{"id":16344,"date":"2015-02-07T04:03:47","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T03:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=16344"},"modified":"2023-06-30T13:33:40","modified_gmt":"2023-06-30T12:33:40","slug":"german-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2015\/02\/07\/german-gear\/","title":{"rendered":"German gear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ralf and Florian, 1973. Back cover photo by Barbara Niem\u00f6ller.<\/em><\/p>\n

At that time, Kling Klang Studio was far from the technological hub it would become. “The studio was a big room in an old factory building with brick walls,” recalls [Wolfgang] Fl\u00fcr. “There were big home-made speakers, amplifiers and so on. Florian had his side, with his flutes and one of the very first ARP Odyssey synthesizers, while Ralf’s side had Hammond and Farfisa organs and a Minimoog synthesizer.”<\/p>\n

Andy Gill<\/a>, Mojo magazine, April 1997<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last week’s Autobahn<\/em> post prompted a week of revisiting Kraftwerk’s three pre-Autobahn<\/em> albums, all of which remain unreissued. The photo that fills out the back cover of the third album, Ralf & Florian<\/em><\/a> (1973), has appeared here twice before so if you want an example of an obsession look no further. I only have a bootleg CD of this one, a package that doesn’t do much for the photograph so I went searching for a larger copy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"ralf.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The attractions, if you have to list them, are multiple: Ralf & Florian<\/em> is Kraftwerk’s most human album, and the cover photos reflect this. Trans-Europe Express<\/em><\/a> originally had pictures of the group on its sleeve (now replaced by the TEE train) but they were airbrushed, idealised portraits; the showroom-dummy personas they adopt there would turn into robots on the album that followed. There’s an overt sense of camp about the Ralf & Florian<\/em> cover shots that runs counter to the tenor of rock music in 1973. The charts in Britain might have been filled with glam acts but for all their flirtatious androgyny they were selling the same assertive macho sexuality as the big rock bands of the time. One of the things I enjoy about this cover photo is its refusal to follow that crowd: the neon name signs, the standard lamp from a 1950s’ living room, Florian’s semiquaver brooch; all are effete enough to give Deep Purple the vapours. (The first UK release of Ralf and Florian<\/em><\/a> replaced the cover photo of the pair with a printed circuit.) The closest comparison in the same year would be the sleeve for Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets<\/em><\/a> with its shelves of dead flowers and junk-shop discoveries. But this wasn’t so surprising for an ex-member of Roxy Music, and Eno’s album is still very much a rock production.<\/p>\n

\"florian.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Then there’s the details: the egg-box soundproofing (Can used old mattresses to soundproof their studio); the enormous white speaker; the traffic cone that nods back to the sleeves of the first two albums and forward to the automotive theme of the next; Ralf’s white shoes (and is he wearing leather trousers?); Florian’s oscilloscope, his mysterious tone generators and that peculiar stringed instrument. This diverse range of gear somehow produced the music you’re listening to.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"clusterii.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The display of equipment is always linked for me with a similar display a year before by another German duo, Cluster, in a photo that appeared originally inside the gatefold sleeve of their second album, Cluster II<\/em><\/a>. (Cluster are also connected to Kraftwerk by guitarist Michael Rother, who worked with both bands, and producer Conny Plank.) There’s the same array of keyboards, tone generators, snaking wires, effects pedals and yet another peculiar stringed instrument. A photo inside the gatefold of their first album<\/a> shows that they too had an oscilloscope. Cluster II<\/em>, however, is much closer in sound to the first two Kraftwerk albums than the electronic melodies of Ralf & Florian<\/em>. The early Cluster albums are abrasive enough to be precursors of Industrial music, and serve as further examples of my pet theory that many of the electronic German groups had to pass through a kind of noise barrier before developing a musical style of their own.<\/p>\n

\"cluster-1971.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cluster, 1971.<\/em><\/p>\n

If this tech-fetishism seems rather quaint now it’s worth remembering the hostility such non-rock gear used to raise at the time. In the mid-70s the NME published The NME Book of Rock<\/em>, an encyclopedic guide to rock music from the 1950s on. Kraftwerk were one of the few German bands allowed an entry, and the comments towards them and their audience were scathing. Many rock journalists loathed electronic music, and wouldn’t entertain the idea that this might be the music of the future. We know how that turned out, don’t we?<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Autobahnen<\/a>
\n\u2022 Ralf and Florian<\/a>
\n\u2022 Reworking Kraftwerk<\/a>
\n\u2022 Autobahn animated<\/a>
\n\u2022 Sleeve craft<\/a>
\n\u2022 Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?<\/a>
\n\u2022 Old music and old technology<\/a>
\n\u2022 Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ralf and Florian, 1973. Back cover photo by Barbara Niem\u00f6ller. At that time, Kling Klang Studio was far from the technological hub it would become. “The studio was a big room in an old factory building with brick walls,” recalls [Wolfgang] Fl\u00fcr. “There were big home-made speakers, amplifiers and so on. Florian had his side, … Continue reading “German gear”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,3,15],"tags":[643,6979,145,2275,3462,5390,122,692,1671,6980,5083],"class_list":["post-16344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronica","category-music","category-technology","tag-androgyny","tag-andy-gill","tag-brian-eno","tag-cluster-group","tag-conny-plank","tag-deep-purple","tag-kraftwerk","tag-krautrock","tag-michael-rother","tag-roxy-music","tag-wolfgang-flur"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4fC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}