Kraftwerk, how it all began

The core members of Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter, were key to Germany’s experimental music community. Schneider had already played in one group, the fabulously named Pissoff, before he and Hutter joined Organisation, whose Tone Float (1970) is a minor classic of its kind - a strung-out, spiralling, improvisatory ramble. There was plenty of ambling, horizontal ambience being made around this time, as “space rock” took to the air; Tone Float is one of the better examples. Soon, though, this lineup would disintegrate, and Kraftwerk would rise out of its ashes, Schneider and Hutter calling in two drummers, including the soon-to-be-legendary Klaus Dinger, who stepped in to complete the band.

If all you know of Kraftwerk is their pioneering techno-pop, Kraftwerk (1970) and its successor, Kraftwerk 2 (1972) - the albums with the traffic cones on the cover, rendered pop-art lite in red or green - are revelatory for just how risky and unpredictable they are. Kraftwerk opens with “Ruckzuck”, Schneider’s ascending-and-descending flute line fed through a phalanx of delays before the greatest of dumb riffs churns around one note, the rhythm basic and unrelenting. The song speeds up, disintegrates, collapses in on itself, reformulates for one last blast. And when Hutter left the group in 1971 to study architecture, Kraftwerk essentially became a prototype of Neu!, with guitarist Michael Rother joining the ranks.

The subsequent Kraftwerk 2 gleams and glimmers, its introductory bell tones resolving to a lovely toytown music-box rhythm; elsewhere, noisescapes scrape and simmer. 

Soon, Hutter was back, Dinger and Rother were gone, and Ralf Und Florian (1973) was recorded, the hidden gem in the Kraftwerk catalogue, a blissing wash of playful electronics - British musician Neil Campbell said that this album “invented a new form of music... but no-one’s really noticed”. He’s not wrong. Here, Hutter and Schneider are starting to nudge their music into more streamlined shapes, exploring the possibilities of electronics with an eye on the clock and ears attuned to tonal bliss.

Kraftwerk as we colloquially know them, though, started to come into shape on the side-long, titular “Autobahn” (1974), where they embraced the possibilities of pop and “discipline”. It became a surprise international hit, and the electro-pop Kraftwerk’s future was assured. “Autobahn’”s celebration of the highway, a kind of crisp, synthetic endlessness, was modernity writ large. Elsewhere, the album drifted into bucolic territory, with the bird-song swoon of “Morgenspaziergang” and “Kometenmelodie”: sun-stroke drones and one-fingered melodies.

It would provide the template for the next run of Kraftwerk albums, where technocratic populism met sleek, streamlined experimentation. For Ralf Hutter, this is where Kraftwerk’s story really begins.