| BBC:
Now due to the nature of the musicians' life, the
excitement of the open road as the tour bus speed towards the next gig,
the so much popular music has been inspired by travel. One group has spent
their career trying to create the rhythm and tones of travel in the music
itself. Kraftwerk are the enigmatic german musical pioneers, who use electronic
sounds capes and have inspired so many pop bands for whom the synthesizers
is the instrument of choice. Many music critics regard them as among the
most important and influential group of all time. For 33 years Kraftwerk
have made a succession of journey orientated compositions, including "Tour
De France", "Autobahn" and "Trans Europe Express",
in a tiny studio in the backstreets of Düsseldorf. The new LP, the
first for 12 years, not only continues the travel thing, but borrows an
earlier title for a new set of songs to mark this entirely year of the real
Tour De France. A Kraftwerk interview is rare, but the enigmatic German
group have broken with all habits with the release of "Tour De France
2003". When he came to the Front Row Studio, I asked Kraftwerk founder,
Ralf Hütter, about his fascination with the bike ride.. |
| Ralf
Hütter: When cycling is at its best, or it's
really going, it's silent. When your bike functions best, you don't hear
it, it's silent, there's no crackling, it is just sssshhhh. And the same
when you are in good shape and in form and you are riding your bike, you
hear nothing, maybe just little bit of breath, when it is no too ecstatic.
And we work from that kind of silence, type of basis. |
| BBC:
You are a racing fan, but travel has been a recurring
fascination and inspiration for the music of Kraftwerk. Are you directly
inspired by the experiences of train travel? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, but also the musical, the sound
world of cars like tuning cars, sometimes it gets called the raga of the
Autobahn. So it is drowning sounds of the synthesizers, oscillators, overtones
floating and for us it's like music. |
| BBC:
You have been very reluctant to talk about the music,
to explain it over the last 3 decades, so it's a task for the critics to
interpret the music, and very often they talk about the Kraftwerk music
reflecting the bus, the technological rhythms of the modern world. You are
consciously doing that, you are sitting and listening to a road, to a train… |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, definitely and not only a music
concrete, just recording it and working on recorded tracks, but also transporting
it into musical levels with oscillators. So basically is improvising on
some sound ideas. Using circles, using like floating sounds, and like repetitive
little patterns ,and developing from there, and developing from my heart
beat which we recorded at the medical test, so the basis of the rhythm being
my heart beat plus some breath. |
| BBC:
So you are sampling your body. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, from myself. We took my heart
beat and work this into a kind of beat per minute, and some kind of a drum
beat plus the breath modulating and filtering, and working from that. |
| BBC:
This is the same approach that you kept for the last
33 years. When you formed Kraftwerk, you were classical trained musician.
Was this a conscience attempt to do something different with the parameters
of classical music in the way you understood them? |
| Ralf
Hütter: We were coming from some kind of…
one side from classical music being trained as young kids and from there
was the influence of the art world and the electronic world and living in
a cultural environment around Düsseldorf, so just came to our mind that
we have to find our own musical language. We started in 1970 with our Kling
Klang studio in Düsseldorf. Was just an old tape recorder and we have the
first synthesizers. |
| BBC:
You are in the same studio, but it is a different
studio on the inside. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, it changes. |
| BBC:
But it is that an increasing detachment, Kraftwerk
has always been an element of detachment, of technological advancement.
It is not a performance in the conventional. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, it is a very intense performance
because we control all the parameters, the levels, and nods and switches,
so the music is very sensitive and we can achieve big effects with small
movements. |
| BBC:
You haven't really ever played the pop game, the marketing,
the promotion. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, we are very concentrated on
our work, in what we do so we don't have the time to do… |
| BBC:
But I'm interested, do you regard yourself as pop
musicians, or it is just a happy accident that Kraftwerk has been so popular
and experimental at the same time? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, that's certainly a pop element,
do it like the…or…some kind of black humor. |
| BBC:
Is it meant to be funny? |
| Ralf
Hütter: It's incorporated, it's many things
at the same time. |
| BBC:
I asked that because some people always focus on the
sadness as a melancholy aspect. |
| Ralf
Hütter: That's also that, music is so many
things at the same time. |
| BBC:
You are so far ahead of the game artistically and
technologically. Do you worry at all that the pop world has called up? |
| Ralf
Hütter: That's wonderful, because today with
all the tools available, and everybody is in electronic music today. |
| BBC:
When you started your new album, obviously Tour De
France is inspired by the race. Do you sit down and work out themes or is
it you start on the computer and listening to sounds first? |
| Ralf
Hütter: No, we don't have a special working
principle, things come to us. A perfect example Tour De France, like 20
years ago, was meant to be an album, which just we didn't finish it. Now
it's coming back, we just have to finish it as a piece of work. But now
this is done so we progress to the next ideas. |
| BBC:
So it is not a worry to make the next technological
lead forward to stay ahead of the game? That's not important. |
| Ralf
Hütter: No |
|
|
|
Interview
to John Wilson
|
| Transcription
of Nieves Amo - Valladolid - Spain |
|
