Entrevistas a KRAFTWERK

Junte un par de entrevistas a Ralf y Florian porque estoy re-manija con ellos nuevamente, siempre es bueno volver a re-escuchar temas viejos asi que por el momento le estoy dando duro y parejo al Minimum2Maximum. Si alguno las quiere traducir y/o agregar nuevas, bienvenido será.

PD: espero que no sean re-post o fakes... por las dudas, busque aca y no encontre.

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Kraftwerk Interview - first published in Triad Magazine June 1975.

While the casual listener may be quick to draw comparisons to Pink Floyd and "space music" in general, in reality there is far more to Kraftwerk than that. Space is only a part of the total Kraftwerk concept, for it also includes Time and Mechanics, and not only time and space, but visual and other sensory phenomenon. They are working with artists in other fields in conjunction with their music and are anxious to begin producing video discs of their art. Lyrics are becoming a more regular part of their music.

Autobahn has a fully descriptive character taking the listener for a quick cruise down Germany's famed superhighway. It becomes and indistinguishable blend of vision and reality, as it begins with a slam of a car door and proceeds to imitate the sounds of the cars whizzing down the road. The mysterious whispering tones of "Kometenmelodie" soar lightly into the ether and leave the listener with a grandious spatial experience.

They perceive commonplace occurrences and transform them into dramatic situations. Just as writers and poets play with words and phrases, painters play with colors and perspectives, and sculptors play with shapes and forms, so Kraftwerk plays with sounds. The qualities attributed to the arts are equally applicable to their music. It is shaped, phrased, colored, molded, mixed and modified into a unified experience. The music is sketched on broadly fundamental lines leaving leaving the setting and filling in, to a great extent, to the listener. In such such a vague and ethereal art Kraftwerk excels in transforming the commonplace sounds of daily life to a stirring and spiritual experience.
Interview with Ralf Hutter
and Florian Schneider

by Saul Smaizys

***

Triad: -is the term "space rock" applicable to your music?
Ralf: -We are part of the Industrial generation. We grew up. . .
Florian: -. . . very impressed by these machinery rhythms that we used in our music, the mechanical aspects of life. Technology is no enemy to us. We use technology as it is. We also like nature but you cannot say the Technology is any better or worse than nature. You have to accept all of these things as they are in the world today.
Ralf: -We have aspects in our music that refer to space, like Kometenmelodie, but we also have some very earthly aspects that are very direct and not from outer space but from inner space like from the human being and the body, and very close to every day life.
Florian: -We see films and we go out and get optical impressions and so this often has an influence on our music and it becomes an acoustic film or acoustic poetry. That's the way that we try to express what we have seen and what we have heard. Several years ago we were on tour and it happened that we just came off the Autobahn after a long ride and when we came in to play we had this speed in our music. Our hearts were still beating fast so the whole rhythm became very fast.

Triad: -The spinning of a roulette wheel is the basis for another one of your tunes.
Ralf: -Yes, movement. The idea is to capture non-static phenomenon because music itself is a non-static phenomenon. It deals with time and movement in time. It can never be the same.

---sigue---

Triad: -Does dance have a part in your music?
Ralf: -Yes, in Germany some modern ballet companies have used our music to create their own versions of ballet for this music.
Florian: -The choreography was like a computer dance,. like robot dance. Very mechanical in its movement on stage.
Ralf: -We also kind of dance when we perform. It's not that we actually move our bodies but it's this awareness of your whole body. You feel like a dancer.
Florian: -Your brain is dancing. The electronics are dancing around in the speakers.
Ralf: -We've had this idea for a long time but it has only been in the past year that we've been able to create what we feel is a loudspeaker orchestra. This is what we consider Kraftwerk to be, a non-acoustic electronic loudspeaker orchestra.
Ralf: -The whole thing is one instrument. We play mixers, we play tapes, we play phasers, we play the whole apparatus of Kraftwerk. That's the instrument. Including the lights and the atmosphere.
Florian: -Sometimes I can taste the sounds. There are a lot more feelings than just the feeling going through the ears. The whole body can feel the sounds.
Ralf: -Imagine the trees. What do the trees sounds like? You don't even have to make the sound audible. You can just write out the suggestions and the reader can imagine the sound or reproduce the sounds spiritually in his brain.

