I'm curious about 8-Bit Operators [the 2007 album on Kraftwerk's label where musicians interpreted Kraftwerk music using very primitive pocket calculators and Game Boy equipment]. The challenge those people had was to make Kraftwerk minimalism even more reduced.

Yes. It is mind stimulating, the minimum/maximum coming from sound levels and thoughts and ideas. Like Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express are very basic and elementary ideas, but they offer a pattern or concept for improvisation. And we use very few words, sometimes even just phonetics so they become the music itself like 'dah-dah' or 'tchuk-tchuk' vocals. Like in the beginning though as we said, it is very difficult to talk about this music because everything is said in the music, and that is what we are still trying to work out.

This may be why when people talk to rock musicians they rarely talk about the music but about their lifestyle, but you don't do that either.

Yes, we call ourselves musical workers, kraft-werk. We go to the Kling Klang Studio and we speak with music. That takes longer, it is not just every year a new album because we still really haven't found an instrumental form and then just do a new selection songs. In our case it is different because the studio, the technology, is an influence which means it unfortunately takes longer.

I remember speaking to Philip Glass when he was very much a minimalist and he observed that if you set up a repeated pattern of 20 notes you only needed to change one and it would sound like thunderbolt.

Yes, because it makes for a different composition. Or you change the tempo.

Are you disciplined, do you go to the office, the studio, every day?

Yes, to Kling Klang, that is our office where we work on our laptop computers or keyboards and I do my speech-singing and Vocoder.

And when you are not touring you go in regularly?

Well, we ride our bicycles. Unfortunately we couldn't bring those to New Zealand but I know you have hills and mountains. That is where the composition comes from, our cycling activities. It is our electro-lifestyle. (laughs)

As someone who doesn't cycle I have to ask: what is the attraction? Because I just don't get it.

It started 30 years ago - although obviously in our childhood too - it was man-machine and it in a way is the men of Kraftwerk on their machines, like cycling.

On the other hand it is similar to music because it is always going forward and you keep a rhythm and you keep your breath - and try not to fall off.

Once you stop, you fall off.

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FIN.