PROGRESSIVE ELECTRONIC

Their self-titled third album is still the neglected stepchild in the greater Kraftwerk discography, overshadowed on one side (even today) by the raw Krautrock grunge of their earlier 'traffic cone' albums, and on the other by the international success of "Autobahn". The album's namesake duo refuse to even recognize it anymore, and to date have never sanctioned an official CD release, frustrating many older fans in the process.

And yet it was the first Kraftwerk album to formulate anything resembling a genuine group identity. The original cover photo showed the genesis of that immaculate Kraftwerk image, embracing an ironic caricature of German efficiency and discipline that would soon go a long way toward selling the band around the world. Ralf still wore the shoulder-length hair of a precocious chemistry professor, but how many young musicians in 1973 were dressed and groomed as neatly as Florian, complete with musical lapel pin?

Clearly this wasn't the same team of counterculture vandals who fabricated buzz-bomb attacks on their self-titled debut LP. But for the time being the two were still in the process of shedding their primitive Krautrock epidermis. You can hear it in the crude attempts at real melodic figures, and in the punchier rhythms of "Kristallo" and "Tanzmusik". The latter in particular was a brightly laminated road map to a lucrative trans-global future: the most upbeat and simple tune so far in their rapidly evolving catalogue, yet still disarmingly German (if that isn't an oxymoron).

And then there's the (almost) side-long "Ananas Symphonie", an evocative tone poem to swaying palm trees and undulating native girls, strikingly out of step with other German music trends at the time. The track doesn't really arrive anywhere after nearly fourteen minutes, but like the whole album it's a very pleasant journey, and one more confident step away from the labored Teutonic experiments of the past.

Maybe Ralf and Florian were later embarrassed by the low-tech clutter of their home studio, as it appeared in 1973 on the album's rear sleeve. Or maybe turning their collective back on the past was a calculated ploy to increase the cult appeal of those anomalous early efforts. Either way it's a shortsighted attitude: the sleek computer world of future Kraftwerk wouldn't look the same without the man-made nuts and bolts of makeshift analog albums like this one.

Same old cliche - slightly better delivery.

One can easily reach saturation point with TD over their zillions of releases, few of which stand out. Lets face it, who could write a review on every sequenced piece that sounds just like the one before and remain original?

I am less than half-way through their official material, searching for the odd, memorable tune - with little success. That's not to mention the TD Fan Club live material that may take some months to absorb.

This performance is notable - if only because Jerome Froese was held back, preventing him to turn it into - yet another - Techno "offering".

Linda Spa on saxes plays well, but still fails to engage my attention. I just don't enjoy her approach. Meanwhile, hired hand on guitar Zlatko Perica steals the show - when he is permitted to shine.

Lacking depth, still a reasonable performance, but still very, very far from the band's true potential. 3, perhaps 3.5 at best.

A question. Why would any respectable artist keep releasing sub-standard material, knowing that it eats away their fan base? Still, this piece is better than some before, but great it isn't.

Organization: hardly a fitting name for such a ramshackle outfit. And if the band hadn't been an incubator for the man-machines of KRAFTWERK it's doubtful many people would even remember them now.

Their only studio album was actually one of the earliest expressions of the German counterculture on record, but it never enjoyed the same influence or significance as other embryonic Krautrock: compare it to the more passionate racket of early CAN or AMON DÜÜL, for example. A lot of circumstances conspired to undermine the effort, including the decision to release it through the British RCA label, which didn't exactly raise the band's local profile at home. The English-language name and track titles effectively camouflaged the band's German identity as well, reducing the album's novelty value just when the market for Krautrock was shifting to interstellar overdrive.

Because of the later Kraftwerk connection it's a fascinating album in retrospect, but hardly successful even on its own naïve but charming hippie-trippy terms. Opening Side One of the original LP with a too-loosely structured twenty-plus minute jam, that itself begins with almost ten rhythm-deprived minutes of haphazard percussion, was probably a miscalculation, serving only to underline the band's lack of any true musical direction.

