Monthly Archives: May 2020

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte

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The news that Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider had passed away at the beginning of May was one of those announcements that seemed to strike a particularly resonant note for me. I had first heard their music long before their breakthrough album Autobahn courtesy of a radio programme featuring import albums back in the early ’70s. They were one of my personal inspirations to start making electronic music.

It was certainly a much more pleasant experience to learn of a new biography of Kraftwerk was being published by Penguin Books earlier in the year.

Kraftwerk: Music of the Future by Uwe Schütte is a rather succinct volume which covers the careers of co-founders Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. The pair met at school in the turbulent days of the late ’60s and immediately hit it off. In 1968, they formed a band called Organization who released a sole LP called Tone Float (only in the UK as German record companies had no interest in their work).

Keeping their base in their hometown of Düsseldorf, the pair then went on to create the concept of Kraftwerk (literally translated a Power Station). Their early work did include electronics but also guitar, flute and drums. Much of this work was based around improvisation and electronic sound manipulation.

Their first three releases were prime examples of their work at the time. It’s unfortunate that to this day these albums basically been written out of the band history and not been any part of a re-issue program for their recordings.

For Kraftwerk, it was their fourth album – Autobahn – that denoted the beginning of their recording career. It’s the album (and song) that brought the group to international attention (although, it was virtually ignored in their own country).

They subsequently built up their reputation with their next three releases of the ’70s – Radio-Activity, Trans Europe Express and The Man Machine. It was also at this point that their work started to reverberate into other forms of music. It became an influence in electronic dance music and what would develop into techno.

They brought in the ’80s with Computer World with it’s ubiquitous Pocket Calculator emanating from radios around the world.

After that, the space between album releases would become much greater. It was another five years before the release of Electric Cafe and another seventeen years until the Tour de France Soundtracks (with a stop-gap remix effort called The Mix in 1991).

But, that doesn’t mean that Kraftwerk were inactive during these long apparent silences. As the author points out, Kraftwerk were not really a “band”. They considered themselves to be a multi-media project. They spent a lot of time concentrating of visual elements to their work, as well. Stage presentations, museum exhibitions… you name it, they seemed to have their finger in it.

In the past twenty years, Kraftwerk were very active in the area of live performances. The miniaturisation of their music producing gear helped a great deal in this regard.

Throughout the book, Schütte puts the efforts of Kraftwerk in the context of the music, society and art of the times and also details how it affected the future of music. It is a good overview of their music and art helped to shape many things to come.

Isolation Reading: Fiction

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Isolation can be fine when you have some good reading material

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Over the years, the bulk of my reading has been non-fiction books. These have mainly been art-related books with a heavy emphasis on music. It’s really not been until recent years that I have gotten into the habit of reading fiction to any extent. In fact, fiction has made of about three quarters of my reading for the past few years as I play catch-up with a lot of interesting stuff.

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. This is the story of Eric Packer who is a financial industry billionaire living in New York City. Eric simply wants to go out to get a haircut. So, he gets into his limousine and heads across Manhattan. But, the trip is not so straight-forward. Along the way, he hops out of the limo for various interactions. Other times, he is stuck in traffic while at the same time dealing with others who have jumped into the car for meetings of different natures. Often hilarious and sometimes a bit frightening. Always involving.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I first read this book three years ago. Since that time, seeing it on my bookshelf has often beckoned me to re-read it. I finally decided that now was the time.

For some reason, this book seems to have a reputation of being a difficult read. It seems to wind up on lists mentioning the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses. But, other that being a very long book, it really isn’t a particularly difficult book to get into.

The three main plots involved include a tennis academy for young people, the residents of a rehab house and the search for an illusive media called the Entertainment. As the story unfolds, the three plots are seen to intersect at various junctions.

Probably the aspect of the book that is most at the forefront is the detail. Wallace is one to stack detail upon detail upon detail. It often makes for very dense passages of text. And there is another aspect of the book that also makes it even more dense. End-notes. At the back of the book there are nearly 100 pages of notes regarding the main text. The reader is expected to pause their reading and flip to the back of the book in order to discover the subtext involved as they hit the number of an end-note. And I highly recommend getting involved in the practice – at least the first time you read it – as it often does lead to a deeper understanding of what is happening (although some seem a bit superfluous).

Stick to it and you will find yourself with a highly rewarding reading experience. It’s just as good the second time around, as well.

Ulysses by James Joyce. OK. Now, this truly is a difficult one. It certainly makes Infinite Jest seem like a walk in the park. Ulysses has a reputation of being one of the landmarks of twentieth century literature. It also has the reputation of being a notoriously difficult book to read. Correct on both counts.

I recently picked up the Dover reprint of the 1922 version of this book. It has undergone several revisions in succeeding years but, this was the way that it was first published (in a form corrected by Joyce).

It is basically the story of an advertising salesman called Leopold Bloom. The entire volume covers twenty-four hours of his life. During this time, he meets up with friends, goes to a funeral, goes out to drink and dine and other seeming mundane activities. All the while, he does his best to stay away from home as he knows that his wife is having an affair.

