Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk 2 [ENDLESS HAPPINESS]

Why you'll love it

Kraftwerk 2 is the duo's early, exploratory side, made with engineer Conny Plank before the Autobahn breakthrough. It reached No. 36 on the German albums chart, and "Klingklang" later gave its name to the band's Düsseldorf studio.

About the album

Long before the robots and the pocket calculators, Kraftwerk was two men in a Hamburg studio with a flute, a violin, an organ and a great deal of tape. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider recorded Kraftwerk 2 at Star Musik between September 26 and October 1, 1971, producing it with Conny Plank, who also engineered.

Hütter later said drummers didn't want to work with a band that had so many electronic gadgets, so on the near side-long "Klingklang" he used a preset organ rhythm box instead, one of the band's first steps toward the machine music they became famous for. There are no synthesizers here: "Atem" is a recording of breathing, "Strom" stacks looping flutes through tape echo, "Spule 4" and "Wellenlange" drift through guitar, bass and electronics, and "Harmonika" bends a mouth organ on tape.

The cover repeats the pop-art traffic cone of the first album in fluorescent green with a big "2" added, a conceptual-art joke that set up the band's love of design. Schneider called these early records archaeology, and like all good archaeology, it's where you find out how the whole thing started.

Also at Kops: more Kraftwerk on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Endless Happiness (cat# HE72012), a reissue of the 1972 album.