KRAFTWERK (1 AND 2)

Anyway, this, should I say, compilation consists of first two Kraftwerk albums, named "Kraftwerk" and "Kraftwerk 2". How imaginative! Well, it suits cold-machinery Kraftwerk's music spleen very good. And on the other hand, similar album names are proportional to similar music. Really, it's not very diverse, and it's impossible to tell where the first album ends and second one begins, because they are similar in sound, concept and presentation of the ideas.

Warning to all of you: this is highly experimental. Most of the time it sounds like a collection of radio announcements rather than traditional songs. Most of the songs are simple structured: they are following one simple pattern, developing dynamics and layers (and sometimes tempo) until the end of the track. Do not expect anything unpredictable in the middle of the...ehm, songs. This is highly meditative conception.

Electronic experimentation is omnipresent, but there is no sign of synthesizers - at least not the keyboards with the purpose of synthesis. They will appear in years to come. All the electronic sounds here are simple-circuit-generated basic waveforms, with no drastic modulations or accented melody.

The main instrument here is flute. Not to be mixed with JETHRO TULL or FOCUS crowd; there's just one single pattern played by Herr Schneider (he plays flute with very mellow timbre, in a good old tradition of German classical music), often augmented by a tape echo units. Playing a consonant interval in the same time when tape loops the sound over and over again is producing ascending simple chord effect - no dub-like double-tap echo here. Creating an organic tapestry, band continues with minimalistic interventions of other instruments here - including the guitar, but only in traces.

All the songs are in the same vain, more or less, some of them sound lovely, some of them are emphasizing meditation concept, some of them are intentionally nasty. There is also a momentum that sounds like a background for Schlager (easy listening) music, which, in my opinion, is the most important chapter of this manifest whose idea is to deconstruct the music by it's particles and reconstructing it again in a intelligent, alternative way, paving the road for all the social impacts to the art of music itself, including the hedonism of using the helpful sound tools. The final artifact is undoubtedly a state of art, dehumanised piece made by human individuals, sounding clinical and beautiful at the same time.

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