Triad: -Do you listen to other kinds of music other than electronic?
Ralf: -Oh yes. Sometimes we listen to the radio and we also listen to life, to noise, or to what people normally regard as noise, which is of course the source for environmental music. If you walk down the street you can hear a symphony if you are open enough to listen to it.
Florian: -That's what you learn from working with electronics. You go to the source of the sounds and your ears are trained to analyze any sound. We hear a plane passing overhead and I know all of the phenomenon that go into the make-up of the sound, the phasings, the echos. All these things that happen in nature. . .
Ralf: -. . . and the more you learn the more you enjoy it. You can always discover new sounds that you've never heard before. It's amazing sometimes when you listen to the context of the sounds. It could be the animals in the park, with the cars and the people mixing together.
Florian: -The association field is very large in music, meaning that somebody can make some special sound put them on tape and broadcast them to 50 people or 100 or 1,000 and each one of those people has a different impression of the sounds they have heard. It's not like the cinema where nearly everybody sees the same thing. I think the optical is much more fixed but when you have music you have so many different sorts of musics in the brains of the people.
Ralf: -Yes, musics. Many musics.
Florian: -When you are on stage you can focus the music to all these different brains, but you know there are a lot of different receptions. Some people fall asleep, some people are excited, others don't like it and go out, others come back, some stay in their seats. So there are a lot of different reactions to the same thing.
Ralf: -We improvise in the way it is used in Oriental and raga music. It's not harmonically structured.
Florian: -We prefer to make sounds. Sound symphonies. We use a lot of natural harmonies. . . like from the overtone scale. We try to do things simply, the simpler the better. We tried to do a lot of complicated bullshit in the past where everybody tried to play as many notes as they can in a second or a minute, but after awhile we came down to the essential thing.

---sigue---

Ralf: -You have to face yourself to come to the point where you really think about what it is that you want to do. Not to hide behind too many notes or to hide behind . . .
Florian: -. . . the speaker cabinets.
Ralf: -. . . to open up to the simplest things.
Florian: -We don't like these sort of bombastic sounds, we prefer more refined sounds.
Ralf: -It took years of development, step by step, for us to get to what we are doing now. And it will take more steps to do something else.
Florian: -We started out with acoustic instruments. We had a lot of friends who have played with us in the past, and so life goes on and some of them leave and others join. We finally came to a point where we decided that we didn't want these loud drum kits on stage with us. Then for a year we played with just the two of us. We used a rhythm machine but this was not entirely satisfactory. It would be good for one piece but too boring to use for a whole evening, and so we decided to build electronic drums because we wanted to have rhythms in our music. We designed and built them and are now playing with two electronic percussionists in the group.
Ralf: -It gives a lot of possibilities to change the sound because electronic music is created out of white noise, so you can take whatever frequencies you like, or you want, for your particular concept of music - and with these electronic instruments you can pick out the frequencies that suit you. Like a painter, you can choose whatever colors of the spectrum you like for that projection of your painting.
Florian: -We are working with a painter now who can realize some of our optic visions.
Ralf: -We don't think of ourselves as musicians, but rather as people who create out of the different media or ways of expressing yourself, whether it is painting, poetry, music, or even film. The ideal is to communicate to people.
Florian: -We don't really know where this whole thing will drift, perhaps more to optics or to words.
Ralf: -We are waiting for the video disc, which will soon be available in Germany. This will probably be the next step we want to go on to because we have so many visual ideas along with the music and they both influence one another.

---fin de la primera ---

Interview: Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk
Sep 27, 2008
By Graham Reid

Thank you for taking the time because I appreciate you are busy. You are playing in Krakow in a couple of days?

Yes, we are travelling there tomorrow and we are doing three dates and finishing a festival, we are some kind of 'highlight'. I think it will be a beautiful occasion in an old industrial complex re-functioned for cultural events. So we travel tomorrow to set up.

Does it take Kraftwerk longer to set up than most bands given the amount of technology you have?

No, faster I think. Two or three hours. But it is more like checking cables and connections and having the computers working properly. It's not so much a physical set-up.

Is it easier now to perform live than it was say 20 years ago because the technology is better?

Definitely, we've been very lucky that the technology developed in our direction. (laughs) This is what we envisaged in the late 70s when we worked with mostly analogue [equipment] of course. Then we composed the concept of [the album] Computer World coming out in 81 and we didn't even have computers at that time. So that was more like a visionary album. We only got that technology, a small PC, around the tour of that album and we used one on stage just writing letters. Just typing them in, not even in synch or anything. Just live, and a guy putting that on screen.

So we have been very lucky because you can imagine in the late 70s the travelling problems. We couldn't tour at all because all our drum tracks were recorded and were synchronised by sequencers.

Did you want to tour more? The image of Kraftwerk was that you were very reclusive, you didn't do interviews and you didn't perform live every often. Would you have preferred to have performed more back then?