Organization lacked the sterling underground credentials of their better-known contemporaries, and the impression left by "Tone Float" is of a young band riding the coattails of other, more experienced Krautrockers. But Ralf and Florian were smart enough to ditch the bongo drums soon afterward, on their way toward becoming household names (in smarter cosmopolitan neighborhoods, at least). Their ex-bandmates Basil, Butch and Fred would remain minor footnotes in Krautrock history, as would the album itself: a collector's treasure for Kraftwerk completists but otherwise lacking enough sparks to even qualify as a flash in the pan.

— First review of this album —

This Dutch electronic group is simply one of my great new discoveries, yet they've been around seemingly forever (since the 1990s, but it's now 2013). I know Holland has never had a big electronic scene, I am aware of Peru, that's about it. Narrow Lane is yet another live offering, the first part recorded the National Space Centre in Leicester, and the second part at Hampshire Jam 6, in Liphook. This Dutch group seems to hang around the same UK venues that Radio Massacre International does. In fact I like to think of FSP as the Dutch equivalent of RMI, only I think FSP's music often rivals that of RMI. FSP often uses modular equipment, like the Arrick modular synth, which is a modular synth based off the Moog. Arrick is based out of Texas, so the synth is American made. They also use vintage gear like the EMS Synthi A, Elka Rhapsody, and Solina String Ensemble, but the Mellotron is sampled, using the Yamaha A3000. FSP is always the vehicle for Marcel Engels, but he gets help here from Ruud Heij, and for the first part (recorded in 2006), Frank van der Wel. Unfortunately v.d. Wel had left shortly after that performance, so the second part, recorded late in 2007, was without his presence. Regardless, this stuff is right up your alley if you enjoy Rubycon/Ricochet-era Tangerine Dream, even these guys use many of the same synth timbres. It can be said that this might not bring nothing new to the table, but I don't care because this stuff really blew me away! If they done something very much like what a certain well-known electronic group had done some thirty or so years earlier, and do it well and do it convincingly, I have nothing to complain about. It's strange how many other countries are taking up to the Berlin School of electronic music. In the '70s you had Anna Sjalv Tredje in Sweden and even Zanov in France (Jean Michel Jarre might have been influenced by it, but of course, his style isn't Berlin School), and now you have Radio Massacre International, Airsculpture, and Red Shift in the UK, as well as FSP in Holland. This comes highly recommended to fans of this style of electronic music!

The second Kraftwerk album is one of only two performed by just the core duo of Ralf and Florian (the other was titled exactly that), and the lack of any collaborators may explain the more uniform minimalism of this effort compared to the scattershot Krautrock grunge of their 1970 debut.

The stripped-down sound was also a reflection of the unsettled state of the band at the time. More than on any other Kraftwerk album there's a distinct connection with the kindred Düsseldorf pioneers of NEU!, whose first album followed this session two months later. You can see it in the parallel pop-art simplicity of the cover design, and in the collage of Polaroid photos inside the original gatefold sleeve. And you can hear it in the absence of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, interim bandmates of Ralf and Florian before leaving to pursue their own destiny.

With the group suddenly reduced to a twosome, and without the benefit of an actual drummer, the new album would become a prototype slice of dark, almost industrial electronica, miles away from anything resembling the bouncy techno-pop of later incarnations. It's still weird to hear guitars as the primary instrument on a Kraftwerk album, conspicuously on Side Two, in the distorted radio identification signal of "Strom" and the ambient monochrome drift of "Wellenlange".

But the two remaining men-machines were still beating the air(waves) for a stable identity beyond that familiar traffic cone image, testing vague ideas instead of performing solid compositions. The new music had more internal logic than it did on their debut, but still lacked a clear sense of direction, with only one promising signpost to the future: the (almost) side-long "Kling Klang", a title that would resonate through Kraftwerk lore in more ways than one.

Without the crutch of synthesizers (beyond a primitive rhythm box) the pair was forced to experiment with more organic sounds, like the evocative bells and gongs heard at the top of the track. But once the music reaches cruising speed fans should recognize an obvious ancestor of "Autobahn", lacking only the structure and discipline of that breakthrough hit, still three years away at the time. The random tempo changes are in irritation, but less so than the entire next track "Atem": three long minutes of labored electronic respiration (and nothing else).

