There is no beginning and no end in music. Some people want it to end. But it goes on. | | | | Florian Schneider, far right, with Kraftwerk in Brussels, July 6, 1981.
(Gie Knaeps/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | | “There is no beginning and no end in music. Some people want it to end. But it goes on.”
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| | rantnrave:// FLORIAN SCHNEIDER. Oh no. The heart of KRAFTWERK. Or maybe the brains. Maybe a bit of both, it was never entirely clear with those guys. But Schneider and RALF HÜTTER co-founded the band a half century ago, co-produced the classic run of albums in the '70s and '80s and, let's stipulate, co-changed the world. There may not be a single musician working today who wasn't either directly or indirectly influenced by their work, which radiated in a very short span of time through Detroit techno, Chicago house, British synth-pop and New York hip-hop and disco (for starters) and then radiated from there to every corner of the sentient pop music universe, to the point that it's possible ED SHEERAN is the only musician still standing who they're not in some way responsible for, and I'm probably wrong about him, I mean, you've heard what he does with loops, yes? You can try to calculate their influence on pop music or you can try to calculate the sun's influence on the earth, your choice. They were humans who spent a good part of their career trying to merge themselves with machines while making albums that celebrated the very human joys and mysteries of highways, trains and bicycles (three things that computers, left to their own devices, would have no need for); who could turn the sound of metal on metal into a piledriving beat that could fill a dancefloor four decades later, and who could melt your heart while contemplating the technological wonder of neon lights. One of my favorite TWITTER tributes, after the band announced Schneider's death Wednesday morning, was this clip of a 1970 German television performance, shared by electronic music adventurer HOLLY HERNDON with this short, simple note: "Kraftwerk, a few months after Woodstock." It took the world a little time to catch up. But catch up, the world did. Eventually. Here's WOLFGANG FLÜR, the percussionist who was another piece of Kraftwerk's classic lineup, in an UNCUT retrospective on the breakthrough album, AUTOBAHN: "During the first US tour, we had problems with equipment. The PAs in the halls were not designed for our massive analog sounds and many speakers burst." Schneider may be the man to blame/thank for that. The closest anyone has come to delineating exactly what he did in the band may be this answer Hütter gave to MOJO magazine in 2005: "Florian is a sound fetishist. I am not so much, I’m maybe more a word fetishist. These roles are not an obligation; they have just developed over the years as our preferences." In the context of this particular band, that clearly wasn't meant to be understood as a words vs. music thing. I assume it's more of a text/texture distinction. Schneider, a flutist by training and an electronic programmer by career choice, was an inventor, tinkerer and sonic perfectionist, and something of a philosopher of sound. "We are very much interested in origin of music, the source of music," he told LESTER BANGS in 1975. "The pure sound is something we would very much like to achieve." Kraftwerk's sound was one of pop's great leaps forward. The music was "beguilingly simple, but impossible to replicate," remembered PETER HOOK of JOY DIVISION, which used Kraftwerk's "TRANS EUROPE EXPRESS" as entrance music for most of its short career, and NEW ORDER, which "ripped off [Kraftwerk] as soon as we were able." They were "so stiff, they were funky," DETROIT DJ CARL CRAIG once said. Schneider left the band in 2008, long after they stopped making records but while they still touring with some regularity. He remained as mysterious outside the band as he had been within it, though he emerged in 2015 with a climate-change protest song, "STOP PLASTIC POLLUTION," based on a loop of dripping water in bathroom. "We don’t make a distinction between an acoustic instrument as a source of sound and any sound in the air outside or on a manufactured tape," he had told ROLLING STONE 40 years earlier. "It’s all electric energy, anyway." In 1975, that was a radical notion. By 2015, it was the sound of the pop charts. Some people can predict the future. Other people simply are the future... RIP also SWEET PEA ATKINSON, PETER JONAS, LEN FAGAN and RAY HENNIG. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | | | | | | From "Computer World" (1981). |
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