| LA:
There’s a bumper sticker that says “Drum
machines have no soul.” Do you think that is true? |
| Ralf
Hütter: It depends on who is programming.
It sounds to me like a sticker from the 70's, “Kraftwerk is anti-music”
or “Synthesizers have no feelings”. It sounds very old-fashioned.
It’s all in the interaction between man and machine. That’s
what Kraftwerk is all about: the harmony between man and machine. |
| LA:
Would you consider the Kraftwerk concept to be basically
optimistic about the relationship between man and machine? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes. It is about showing possibilities
and limitations of possibilities. And also dynamics. I think there’s
a lot of energy in our music, at least that’s what I feel, and we
get that feedback from the different cultural communities where we’ve
been playing the last year, from Moscow to Santiago, Chile; from Sydney
to America. We’ve been playing in Miami, in November, so I think it’s
nowadays in the world community. |
| LA:
When you play this show at the Greek, you’ll
be performing almost in nature, under the stars: the machine in the garden.
Do you see that as a contradiction? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, but I think that’s okay.
We’ve been performing in different cultural contexts. We played a
tribal gathering in England that was in the countryside in tents. In Italy,
we will play outside in the old city center. We played on the Lido in Venice.
In Moscow, at Sports Palais. So it’s like a little spaceship landed
somewhere and we present our performance. |
| LA:
There’s an almost universal fascination with
machines and computers, but at the same time, isn’t there a cultural
fear of the future, of machines taking over? A fear of cyborgs? |
| Ralf
Hütter: This has to do with social structures
and who is operating the machines. But it’s the same with all machinery
from simple tools to... |
| LA:
Since the wheel, I guess. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes. |
| LA:
Or fire. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes... since the fire may be made
to prepare food, or to burn your enemy’s house down. It’s all
to do with social behavior. |
| LA:
What do you think about artificial intelligence? Do
you think it’s possible that a machine can become sentient? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, maybe. People are working on
certain things, but by doing so I think, as far as I know, they discover
the complexity of the human brain. Lately, we have been doing basic work
on more random — or subconscious? — music. Composing, not by
chance, well, like we say sometimes: We play the machines, and sometimes
the machines play us. It’s interaction, to be relaxing and enjoying
the rhythm, like driving your car, or leaning back and having your friend
drive a little bit, leaning back and enjoying the movements. Also we have
the same feeling with bicycling. It’s the same with music. But also
with music, maybe music during the concert, I have the feeling sometimes
it’s best when it plays itself. We have the computers running and
we can interfere, and sometimes we let the computers keep on going. Then
you feel like going Ah! I want to do something here. And we interact again.
So it’s in and out. |
| LA:
Last year’s Tour de France was Kraftwerk’s
first new music in many years... |
| Ralf
Hütter: In the ’70s, we just stayed
in the studio and worked out the concept albums. But now, with the new Kraftwerk
mobile laptop setup, we can perform the music live and keep the man-machine
dynamic. And it’s multimedia. It’s very visual. We have created,
ourselves or working with others, these electronic paintings and computer
graphics and electronic images that are synchronized with the music. |
| LA:
Throughout your career, you’ve worked with engineers
who build instruments, who build computers, like Ludwig Rehberg, the EMS-Synthi
guy who helped with the Vocoders. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Florian did that, yes. And also engineers,
Florian was very good in persuading, because we couldn’t afford, and
then another programming engineer from University computers — Florian
persuaded him to write speech programs for him at night. We’ve always
had scientists and friends helping us out. Because especially in the early
days, things were unaffordable for us. The big computers, they were with
Bell Laboratories, or IBM, or the Speech Voices were with Bell. So we organized,
we got access to certain sounds, and always I say, when I bought my first
synthesizer, it was the same price as my grey Volkswagen, which later was
on the Autobahn cover. Today it’s much easier to get access, now that
we have 35 years of work behind us. We even test-pilot for music computer-programming
companies. |
| LA:
When you let machines play at concerts — especially
when there are actual robot versions of Kraftwerk onstage in place of the
humans — when you do that, and the audience applauds at the end of
the song, what are the people applauding for? |
| Ralf
Hütter: The spirit... the art. Or the spirit
of the art. The creativity. Sometimes people like the robots more than us.
Specially when we’ve set them up in the afternoon in public, or somewhere
backstage, or at a party. They are in their traveling suitcases/coffins,
and when we set them up, people look at the robots, and they ignore us.
Which is okay, because they are there, they do photos for us, and things
like that. |
| LA:
But they’re not ready to do the interviews yet. |
| Ralf
Hütter: No, I have to write maybe some interview
programming. |
| LA:
Well, I look forward to seeing the show at the Greek. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Is it open-air? And what happens
when it’s raining? Or, it never rains? |
| LA:
It says on the ticket, “Rain or shine,”
so it will happen. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Okay, then the stage is covered? |
| LA:
Yes. There won’t be any rain. It’ll be
fantastic, don’t worry. |
| Ralf
Hütter: We’ll bring the anti-rain device. |
| |
| Interview
to Jay Babcock |
|
