Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (27 page)

David Grubbs, solo / Gastr del Sol:

The Faust Tapes
were important to me in how it was assembled. With fragments, the music is composed after the fact. Grouping performances as material, to be completed later, that’s a basic fact of the way I work. And it was done with extreme sensitivity and grace on The Faust Tapes.

Though
The Faust Tapes
was at times group’s most difficult music, it became their best-selling release in Britain due to its more-than-affordable price of a half-pound (roughly one dollar!). It even led to a U.K. tour, featuring a colorful stage show in which the band played pinball machines that triggered sampler-like instruments to help reproduce their music live.

Scan O’Hagen, High Llamas:

The Faust Tapes
was really weird, but for 50 pence, it was an album you could afford and everybody at school bought it. Hearing this bizarre music when I was nine or ten, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. But I just thought all rock music was great because it wasn’t Bing Crosby. These tapes of people rummaging around and these strange, badly recorded riffs, to us it was like, “Well these guys are out there doing it, this must be what [rock music] is about.”

Faust IV
, the group’s fifth release in three years (counting the
Conrad
collaboration), swung back again to more accessible sounds, including the reggaeish
The Sad Skinhead
and the psychedelic
Jennifer
. Though it was the first album recorded in England, where the group’s fan base was now centered, it failed to take hold. When the next album was rejected by the group’s label, Nettlebeck lost interest in the band. By 1975, Faust had broken up.

Little was heard from the band members over the next decade, though Faust’s influence on experimental and sample-based music continued to be felt. In 1990, Diermaier and Peron resurfaced as a reunited Faust. After touring for years with an industrial/hippie-style stage show, the group hired post-punk guitar improviser (and
Tony Conrad
cohort) Jim O’Rourke to compile a collage work to their tapes. The result,
Rien
, was released in 1995.

DISCOGRAPHY

Faust
(Polydor, 1971; 1991)
; the striking debut, featuring long songs full of editing, low-fi effects, and absurdity.

So Far
(Polydor, 1972; 1991)
; a more accessible effort that revealed the band’s eclecticism.

(w/
Tony Conrad
),
Outside the Dream Syndicate
(Caroline, 1972; Table of the Elements, 1995); a collaboration with composer
Tony Conrad
that built on the earlier work he’d done with
LaMonte Young
’s
Dream Syndicate
.

The Faust Tapes
(Virgin, 1973; Recommended, 1991)
; their classic collage of song fragments into one complete album-length work.

Faust IV
(Virgin, 1973; 1992)
.

Munich and Elsewhere / The Return of a Legend
(Recommended, 1986)
; recorded between 1973 and 1975, after the band stopped releasing new music.

The Last LP (Faust Party Three)
(Recommended, 1989)
; a collection of previously unreleased material.

71 Minutes of...
(Recommended, 1996)
; combines the
Munich and Elsewhere
album with
Faust Party Three
.

The Faust Concerts Vol. 1
(Table of the Elements, 1994)
; a live recording from 1990.

The Faust Concerts Vol. 2
(Table of the Elements, 1994)
; a live recording from 1992.

Rien
(Table of the Elements, 1995)
; the first new Faust recording in decades, made by editing together recordings from recent concerts,

You Know Faust
(Klangbad, 1996)
.

KRAFTWERK

Richard James, Aphex Twin:

I’ve always loved them. I don’t think anyone doing electronic music can say Kraftwerk wasn’t an influence.

While it’s hard to consider any group that had a Top Five album and Top Forty single to be part of a “Secret History,” Kraftwerk makes the cut because of how overwhelmingly influential they’ve been to people who weren’t even born at the height of their commercial success – and because of how inaccurately they’ve been perceived in the United States. When their futuristic pre-techno single
Autobahn
, and album of the same name, became hits in 1975, they shared the charts with acts like B. J. Thomas, John Denver, and the Captain & Tennille. It was no wonder they were perceived as a freakish novelty act from some distant time and place, and soon suffered the fate of most novelty acts (they never returned to the pop charts).

Sean O’Hagen, High Llamas:

I was attracted by the fact that Kraftwerk were using classic pop writing, which is one thing you didn’t do when you were into progressive rock. But Kraftwerk were just like, “Hang on, we do what we do, and we start off with pop writing.” Even today there’s lessons to be learned.

But while
Autobahn
may have been the beginning and end of the Kraftwerk story in the eyes of the mass market, for followers of krautrock and electronic music it was neither. They had been making progressive pop music since the beginning of the ‘70s, and were soon to become one of the primary roots nourishing nearly all the new computer-based music to arrive in the coming decades: disco (where they continued to thrive), techno (through their acknowledged influence on Detroit dance pioneers Juan Atkins and Derrick May), electro-funk and early hip-hop (through Afrika Bambaataa’s appropriations), new wave (in Gary Numan’s robot-man pose), and synth pop (with the stylistic borrowings of Depeche Mode and other groups). So important was Kraftwerk to even the more mainstream pop world, David Bowie dedicated a song to the group’s co-founder (“V2 Schneider”) and even Michael Jackson expressed interest in working with them (they declined).

Alex Paterson, the Orb:

Even back in ‘74 I was really influenced by them. The 22-minute version of
Autobahn
I imagine brought me in line with making big Orb records early on. You can cram a lot of stuff into a three-minute pop song, but you can make much better music if you give yourself ten or fifteen minutes. When they split up a few years ago two of them ended up around here checking out me and [Orb member] Thrash to see if they could work with us. That was quite weird, I assure you. Them sitting on the floor cross-legged, listening to me deejay in my own flat. They were all dressed in black! And they didn’t undo their top buttons either! That was strange – two people you idolize when you’re little, sitting there watching you deejay, asking silly questions.

