although they have not released an album
of new material since Electric Cafe in 1986, Hutter says he and the Kraftwerk
community have been constantly at work. |
| "We
call ourselves musical workers - musik arbeiter," he says. "It's what we
do. We always have people closely working with us on different projects
- artists and camera people and programmers, visual people, and our friends
[such as artist Emil Schult]- for a very, very long time, painting, painting
for [the cover of 1974's] Autobahn (as well as 1981's Computerworld). And
lyrics." |
| Since
the days when they had to build their own prototypes of electronic instruments,
Hutter says Kraftwerk has maintained a close relationship with those electronic
music engineers who have carried on their work in that realm, acting as
the "test pilots" of new music programs. Technology, says Hutter, has been
kind to Kraftwerk. |
| "We're
happy - years ago we had to bring tonnes of analogue equipment and now it's
all digital and all on diskettes and hard-disk drives and all kinds of storage,"
Hutter says. "For us it's perfect. It's, like, mobile. Pocket Calculator,
a song we composed more than 20 years ago, is a reality for us now. So we
can travel more. So everything is working in our direction, which is fine." |
| Hutter
says his beloved machines have rarely faltered over the years. He puts that
down to paying them the respect they deserve. |
| "We've
been lucky..."
he says... "We treat our technology with lots of care
and love and it's given it back to us. We have been treated well by technology.
Like we say, sometimes we play the machines and sometimes the machines play
us. So it works very well, it's symbiotic". |
| It's
been 21 years since Kraftwerk performed in Australia. Not that we've missed
out on much in the live stakes - following that world tour in late 1981,
the outfit didn't perform again until 1990. Apart from a European tour in
1991, there have been only spasmodic appearances.Performing at a day-long
dance party such as the one in the Boiler Room isn't a unique experience
for Kraftwerk, although they are accustomed to a more refined - or at least
less sweaty - audience. |
| "We
play everywhere,"
Hutter says. "Art centres. Mostly we play on our own.
[To] people from film, theatre, visuals, performance art, music, dance,
disco". |
| For
all their absences, Kraftwerk's stature in popular culture hasn't altered.
After all, as everyone knows, these gentlemen virtually invented - or at
least arranged the building blocks - of music as we know it today. And they've
provided some of the most moving, minimalistic musical mantras along the
way: Autobahn, Computer Love, Pocket Calculator, Tour de France. Hutter
says his bionic Kraftwerk has always aimed to please "everything" human:
"The feet, the heart, the intellect, the body". |
| "I
think it also makes it easier to understand in different cultural aspects.
So we play here, we play there, we play. Every day. Musik arbeiter". |
 |
| (Interview
to Patrick Hamilton) |
|