While the book seems to start as a fairly straight-forward read, Joyce changes styles quite drastically from section to section. There are sections that read like a play and other parts which unfold as a dense run-on sentence.

Often perplexing, it is worth the effort to soldier on. I can’t say that it is an easy task to make it through to the end. But, I certainly did find it an intriguing read.

The King by Donald Barthelme. What seems to start out as a fairly normal tale of King Arthur eventually starts to take a turn in an unexpected direction. This comes when the characters start making references to photographs printed in the newspaper and listening to speeches by Winston Churchill on the radio.

For some reason, King Arthur and the others have found themselves living in England during the second world war. It’s best to just go with the flow and see how things progress. A very amusing read.

The Yips by Nicola Barker. I first became aware of the author from a Guardian article last year. It made me curious to check out her work. This was the first book that I found. The story mainly revolves around the golfer Stuart Ransom. His life – professionally, financially and personally – is on a downward spiral. His encounters with such characters as a female priest and puzzling barmaid take his life into often comic turns.

Despite the book’s length, the rapid unfolding of the various story elements seem to make the book whip by at an accelerated pace. Very enjoyable, indeed.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend. Adrian Mole has just entered his teenage years and like most people of that age is finding the going a bit rough. He’s a self-proclaimed intellectual and he seems to attribute that fact as to why he has a difficult time relating to other people.

Adrian’s daily journal entries follow his relationship with his parents, girlfriend and others involved in his life on a daily basis. It’s apparently not an easy life for Adrian and this leads to countless chuckles and many laugh-out-loud moments. It reads like a modern day take on the classic British book The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith from the 1890s (which is still in print and highly recommended!). A great read for some comic relief… especially in difficult times.

Isolation Reading: Music Books

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During the current days of isolation, many people have taken to reading as a way to while away the time. Personally, I’ve pretty well always got a book on the go. According to my info on Goodreads, I read over 70 books last year. At the moment, I’m at the two dozen mark for 2020.

At this point, I thought that I’d share some of things that I’ve read so far this year. In this post, I’ll cover some of the music-related books.

Jaki Liebezet: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer – Jono Podmore (editor). As a fan of the German group Can since I heard their first album (Monster Movie) on an import records radio programme in 1970, I was very pleased to learn of this new book on their incredible drummer.

This volume is bookended with a concise biography and a massive discography. But, the meat-and-potatoes of the book centres around the rhythm system of drumming known as dot-dash. Since this part of the book makes up about half of the content, this is where the value of the book will vary from reader to reader. Despite the fact that my own compositional work rarely deals with percussion or rhythm, I still found this section very interesting.

For me, one of the highlights of the book is the exhaustive discography which covers every release from his jazz beginnings through his work with Can and the last chapter of his life with Club Off Chaos.

Overall, I found this book to be a very engaging read. But, I’m not sure how it will appeal to people who are not interested in all of the technical information presented here.

The Life of Curtis Mayfield: Traveling Soul by Todd Mayfield with Travis Atria. The re-release of Curtis Mayfield’s first four LPs as a box set last year got me to wonder if there was a biography out there. Sure enough, I discovered this book by his son Todd.

The book covers his humble beginnings towards a successful career as a member of the Impressions and subsequent journey into his solo work. It reveals him to be a man focused on his music and also someone who was driven to retain the rights to everything he was involved with. It also shows how this drive could often lead to conflict in both this personal and professional life.

It is a thoroughly researched and well presented portrait of one of the most important figures to ever emerge from the American music scene.

Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins. Despite the fact that I have been a Genesis fan since the early ’70s, this book was not particularly high on my list to read. But, I stumbled across an advance uncorrected proof at a thrift shop and picked it up. I’m glad that I did as it proved to be a quite enjoyable read.

Collins covers his entire history from his early years as a child actor to his work with Genesis, his solo career and eventual situation of alcoholism and illness. It’s a warts-and-all account of both is successes where he does not shy from accounts of pitfalls and personal failures. A quick and enjoyable read.

Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy L. Schmidt. Whether you were a fan of soft rock in the ’70s or not, everybody seemed to agree that Karen Carpenter was a singular voice in the music world at the time. I can still recall buying the Carpenters self-titled LP on the same day as Paranoid by Black Sabbath. Both held appeal to me for different reasons.

While others had attempted to write a biography of Karen Carpenter in the past, the hyper-protective nature of her family always resulted in a dead end. Fortunately, this was not the case for Schmidt. He was able to finally dig beyond the surface in order to get to the roots of her life.

Of course, it was a life of tremendous success on the surface but, he manages to dig deep into a personal life which was far from perfect. It’s a touching portrait that shows the sad physical decline of Carpenter leading to her eventual death from complications related to anorexia. In the end, it’s a story that will no doubt be of interest to the fans of one of the most distinctive voices in popular music.