Kraftwerk’s principle members, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, studied together at the Diisseldorf Conservatory in the late ‘60s, where they were exposed to the early electronic compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Their first foray into popular music came in 1970, when their quintet the Organisation released an album called Tone-Float. Within the year, Hütter and Schneider decided to pare down the group to become a duo and renamed themselves Kraftwerk (which means “power station”). By the time they’d recorded the first
Kraftwerk
record, though, the group had expanded to include percussionists Klaus Dinger and Thomas Hohman. While the album, recorded at their own Kling Klang studio, had hints of the ambient techno-pop sound Kraftwerk would arrive at years later, it mostly sounded like exotic art rock that had been heavily influenced by their avant-garde backgrounds.

Tim Gane, Stereolab:

The whole thing of the “stereo-lab,” with references to scientific experiments and mixing chemicals, that’s been my approach to music in a tongue-in-cheek way. I always wanted the image of the band to be that, rather than a pop group. It all comes from Kraftwerk. Our early records had the same sleeve design, with slight variations, just as Kraftwerk had done. I like the idea of records being reports, not so much individual records as an ongoing discovery. I just thought Kraftwerk was the highest point you could do in music, the whole thing influenced me. The throbbing, hypnotic music just struck a chord in me.

Following the release of Kraftwerk’s debut album, Hohman was replaced by a friend of Dinger’s, guitarist Michael Rother. The team of Dinger and Rother began to move the group’s sound into more rhythmic guitar-groove territory, a direction Hütter found so distasteful he quit the group for a while in 1971. The trio of Schneider, Dinger, and Rother lasted only about six months; then Hütter returned while Dinger and Rother left to form
Neu!
. Temporarily a duo once more, Kraftwerk turned to drum machine accompaniment on their
Kraftwerk 2
and
Ralf & Florian
albums. Ironically, even after Dinger and Rother left Kraftwerk their influence remained, as Hütter and Schneider began to produce a more synthesized version of
Neu!
’s propulsive and metronomic “motorik” beat.

With 1974’s
Autobahn
, Kraftwerk entered a new phase. Recognizing a need to more effectively communicate an image for their esoteric music, the group – once again a quartet, with electronic percussionist Wolfgang Flur and guitarist/violinist Klaus Roeder – conspired with visual director Emil Schult to recast themselves as robotic man-machines that celebrated technology through synthesized music. Another thread running through the music was a nostalgia for lost European pre-War cultural institutions, such as the minimalist school of design called Bauhaus, that had been suppressed under the Nazis. With their 22-minute
Autobahn
(which, in shortened form, became an international hit), Kraftwerk fused a love for technology with German scenery, and turned it into what was essentially a futuristic “Born to Run” (released the same year!).

With their new image (or maybe anti-image, since it masked their real personalities behind the cold veneer of hardware) Kraftwerk became the only German band of the era to cross into the American mainstream. Though their follow-up
Radio-Activity
failed to take hold the way
Autobahn
had, 1977’s
Trans-Europe Express
was a return to form that made a splash on the disco charts. The title track and
Europe Endless
offered more continental musings, while
Metal on Metal
made a strong impart on early industrial music. Similarly, the following year’s
The Man-Machine
produced standouts such as
The Robots
, with its vocoder voice synthesizer, and the Euro-chic hit
The Model
, which reached number one in England and anticipated the arrival of new wave artists like Human League and Gary Numan.

Doug Firley, Gravity Kills:

Kraftwerk was really the avenue that I initially wanted to explore and it took me many, many years trying to reproduce music like that. And I guess I found I was really bad at it, or that there was no way to reinvent the wheel. So I got a sampler and thought instead of trying to recreate the parts, I’d just go ahead and sample them.

As more groups adopted Kraftwerk’s sound and the computer age dawned, the music became less alien and the group’s robot gimmickry began to wear thin. By the early ‘80s the band was recording only sporadically and veered toward anachronism and self-parody. Though they continued to show up in dance clubs doing songs like
Tour de France
, they produced little material of note during a decade when their legacy would sprout a variety of new directions in music. With their 1991 remix album,
The Mix
, Kraftwerk – reduced again to the duo of Ralf and Florian – were taking their cues from artists for whom they’d paved the way.

DISCOGRAPHY

Kraftwerk 1
(Philips, 1971, Germanophon, 1994)
.

Kraftwerk 2
(Philips, 1972; Germanophon, 1994)
.

Ralf and Florian
(Vertigo, 1973; Germanophon, 1994)
.

Autobahn
(Vertigo, 1974; Elektra, 1988)
; the international breakthrough.

Radio Activity
(Capitol, 1975; Cleopatra, 1996)
; a challenging but largely unsuccessful follow-up, coming at the height of their success.

Trans-Europe Express
(Capitol, 1977; Elektra, 1988)
; a strong return to the stuff that made
Autobahn
a success.

The Man-Machine
(Capitol, 1978; Elektra, 1988)
; further explorations into techno-futurism.

Computer World
(Warner Bros., 1981; Elektra, 1988)
; no longer so ahead of its time, the group now sounds strangely dated.

Electric Cafe
(Warner Bros., 1986; Elektra, 1988)
; a mid-‘80s release, barely noticed and never followed up.

The Mix
(Elektra, 1991)
; an album that remixes past material into ‘90s dance tracks.

The Model
(Cleopatra, 1992)
; a compilation of the group’s best-known material.

Three Originals: The Capitol Years
(Cleopatra, 1994)
; collects the group’s post-
Autobahn
records.

TRIBUTE:
A Tribute to Kraftwerk: All in a Day’s Work
(Mute, 1991)
.

TRIBUTE:
Trancewerk Express Vol. I: A Tribute to Kraftwerk
(Cleopatra, 1995)
; features European electronic acts such as Audio Science, Purity J., and Kirk.