TONE FLOAT

Tone Float was released back when Kraftwerk was known as Organisation, and the material here is not electronic, but fantastic krautrock. In fact, it's very primitive - bongos, conga, flue, violin and organ make up most of the sound. The title-track is a long, slow jam that has spiritual hints and occasionally comes off as sounding almost tribal. The rest of the albums follows the example set by the first track with a few variations here-and-there. "Milk Rock" has kind of a kraut-meets-Sun Ra kind of avant-garde jam feel, "Silver Forest" is a bleak collection of droning instruments held together by a steady but slow beat on the gong and triangle, "Rhythm Salad" is a near-tribal percussion solo, and "Noitasinagro" is more straight-forward krautrock that reminds me of Agitation Free.

I make it sound boring, but this actually is a rather nice collection of original krautrock material from pre-Kraftwerk. I really did enjoy this album, but the next few albums and their electronic material both are better than this, in my opinion. However, it's always good to listen to band's roots. After listening to this, it would've been hard to determine the path that Kraftwerk would eventually take from this point in time.