Sneak around-round-round in a blue jump suit Ghost Rider motorcycle hero”
Ghost Rider
How do you even begin to talk about an album like this? An album whose sole purpose was to shock and terrify the listener. When performance art duo Alan Vega and Martin Rev conceived of this musical idea, their goal was to scare audiences. Alan Vega would aggressively get into audience members faces in hopes that they would beat the shit out of him in response, screaming gutturally in their personal bubbles., all while Martin Rev was behind his keyboards playing droning bass synths that felt like they were trying to eat your soul and attacking synth sounds with his right hand that pierced through your ears like a sharp needle. As a whole this is not meant to be a pleasant experience, it’s supposed to be disturbing and horrible… and yet… it’s absolutely beautiful in its execution.
Hauntingly beautiful is the words I would use to describe it, because no matter how sinister the album gets, there’s always the strange ethereal beauty just underlaying the whole thing. The best example of this is Cheree, which feels like a love song for two haunted souls finding each other in the afterlife. It’s like the soundtrack to a demented rom-com taking place on a creepy graveyard and I’m here for this. For all of this. Maybe it’s the halloween-esque synth sounds that feel possessed or the added reverb to Alan Vega’s vocals that give it this haunting beauty. Whatever it may be, this is one hell of an experience in the world of synth-punk that you will truly never forget.
How does one even convince people of the dark, sinister beauty of this album? Any average listener would run screaming at the very mention of it. The name of the band is provocative enough, but if they even make it to their ten-minute opus “Frankie Teardrop” there’s no way this person you’re trying to sell the experience on will be by your side. The second Alan Vega’s blood-curdling screams exit his mouth and travel through the speakers into their ears, they’ll be done. Their souls shrivelling up and decaying on the spot. A shiver down your spine is an understatement and he does it not once but multiple times and all to the story of a man snapping and shooting his wife and kids before shooting himself, the horrifying screams replacing the gun shots… how do you sell an album like this to someone?!
I would like to say I can spread the word and convince everyone of the haunting beauty that is Suicide’s Suicide. But, alas, with a piece of music like this, there’s more chances of a rejection happening than an acceptance. I would urge everyone to listen to this album at least once in their lives and experience it for themselves. If I can get just one person to see the album’ for what it is’s haunting beauty then I know I will have done my duty.
Genre: Electronic / Synth-Pop / Experimental Pop / Avant-Garde
“Parks, hotels and palaces (Europe endless) Parks, hotels and palaces (Europe endless)”
Europe Endless
I always get excited when I get to talk about Kraftwerk in any way. There’s a giddiness that just fills me up and I don’t know exactly why Kraftwerk fills me with such emotion, but they do and I won’t question it because it’s good to get excited about things. It makes me sad that whenever I bring up Kraftwerk in social circles, rarely anyone even knows who they are, which is shocking especially when you take into consideration that a lot of these people love electronic music in some way. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t see beyond just what’s modern and don’t look back to what came before. Real shame because they are missing out. I think I got especially excited because I recently just read a book that dissected Kraftwerk’s album Computer World (which has quickly become my favourite album by them) and I got a lot of insight about how they function as a band and even a little glimpse into how they went about recording this particular album. I learned about how they write their music, how they use their studio as an instrument and also about their philosophies as a band in regards to our relationships with technology. It was an incredibly insightful read and I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in learning more (It’s the Computer World book that’s part of the 33 1/3 series!)
In true Kraftwerk fashion, they continued what they started with Autobahn and created a soundtrack to modern technology, specifically related to travel. While Autobahn evoked imagery of driving in your car down the German autobahn, Trans-Europe Express does the same but this time with train travel. Songs like Europe Endless recreate the feeling of sitting in a train and watching the scenery pass, while the entirety of Side B is the movement of the train, from the percussion that recreates the chugachuggachugga of a train, and the synths that evoke speed and directness, with a kling klang of metal on metal as the train barrels down the tracks, its amazing how well they bring that to life from 100 % synthetic sounds from their studio. It seems the group were trainspotters and loved watching and listening to the trains pass by, recording their sounds as they did. These recordings would heavily inspire them to make this album and would provide the blueprint of the sounds they were looking for. Even the two songs on the album that have nothing to do with trains (Showroom Dummies and Hall of Mirrors) still hold true to their exploration of modern technology (Hall of Mirrors being well, mirrors, and Showroom Dummies being a pre-cursor to the Robots and their mannequin aesthetic they would develop in their live shows and appearances).
I always believed Kraftwerk to be predicters of the future, somehow having such a good grasp on what was happening and predicting where things were going. But it seems the reality was they were very much in tune with what was happening in the present. As much as a lot of their music seems to predict future trends (Man-machine and Computer World being the biggest examples of this) they always claimed that they were very much just living in the present and seeing what was happening around them. It just happened that their strong awareness to technology around them would make them out to seem like seers of some sort. Their strong fascination with the technology was what made them seem like a band from the future, when in reality they were just strongly living in the present (which I feel is a lesson we should all learn for our own personal lives).
Kraftwerk is one of those bands that I think I’ll never grow tired of in any way. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the earliest bands I got into or maybe it’s just my love for anything electronic, but they really did have a unique talent with how they handled their music. A part of their process when writing their songs was to let the beats and foundations of the song play sometimes for days on an endless loop to see if the music could live that long, which I’m sure was an incredibly helpful process for this album to recreate the feel of long distance travel on a train and get that chugging sound just right. Their studio was very much an instrument as much as the actual instruments. And although none of this is unique when looking at it through a modern lens, it definitely was one of a kind back in 1977 and no one was doing what Kraftwerk was. They were innovating and inventing and just living in their own little world musically.
