Sunday, October 26, 2008

radioactivity is in the air for you and me

"Approximately 40 years ago, in the cold, clean recesses of one Kling Klang studio laboratory located in Düsseldorf, Germany, a collective that called itself Kraftwerk began churning out from an assortment of electronic equipment and their own secret inventions what they termed “machine music”, the likes of which had never been heard before.
Cold, precise, minimal, repetitive and almost wholly electronically-processed, this new brand of stiff was released on an unsuspecting public in the 70s, and pop music was never the same again…
Beginning as a duo in Germany’s late 60s experimental music scene and evolving into a notoriously reclusive synth-pop quartet in the mid 70s, Kraftwerk is today both an institution and an enigma. The group that once expressed an intention to “make music that sounded like Germany” has had its distinctive sound – drum machine beats, synths, vocodered vocals – copied and sampled by musicians such as David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, New Order, Art of Noise and Afrika Bambaataa across genres from techno and new wave to rock and hip-hop.
Strikingly antiseptic and yet strangely compelling, Kraftwerk’s spare melodies, precise programming and curiously facile lyrics (“Radioactivity is in the air for you and me”) reveal a deadpan humour and an appreciation of the absurd. Experienced live, a Kraftwerk show is a perfectly synchronised visual spectacle with four besuited guys (and their robot doubles) standing quite still behind consoles onstage, against a backdrop of perfectly synchronized visual projection, lights, robotics and pure theatre."


its gonna be epic.
i can hardly waitttttt.

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