Yes, because in the late 60s and the early 70s Kraftwerk was the man operating the machine and was not a museum. It was a live electronic outfit and we came from free form improvised music, classical or certain jazz. And so at one point we were stuck with all this complex analogue technology that took so long to set up we couldn't perform the music to the same level as on record.

We had multi-tracked on record so on stage we used tapes, especially for the drum tracks. So the drummers were just posing. (laughs) Then with computer programmes in the 90s it was like a restart in 91when we finally had the technology. It had developed to our standard and we could afford it, and could travel with it. It is light and very compact.

I saw you in New Zealand when you played The Big Day Out and people were very impressed. You mentioned writing letters earlier on. People thought that you could have been sending e-mails home to your friends because that is what it looked like.

Yes, that is a very funny vision. Of course there is black humour involved so whatever people have - serious thoughts or whatever - are okay. Electronics is very mind-stimulating music. It is not instruments like a violin where you admire someone playing a violin and their technique. This is more essential. It is basic frequencies and we have a wide range of audible frequencies from 20 to 20,000 hertz.

There are no limits, the limit is our creativity and we have the instruments . . . . but this time for the first time for you we will have the robots.

Last time they had to stay in Dusseldorf and they were very fat. But this time they will travel with us.

---sigue---

Speaking of technology, I enjoy Kraftwerk and get a sense of fun out of the music, but also there is an ambivalent feeling because it is technology which tends to be alienating and emotionally distancing?

I think there is that, but it has to do with the people operating it. If you just make bank accounts or text or make financial calculations, just technical configurations, that is only one type. But creativity, computer art is different and that is what we are doing, creating computer patterns of sound and images, a technological multi-media performance that we create ourselves. We create the visuals that are synchronised with the music and sometimes we are working with outside artists or cameramen. Basically we develop the whole Kraftwerk concept.

And you trigger your images live, or are they predetermined?

Everything is on-line and in real time.

So when you are on stage and you improvise, because I know you do a measure of that, you are also triggering the appropriate visual imagery.

Yes, but not everything can be done yet. When we rehearse in the afternoon or when we change from country to country we change the languages. When we go to Poland we will do Pocket Calculator in German because they want to hear the original language, but in New Zealand obviously we will sing in English - although I may use some German words, and we will create the images out of our storage.

So in a way some people call it live DJing. With the Kraftwerk repertoire we now have maybe 40 years of sounds in our computer memory, so we are able to use old and new sounds to modify and modulate our music. Some people call it sound design, from 40 years of the Kling Klang archive.

We have the original Autobahn sounds from 74 and then we modify and work with those, and we might change them during the performance. Although there is a basic structure so everybody knows where they are going.

If you didn't you'd be a free jazz group at that point.

Yes! Although we do have some free jazz type of feelings: no harmonics, atonal things and frequent improvisation.

One of the things that was always said about Kraftwerk and explained why there was such a delay between albums was because you were perfectionists. You've said you can replicate exactly on stage what you do in the studio. That is important to you? Because when a rock band is on stage or at a classical performance people don't expect, or perhaps even want, to hear the same as the studio.

No, we treat the records as a documents in time and for example something from 1977 is there, but now it is 2008 and it will sound completely different - but it is still the same composition. Our compositions are very minimal - minimum/maximum - but we have all the maximum possibilities of changing and reprogramming. Even during the tour we would do that. There are experiments all the time.

Who is coming as Kraftwerk to New Zealand, because I see Florian hadn't played with Kraftwerk in Ireland recently.

Yes, he never likes touring so in the last years he is working on other projects, technical things. So we are travelling with our live set-up as on the last American tour and now Europe. We are me, Mr Henning Schmitz, Mr Fritz Hilpert and Mr Stefan Pfaffe who is programming visuals with us.

---sigue---

Another interesting area where Kraftwerk seems separate from what we might call rock'n'roll culture is that people in rock are very attached to a band having the same line-up. Whereas for the music that you make it may not be necessary the membership stays the same. The Ramones changed members because in a sense it didn't matter who was up there, the sound was important.

Yes, it is a strong concept. Kraftwerk is a concept for electronic music and when I started with Florian in 1970, even before that when we were students actually, we always worked a lot with different musicians and many other people like artists, painters and poets, and we have technicians or computer programmers, cameramen and animators, and people who do the album covers. We work with people in the printing stage. And graphic people.

So we are involved in all different levels which makes it for me very interesting. When I was a kid I never liked being at the piano, I hated that. So we keep alive by working these different fields.

You studied architecture didn't you?