Research and development of this sort can often have its own unique rewards, with a little help from a sympathetic listener. "Kraftwerk 2" wasn't quite the light bulb moment Ralf and Florian were aiming for, but the album deserves more consideration than they've given it themselves.

Next to TANGERINE DREAM's "Electronic Meditation" this has to be the most unlikely debut album from any band on the road to global synth-rock superstardom. But today that same implausibility is a large part of its cult appeal: the chance to hear Ralf and Florian before their cybernetic face-lift, playing grungy experimental Krautrock not far removed from what their ex- bandmates would soon be doing in NEU!

Maybe calling the album 'experimental' is granting the band too much credit, however. Like other young German musicians, Ralf Hütter would later pay lip service to the Krautrock myth of Stunde Null: the belief that after World War II his generation rebuilt a new musical identity from the rubble up, without any English or American influences (not entirely true, but that's a discussion for elsewhere). Early Kraftwerk came closer than most to that ideal, but in 1971 they weren't exactly cutting any innovative musical edges yet.

In fact, depending on how broadly you define the word there might not be much real music on this disc at all, and what little there is lacks the thematic focus of later Kraftwerk hits. The band's only nod to musical development was limited at the time to arbitrary tempo changes and random buzz-bomb sound effects, with the occasional ambient detour ("Megaherz"). The signature rhythm of "Ruckzuck" and the brief jam in the latter half of "Stratovarius" are as groovy as this music ever gets, played in a style described (affectionately) by Julian Cope as "so tight- assed you want to prise it apart with a hammer."

Clearly this was a band in need of direction. And yet there's still something compelling about their first recorded effort, from the bright pop-art logo to the primitive blitzkrieg of "Von Himmel Hoch". But as much as I'd like to upgrade it the album doesn't really deserve more than three stars: there was better, farther reaching, and more influential Krautrock being made elsewhere at the same time.

This is the third and last album from the pioneer electro french duo Space Art. And this is not a bad album at all, but it's boring, not cacthcy, and it loses a lot of strenght after their two epic early releases. The effects are cool IMO, even the ''supermario jumping sounds''. But the lack of variety on effects not works when the band have no catchy rhytms to show us. Another point is: this album sounds happier than the other releases. No, it haven't sound commercial for me, but it loses the space feeling that i have for it. This isn't a space ART anymore.

Space Art self-titled album, or Onix, engages a pretty musical environment. The music isn't complex to undestand. It just could blow you into an imaginary space adventure, much like Trip in The Center Head. It's incredible how this album works. From the first to the third track, it creates a proper atmosphere to the fourth track, Axius. The sixth track (Ode a Clavius) took my interest after the first two minutes, and it's get better and better, within an experimental musicscape following to Lase En Novembre. I personally like the leading keys/synth style and tones, and it was the reason that I still keep my interest in these two guys. I feel sorry for the lack of listeners in our days.

Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics - Wikipedia about Drone Music. Well, I think No Pussyfooting is the definitive drone.

Robert Fripp and Brian Eno working together at the weirdo ambiental "(No Pussyfooting)". Good. This is something totally experimental, with some creative passages. Two tracks. Sorry, but it would be better. While I really love Swatiska Girls, The Heavenly Music Corporation annoys me sometimes. The whole album is a brainwashing mantra, repetitive. It's good to listen to while you're reading.

I do not know why this album have no reviews here. Space Art was a french electronic prog duo, and this is one, Trip In The Center Head, is a must-check. Space Art was the late 70s space prog Daft Punk. I have to say, I really love this oldschool analog electro tune. The album starts with Speedway, introducing the listener to the things to come with one of their best songs. So you fall into Odyssey. The atmosphere here really works. It sounds spacey than ever. The album follows the trip until the apex: Psychosomatique, 11 minutes of mind voyage, and it was brilliant for it's age, and it's still beautiful today.