Review: Kraftwerk :: Remixes

The most beautiful truths are those that eventually become legends: one night in 1977, the two Kraftwerk founders, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, visited an after-hours club in New York’s Bronx. At the turntables: Afrika Bambaataa, one of the first electro-funk/hip-hop DJs, who later became a legend himself.

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At some point that night, Bambaataa mixed the two Kraftwerk tracks “Trans Europe Express” and “Metal On Metal” into a 20-minute monster that drove the crowd onto the dance floor. The two creators of the original songs were impressed. They had witnessed one of the first live mixes of their own music. DJ culture was still a young art back then, disco music was still a long way from becoming house, and most of the remixes were “extended versions”, edits of the original songs, painstakingly recorded by the DJs with tape, razor blades and adhesive tape were made.

The fact that Kraftwerk commissioned external remixes happened relatively early in the still young house era. The singles for the 1991 album THE MIX, which is also a kind of remix album with new versions of classic Kraftwerk songs, were edited by British house/downtempo veteran William Orbit and Frenchman François Kevorkian, who DJed at Paradise Garage and was one of the architects of house music at Studio 54 in New York. These early reworkings of “Radioactivity”, as the compilation shows, are firmly rooted in the time of their creation, while the Kraftwerk’s own “Kling Klang Mixes” from “The Robots” point more towards the future.

Remix albums are almost as old as their object itself

30 years later, remixes have become part of everyday pop life, which, in addition to the original intention of working out the danceable components of a song, can also fulfill the function of creating an artistic reinterpretation of a piece with complete creative freedom. The remix sometimes has a difficult time when it is torn from its natural habitat – the club, or maybe the living room – and put on an album among its peers.

Remix albums are almost as old as their object itself. 1982’s LOVE AND DANCING by The Human League, performing here as The League Unlimited Orchestra, may have been the first in the history of modern electronic music, featuring mostly instrumental, dubbed versions of the songs from the 1981 album DARE. What LOVE AND DANCING didn’t suffer from, but which is the biggest problem with most remix albums: They aren’t conceived as albums, but rather as a means of historicizing, as a kind of sound archive in which the sequencing of the tracks doesn’t seem to play a role.

The best comes last

In the downtempo scene in the 1990s, new variations of entire artist albums were considered good form, but unfortunately so was the phenomenon that different producers had often become obsessed with the same track and built their new versions around the same hook line of this one track. Which can be a tiring listening experience. This also applies to some extent to the Kraftwerk REMIXES: Seven variations of “Expo 2000” in a row are difficult to hear, despite all the artistry of the individual DJs and producers (Underground Resistance, Orbital, François Kevorkian and Rob Rives).

The fact that Kraftwerk are traditionally strangers to giving up control of their work can be seen from the fact that only eleven of the 19 remixes here come from “foreign” producers, some of whom have been friends with the Düsseldorfers for years. The rest: Kraftwerk’s own revisions. The best comes last: the two adaptations by Hot Chip (“Aéro dynamics”, “La Forme”) bring the fusion of the here actually incompatible sound worlds of remix recipient and in a strange way
-geber perfectly together and at the same time represent the most contemporary reworkings of Kraftwerk songs.

The winners of the in-house remixes are “Non Stop”, the eight-minute version of a 30-second sound clip that introduced the MTV show “Music Non Stop” from 1994, and “Home Computer”, its German-language version as an exclusive vinyl single enclosed with the Musikexpress June 2021 edition. The compilation REMIXES was already released digitally on all streaming platforms in 2020, now it is available physically for the first time: as a double CD, as a triple LP, and as a limited triple LP on colored vinyl, which is distributed exclusively via the Kraftwerk web shop .

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