At one point I did, and constructing music and live performance comes from the same spirit.

It makes sense that you would want to be involved in album covers in that you have an eye for design.

Yes. Because sometimes, as you know, some people just make the music and somebody else is developing the video concept for them. That's not the case with Kraftwerk, we do everything ourselves. And that is how we worked right from the beginning.

One of things about Kraftwerk is that you have remained largely anonymous in that you don't do too many interviews and people don't go to your studio. Which makes me wonder - but thank you very much anyway - why are you talking to me right now? You probably don't need to do this.

We do once in a while when there are things to be said or when there are things to make clearer. When there is something to say, then why not say it? But in general show business people are being used for their image. For us part of our work is exchanging creative ideas and travelling into different cultural contexts. Like we go from Poland into Ukraine now for the first time, and after New Zealand we perform in Singapore. We've never been in that part of the world and so we are also curious to communicate with our music into different cultural contexts.

It is the minimum/maximum concept.

I think people in popular culture talk too much about themselves and the more they do that, the less important the work becomes. For many people the interview is the most creative thing they do.

Exactly, for us it doesn't make sense because we have visual media.

---sigue---

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.

-------------------------------
FIN.

muy interesante!!!
lastima q no se ingles

Por que posteas en ingles? por lo menos tomate el tiempo de traducirlo!!!!!

Estas en argentina man!!!!!

Porque la mayoria lo entiende, ademas siempre hay alguno que lo traduce... es cuestion de tiempo.

Mientras tanto... podes usar Google Tranlate: http://www.google.com/translate

...no sera lo mismo peeero...

Entrevista a Kraftwerk - Publicada en la Revista Triad, en Junio de 1975

Mientras los oyentes casuales puedan sacar conclusiones tempranas y realizar comparaciones rapidas con Pink Floyd y la "Space Music" (Musica Voladora) en general, la realidad es que Kraftwerk es mucho mas que eso. "Volador" es solamente una parte del concepto general de Kraftwerk, ya que tambien incluye el Tiempo y la Mecanica. No solo el tiempo y el espacio son escenciales en su arte, sino que tambien lo visual y cualquier otro fenomeno sensorial. Trabajan en conjunto con artistas de otros campos, para producir Discos de Video para su arte. Tambien los vocales han comenzado a ser mucho mas regulares en su musica. Mas presentes.

Su tema "Autobahn" posee un personaje completamente descriptivo, que lleva al oyente a un rapido viaje a traves de la Famosa Autopista Alemana. (Para que se entienda mejor: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn_(Alemania) ). El tema se convierte en una indistinguible mezcla de visiones y realidades, mientras comienza con el golpe del cierre de la puerta de un auto y continua imitando sonidos de autos atravezando la autovia. Los misteriosos susurros de "Kometenmelodie" se sumergen suavemente en un ether y dejan al oyente con una grandiosa experiencia de espacialidad.

La banda toma ocurrencias de lugares y situaciones comunes y las transforma en dramaticos sucesos. Al igual que los poetas y los escritores juegan con las palabras y las frases, los pintores juegan con los colores y las perspectivas, los escultores juegan con las formas y las figuras, Kraftwerk juega con los sonidos. Las calidades atribuidas a las artes, son igualmente inexplicables como su musica. Esta formada, fraseada, coloreada, moldeada, mezclada y modificada para ser una experiencia unica. La musica esta escenificada en lineas fundamentales, definiendose y llenandose en gran medida, para el oyente. De una forma vaga y etherea, el arte de Kraftwerk se esfuerza en transformar los sonidos normales y corrientes de la vida diaria en una experiencia espiritual.

Entrevista con Ralf Hutter y Florian Schneider, por Saul Smaizys:

Cuando pueda, sigo traduciendo, de a poco, voy a llegar a terminarla :P

xD.

PD: G-R-O-S-O Kraftwerk. Escuchen, porque realmente vale la pena.

Yo si puedo voy a seguir traduciendo pero lo dudo.

Cabe aclarar que en la entrevista comentan que gracias al avance del soft, solo usan VSTs y programas para tocar, el unico hard son las laptops, mixer y teclados... y que su sonido tiende al minimal, la menor cantidad de notas para expresar lo que quieren decir, contrario a su pasado como musicos de jazz donde tocaban una gran cantidad de notas por minuto.

