Kraftwerk’s labors opened path for electronic music

The prevailing sound of modern-day Las Vegas originated 5,445 miles from here in a Deutsch city that fancies itself the birthplace of the cartwheel.

The precise, locomotive rhythms of electronic dance music, which reverberate through this city’s nightclubs from the fingertips of the DJs who have become some of Vegas’ biggest stars, can be traced all the way back to Dusseldorf, Germany, some four decades ago.

It was then and there that electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk first began to emerge from the local arts scene, birthing the steely, mechanical pulse that would serve as the digital heartbeat not only for its minimalist electropop, but for future generations of musicians in genres ranging from hip-hop to electronica to much of contemporary pop.

Kraftwerk’s initial idea was to approach music in the same manner as a machinist working on an assembly line, producing sound instead of widgets.

To them, the creative process was a process like any other: Did it matter if the end result was a song or an automobile? After all, there’s art in mechanics and mechanics in art; you can’t have one without the other.

So, for these sonic industrialists, entering the studio was no different than clocking in at a factory.

“We call ourselves musical workers,” says Kraftwerk singer-keyboardist and band founder Ralf Hutter, reflecting on the band’s origins. “We worked on a continuous, day-to-day (basis), like a manufacturer, like a small independent unit.

“It wasn’t just technological, but more about finding a sound of the new Germany with our language,” he continues. “We didn’t have a contemporary music of everyday life at that time. There was, of course, the old classical music from the tradition, and then there was the electronic music of the first generation of electronic composers — an older generation than us. Then we came up with this contemporary, everyday type of music, what we called ‘electronic folk music,’ creating something like an electronic Volkswagen.”

The music was made on machines, some of which were designed and/or built by themselves, and was pointedly robotic sounding, with computerized vocals, repetitive, mechanistic rhythms and synthesizer-based melodies.

And yet it was meant to be evocative of the human condition, the soundtrack to everyday life’s cycle: Wake up, eat, work, sleep, repeat.

Kraftwerk’s members have long referred to themselves as the “man-machine.” And unlike so many of the electronic musicians who followed in their wake, their music is less a running commentary on the potentially ominous/dislocating role of technology’s growing presence in society than an enthusiastic merging of the corporeal and the synthetic.

Not only does Kraftwerk use machines to say something about humans, then, they view humans relative to machines.

To underscore this point, Hutter references the now defunct European railway service that Kraftwerk’s sixth album is named after.

“The Transeurope Express is like a huge symphonic kind of machinery, like the man-machine,” he explains. “The Transeurope Express is kind of like a mechanical orchestra. Kraftwerk is like traveling through Europe.”

Kaftwerk’s sound has traveled much farther than that.

Though Kraftwerk has never enjoyed much commercial success, save for its lone semihit, the edited version of 1974’s “Autobahn,” which reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, its influence has become pervasive,. As such, the band is now greeted with the sort of popular acclaim that once eluded it.

Kraftwerk has toured more in recent years, developing an immersive 3-D presentation to complement its music.

“It’s the perfect medium,” Hutter says, “because our music is also very much surround-sound. Now with 3-D visuals, we can truly work this out.”

Live, Kraftwerk continually reworks its songs. A static stage presence — four guys standing behind laptops, essentially — belying how busy the members are musically.

“Our compositions are minimal, they are like theatrical performance scripts,” Hutter says. “We can put them in a different context, continually change them. The music is evolving. We can make new sounds happen. That’s actually what we do on stage. We work on the computers. That’s our performance.”

Sometimes, it’s best just to let the machines do the talking anyway.

“It’s hard to describe in words,” Hutter says of the Kraftwerk aesthetic, at least partially explaining why Kraftwerk’s songs tend to contain so few words to begin with. “That’s why we make the music.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.