Today we go back beyond the eighties. This time the album has never been lost - a copy of it has always been available as it is completely indispensable. Since I first put on the headphones to listen to the full 23 minutes version, I have been hooked, first by the technical prowess that is displayed on an album which was recorded years before any real developments in the gadgetry that so-called techno music uses today and then by the sheer emotion of the thing. I had missed the strange and comical appearance of the band on Tomorrows World in a segments which might have been dismissed as an April Fool. Instead I came to the band without any preconceptions and I was hooked, locked into them as the coolest, most tuneful and most mysterious band ever to walk the planet. Though of course we are not sure they actually do walk the planet - maybe they glide in strange self-built carriages and so have not had to walk since the day Florian first picked up a screwdriver. I don't believe anything about them cycling.
The album itself is a complex set of interlocking parts, spiced with the deep and satisfying sounds of racing engines, brought just to the point of resonance with the human body - you really feel this music - it gets you in the guts or the head or the heart. And though sometimes the sounds are almost exactly the same as those used by the wannabes of such bands as Depeche Mode, these are properly played melodies - a bar may be sequenced to be replayed over and over but here someone actually hits the keys with a swing that none of the synthesizer infants could ever quite manage. I once read somewhere in a review of drum machines, an enthusiastic paean to some device or other by the Fast Fashion guys in which they praised the tightness of the machine and how they had put it on an oscilloscope to prove it. Were they being ironic? No such boasts from the Kling Klang Kids - they had emotion and all of it went into the machines and came out again. The road system of Germany in one day - sampled through the ears of Ralf and Florian and transformed by whatever bits of electronics lay around the studio. The second section with the flute is as-sweet a melody as you could wish for - filmic and intimate at the same time. Then there is the driving section - simply the main beat overlaid with the deep sounds of engines - panning in the speakers, gradually building to a melodic drone which resolves into the next bridge to the slow down and what must be the only instrumental traffic jam ever recorded. It breaks up into a fractal drive towards a resolution with radio sounds and steel drums and the final fade broken up by a speeding engine in the trademark pan to end. Time to lock the car, walk inside and take tea.
By way of a treat, an early and strange radio track from Kraftwerk in 1971.
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