Hütter and Schneider would later talk as if the classic Kraftwerk sound had arrived in one glorious emanation, like some deft sonic refit of Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow: a perfectly realised vision of eros and thanatos, tech and pastorale, drift and grid. But in fact this ‘new, genuinely autonomous … music’ had to be ‘constructed from scratch’. So, at the same time, did Kraftwerk’s own Kling Klang studio, which they stuffed with vocoders, drum pads and newly available synthesisers like the Minimoog and the suitcase-sized EMS Synthi AKS. On their first three albums (released between 1970 and 1973, and never officially reissued), Kraftwerk were a far more outré, scattershot proposition. There was very portentous organ. There were loooong ‘space jams’. There were extended flute solos. It would be easy to mock such apprentice finger-daubs in light of the duo’s later control-freak tendencies, but Kraftwerk weren’t the only ones exploring tentative bricolage of this sort. Also to be found in that time and place were Can, Cluster, Faust, Neu! and Popol Vuh, some of whom otherwise had such dissimilar outlooks it boggles the mind: you’d be hard-pressed to find any common ground between, say, Faust’s sweaty balls-out commune and Kraftwerk’s spartan, schmutz-free lab.
† Why was 1970s Germany the seedbed for all this prophetic play, taking in gentle ambient soundscapes, electronic beats, experimental film soundtracks, and the studio used as an instrument in itself? For one unlikely moment, it was as if all the bad neoteric technology of Germany’s war effort had been repurposed to create a vast Apollonian glade.