No lo voy a traducir literal y puede que cometa errores, asi que, sirvanse corregirlos cuando quieran:
--------------------
Triad: - el termino 'rock espacial' es aplicable a su musica?
Ralf: - somos parte de una generacion industrial, hemos crecido. . .
Florian: -. . . muy impresionados por esta maquinaria de ritmos que usamos, los aspectos tecnicos de la vida. La tecnologia no es nuestra enemiga. Nos valemos de la tecnologia. Tambien amamos a la naturaleza pero esto no significa que sea mejor o peor que la tecnologia. uno debe aceptar a las cosas como son en el mundo actual.
Ralf: - hay aspectos de nuestra musica que refieren al espacio, como en 'Kometenmelodie', pero tambien hay algunos aspectos directamente terrenales que no son del espacio exterios, sino del 'espacio interior' refiriendose al ser humano, al cuerpo y muy cercano al 'dia a dia'.
Florian: - vemos peliculas y salimos, nos quedan marcadas ciertas imagenes y eso tiene un efecto en nuestra musica que se termina convirtiendo en una pelicula acustica o en poesia acustica. Eso es lo que tratamos de expresar, lo que vimos y/u oimos. Unos años atras volviamos de un tour y pasó que saliendo de la autopista nos pusimos a tocar, lo cual genero un aumento de velocidad en nuestra musica. Nuestros corazones aun latian rapidamente por eso todo el sonido se volvio mas rapido.

Triad: - La base de sus melodias es el girar continuo de una rueda?
Ralf: - Claro, el movimiento. La idea es capturar un fenomeno no estatico porque la musica en si, es un fenomeno no estatico. Se trata del tiempo y el movimiento en el , por eso nunca puede igual.

---sigue---

Una mas reciente...

Entrevista a Ralf Hutter de Krafterk:

"Los influimos a todos" (al fin lo dijeron! :P )

La legendaria banda alemana, que inventó el "techno pop", será esta noche telonera de Radiohead.

En 1981, la banda alemana Kraftwerk editaba Computer World. A pesar de la claridad del título, Ralph Hütter, cofundador de la banda, en 1970, junto a Florian Schneider, aclara, desde Berlín: "Cuando lo grabamos no teníamos computadoras. Las conseguimos un tiempo después".

Antes, el grupo, uno más de los emergentes de la generación que en los '60 modificó la escena cultural alemana, había producido tres discos experimentales, hasta que, en 1974, con Autobahn, abandonaron los instrumentos acústicos, para convertirse en uno de los exponentes más puros de la música pop electrónica.

Para Hütter, no había alternativa. "Provenimos del ámbito de la música electroacústica, que es muy importante en Alemania. Y nuestro concepto siempre estuvo marcado por la idea de asociar nuestra música con la tecnología", explica.


Pero, ¿por qué decidieron aplicar ese concepto en el territorio pop?

Nunca pensamos en categorías. Sólo componíamos y componemos nuestra música. Y el lenguaje contemporáneo nos acompaña desde que tenemos 20 años. Entonces, como artistas involucrados en ese ámbito artístico, debemos utilizar las tecnologías más actualizadas...

sigue: http://www.clarin.com/diario/2009/03/24/espectaculos/c-00708.htm

¿Cómo fue recibida la propuesta en ese momento?

En Alemania, dónde nos movíamos en el circuito de centros culturales, universidades y algunos clubes, fue muy bien recibida. Cuando empezamos a viajar por el mundo nos costó más. Pero eso nunca fue un problema. Seguíamos trabajando en nuestro estudio, Kling Klang, mientras nuestra idea se transformaba en un lenguaje universal.

A pesar de que Hütter no niega la trascendencia que la música contemporánea académica tiene en su país, descarta cualquier tipo de influencia. "Nos basamos en una idea propia", aclara.

Después de tantos años, ¿cambió su concepto de la música electrónica?

No. Sí se ha desarrollado. Es un género que consideramos en continuo crecimiento. Es un desarrollo orgánico, dentro de un proceso continuo, con la mirada siempre puesta en el futuro. Siempre miramos en esa dirección.

¿Qué le aportaron a la banda los avances de las nuevas teconologías?

Nos permitieron manejarnos dentro de un concepto de Minimum - Maximum, de hacer más con mucho menos. Una idea que también llevamos a la parte audiovisual, trabajada con economía de símbolos, para proteger la música.

¿Encuentra influencias de Kraftwerk en la músca actual?

Influimos a todos. Lo nuestro está en las discos y los grupos de distintos géneros. Hasta en el tango, cuyo instrumento más importante, el bandoneón, lo creó alguien de Krefeld, mi ciudad (se ríe).

¿Tiene algún significado especial compartir el escenario con Radiohead?

Será una experiencia interesante. Lo que más me atrae es que toquemos en un espacio abierto. Me gusta la energía que se genera.

FIN.