I, for one, couldn’t ask for any more from them.
Favourite Song: Europe Endless
-Bosco
P.S. A lot of the information here came from the 33 1/3 book on Computer World. If you love Kraftwerk, I highly recommend reading it!
A Journey to Listen to an Album from Every Single Country
4/198
Album: Computer World
Artist: Kraftwerk
Year: 1981
Length: 34:25
Genre: Electronic / Synth-Pop / Electro
I am only four countries in and once again I’ve decided to do a big country when it came to music. Just like Japan and Brazil, Germany was probably, debateably, one of the leading forces for music innovation and influence. Of course, it wasn’t the only country to do so, but there’s definitely a strong case to be made for what Germany had to offer musically to the world and the impact it had left. Let’s just say there was no lack of choice when trying to pick a band to listen to, let alone an album. That’s just a testament to Germany’s music that I could probably do a whole series purely on German bands and it would last me longer than I had ever thought.
Again, we find ourselves a country rich in musical genres, with a nice variety of selections that are also considered incredibly German. There was schlager music, which was a more traditional music of Germany, Kraut-rock (with bands like Faust and Can), Kosmische Musik (with bands like Neu and Kluster), and of course, as a branch of Kosmische Musik, their electronic music that was heavily influenced by the likes of bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Every single one of these bands had albums I had considered to talk about, but it only made sense to me to choose what is possibly my favourite band of the bunch, my favourite album of theirs and the first band from Germany I ever got into: the unbelievably wonderful and innovative electronic robots, Kraftwerk.
Kraftwerk have often been called the grandfathers of electronic music for a good reason. They may not have been the first to use synthesizers, contemporaries Tangerine Dream were making music at the same time and doing cool soundscapes with them, and electronic music was starting to take form as early as the 1960s with albums like Wendy Carlos’ “Switched On Bach” in 1968. No, they weren’t the first, but they were definitely the most innovative, creating their music from instruments they made themselves, isolating themselves into their own recording studio (called Kling Klang studio, a sound that fits their music appropriately) and developed the aesthetic of robots and machinery as the main sound of electronic music. Before them, synthesizers were used for experimentation, but Kraftwerk took the mechanical sounds and used them to create pieces of machinery and music bout said machinery with albums about driving a car, train tracks and travels, exploring humans as robots living under neon lights and in metropolis’ as the Man Machine, and finally a world controlled by computers. Sounds you can hear through modern electronic and dance music, sampled in countless Hip Hop albums and continuing to appear in current musical trends, even if you don’t realise it.
Before going on, I think it’s important to mention how Germany truly developed this sound. Before Kraut-Rock was a thing, the musical landscape in the country was heavy with Schlager and American influenced bands, something that the youth at the time wasn’t enjoying. They were not happy with the condition of Germany, disappointed with their history coming out of the world war and just not enjoying the extremely conservative stylings of Schlager music and annoyed at how American influences were taking over, they wanted to create their own music, their own sound that they can truly call as their own. These young musicians started to experiment with their instruments, creating new sounds and music that was somewhat challenging yet interesting. Bands like Can and Faust, the latter writing a song called Kraut-Rock (possibly coining the term right there), would hit the scene with drone-like songs and hypnotic, mesmerising tunes that could run as long as ten minutes. Kraftwerk was also one of these bands, starting off extremely experimental in nature (one of the main guys was playing the flute in the early days) and it wouldn’t be until their fourth album that they would discover their true sound.
Discovering synthesizers, they realised they really could do anything they wanted musically and started to develop their robotic and mechanical sound that they would become famously known for. It would be an aesthetic so synonymous with the band, that they would even do live shows with robotic mannequins sculpted in their likeness in their place on stage rather than them playing. Their almost motionless, dead pan, machine-like style of playing would go on to influence a large amount of New Wave and Post-Punk bands who would adapt a lot of those movements to their own aesthetics. Any one of their albums would have been worth talking about, but Computer World is the one I constantly find myself listening to over and over again and out of all of them, still completely blows me away at how ahead of the times they were not only musically, but predicting the modern world that seemed so damn futuristic in 1981.
Take into account that Computers in 1981 were incredibly primitive and not a household item like it is today. Somehow, out of all their albums, this one seems not only prophetic but incredibly, even more relevant today than when it was released. We truly do live in a Computer World today, where we are constantly connected to the internet, with a thousand devices surrounding us at all times that we constantly use. It’s at the point that we wouldn’t even be able to survive without all the technology we have. I especially love the song Pocket Calculator that seemed so innocent and playful at the time, about enjoying your little pocket calculator that you operate yourself and push the buttons and it plays little melodies. From a modern lens, there’s no way to see this as anything than an ode to our love and obsession to our Iphones. I’m guessing this all factors in as to why the album resonates with me more and more as the years go by.
Kraftwerk’s influence on electronic music and how ahead of their time they were cannot be understated. They didn’t put Germany on the map when it came to music, but they definitely cemented the country’s name in music history as being a powerhouse of music. With everything that country has been through, it’s nice to see they at least get this one big positive.
Camila’s Thoughts: “This makes me remember all the reasons why I broke up with my ex.”
Bosco's Modern Life 