{ feuilleton }

Ralf Hütter: I got a new head, and I’m fine | Rare interview with Kraftwerk’s last original Man Machine.

Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973).
Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week.
• The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for the UK releases of Kraftwerk’s third and fourth albums, Ralf and Florian and Autobahn. BB experts Rebecca & Mike did clarify a few [...]

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.
Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, [...]

It came from outer space | Cosmic disco. Haven’t we had this before? Yeah but now it’s new again…

End of the road for Kraftwerk founder | Florian Schneider leaves Kling Klang.

Before speech synthesis became a standard feature of home computing there was this crude device for teaching children spelling, now emulated in Flash by Kevin St. Onge. Kraftwerk fans will immediately recognise the tones generated by the top row of buttons which Ralf and Florian used on the track Home Computer for the Computer World [...]

Continuing this occasional series. The above motif is the Golden Dawn’s Wedjat or Eye of Horus emblem as reproduced in the hardback edition of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, an “autohagiography”. Crowley was under discussion here a few days ago and the eye in a triangle symbol can also be seen on the sleeve of [...]

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who—as usual—should know better. Several [...]

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).
A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)
Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O [...]

Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Moebius, Roedelius.
Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for [...]

Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf.
“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno
Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in March [...]

1 Aerodynamik (Intelligent Design Mix by Hot Chip) (8:34)
2 La Forme (King Of The Mountains Mix by Hot Chip) (11:31)
This is a curious moment to be releasing a remix single, four years after the last studio album, Tour De France Soundtracks, which is the origin of the music here. But the Düsseldorf boys have always [...]

I spent much of the summer of 1983 playing games on a very primitive ZX Spectrum computer while listening to the first couple of Street Sounds Electro compilations. Those mix albums were among the best releases that year and remain highly sought after, seeing as they’ve never been reissued on CD.

The musical reputation of the [...]

Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. “Storm-stereo” techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969.
An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. [...]

Minimum–Maximum, live DVD.
More pictures after the jump.