I hadn’t seen this before, but it’s been out a while. Sort of like this meme was created for this moment.
I hadn’t seen this before, but it’s been out a while. Sort of like this meme was created for this moment.
Kraftwerk doing “Pocket Calculator” in 1981. Ralf is a good dancer; the other guys, not so much. I hope to catch them at this MOMA thing. I saw them at the 930 Club in 2005 and that is my go-to answer for the best show I’ve ever seen. I also interviewed Ralf in 2009. I was on Skype, wearing headphones, sitting on the floor of a new apartment in Riverside, Calif., which did not yet have furniture. He was talking to me on a speaker phone as he sat in an office in London. Technology!
Ralf: I think it was more like an awakening in the late 60s of the whole living situation— the German word is einfach musik. Everyday music, like— it’s more like discovering the tape recorder for us. Like, the world of sound: Everyday life has a sound, and that’s also why our studio is called Kling Klang studio because “kling” is the verb and “klang” is the noun for “sound.” So it means “sounding sound.” That’s really what Kraftwerk is about. Sound sources are all around us, and we work with anything, from pocket calculators to computers, from voices, human voices, from machines, from body sounds to fantasy to synthetic sounds to speech from human voice to speech synthesis from anything, if possible. We don’t want to limit ourselves to any specific sound like that was before when we were brought up in classical music. Then it had be strings, it had to be piano, blah blah blah. We wanted to go beyond, to find a new silence and from there to progress to continue walking into the world of sound.
1 note