graywyvern wrote:
i've got their first album before they quite figured out their sound
glad that these days lots of people revere them as originators; at the time they were hardly taken seriously & being a fan was seen as a sign of mental imbalance
Oh, I only just heard about them fairly recently. I studied electronic music composition in music school for my master's degree. I had NO IDEA back then what people were doing. I was used to a lot of Stockhausen, Walter/Wendy Carlos, Morton Subotnik, John Cage, Terry Riley, and the like. Kraftwerk embraces pop music from an artistic perspective, and their identity hadn't quite solidified in their younger days (I'm talking about early 1980s), nor had the technology really caught up with them yet. If you are a music student, early Kraftwerk really needs to be on your listening list.
If I'd been more familiar with Kraftwerk before studying composition, I'd have made more effort to perform live with a laptop. It's just at the school I attended no one really did that. The thought of it makes me giddy with excitement for going back for my doctorate one day.
I've also become more exposed to people using laptops, like with Max/MSP, Reaktor, PD, etc. I don't really get so-called "interactive music," but Kraftwerk is the kind of modernist, techno-pop ART that even my very small children can understand. It's inspiring, because it shows that it's possible to keep artistic integrity, incorporate commercial styles into your own art, AND reach an audience without selling out to either a purely academic mindset or to passive, commercial-oriented listeners. It's art you can dance to, and the fact that their influence has extended far into the academic world as well as the world of pop, electronic, and hip-hop worlds is absolutely astounding.