Kraft – a one hour documentary on Kraftwerk
http://vimeo.com/37393905
Just in time for their new tour in the states that we have reported on earlier this week, this new video documentary appears. Mkae sure to check it out.
Enjoy 
For fans of krautrock, drone, ambient, and electronic music, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a fascinating history of how some of the most influential music of our times emerged from the boredom and hopelessness of 1960s Germany. The filmmakers take the subtitle of their movie very seriously, and they want to crawl back to find the Big Bang of cultural influences that would make something as innovative as Kraftwerk possible. It’s not an unimportant question, since the ideas the electronic musical collective would establish in their 1970s output would influence everyone from glam rockers like David Bowie and Brian Eno to early hip-hop pioneers and New Wave bands like Duran Duran, and on into today, where techno and arty experimentalists like Radiohead still borrow from the German group’s bag of tricks. Even wuss-rockers Coldplay lifted the hooks for their song “Talk” from “Computer Love,” somehow achieving the impossible and proving one could actually be bigger nerds than the pasty originals, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. And that Kraftwerk core duo likes to dress up as robots, so you know they’re plenty nerdy.
Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution traces the rise of German music back to the influx of British bands that went to the European country to ply their trade in the early 1960s. (The Beatles most famously cut their teeth in Hamburg nightclubs.) At that point, German youth were looking to establish a new identity that embraced the freedom of the West and finally unshackled them from the shame of their country’s past—much in the same way Pete Townshend has argued that British rock stood in direct defiance of an older generation in England who were always rubbing past glories in the faces of their children. Though German musicians initially copied their British idols, who themselves were copying African American blues musicians, eventually they would want something that was more in tune with their own experience. As Karl Bartos, one of two former Kraftwerk members to participate in this unauthorized film, put it, they knew they weren’t from the Mississippi Delta, so why pretend they were?” – James S. Rich
MoMa – Kraftwerk Tickets Blues
Funny 
Apparently the booking site was overloaded..
Kraftwerk will give a series of eight performances, each devoted to one of its albums, as part of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of the electronic music pioneers in April, museum officials said. The performances during “Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” on consecutive evenings starting April 10, will not only feature tracks from one of Kraftwerk’s albums, but also other original compositions intended to showcase the group’s influence on contemporary culture. Projected images, including 3-D ones, will accompany the music. The albums will be performed in chronological order, one each night, starting with “Autobahn” from 1974 and working up through “Tour de France” from 2003.
For more info: kraftwerk.com
Not even Hitler is left out:
Enjoy
Kraftwerk and the Electronic revolution (3/19)
In case you have not seen this series on Kraftwerk, make sure to check it out. It contains a lot of information on these synth pop pioneers
Is this a new song from Kraftwerk?
KRAFTWERK new song 2011 “Music international”
“If it is them, perhaps its a taste of the new material. Unusually polyphonic in its arrangement, it still bears a number of very Kraftwerkian elements and is reminiscent of post 2003 Tour De France Soundtracks album.”
Well this is what we have learned so far
Somebody please tell me this was made with old Kraftwerk samples in a bedroom somewhere? Please PLEASE tell me this isn’t “new” music that sounds like everything they’ve done for the last 20 years.
The video on YouTube is a couple of months old, so I’d expect we’d hear something on the official site or in the music press about any imminent release.
*UPDATE*
Robert informs me that “this song is a demo from the bestservice “Synth-Werk” Synthesizer Plugin, a fantastic tool if you want to make music and sound like Kraftwerk … but I don’t know who made this video.” I checked out the plugin and it’s bloomin’ expensive, so I won’t be buying it.
Whether it is too expensive or not – here you can read our review of the product in question:
http://stereoklang.se/blog/reviews/synth-werk
Kraftwerk on the road again
Still remember when I saw Kraftwerk live for the first time (ages ago) – today I would probably go see them again, although one might debate if it really is Kraftwerk you are watching since it is only one of the four original members in the current/today´s line up. Anyhow below are the details:
Kraftwerk will give a series of eight performances, each devoted to one of its albums, as part of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of the electronic music pioneers in April, museum officials said. The performances during “Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” on consecutive evenings starting April 10, will not only feature tracks from one of Kraftwerk’s albums, but also other original compositions intended to showcase the group’s influence on contemporary culture. Projected images, including 3-D ones, will accompany the music. The albums will be performed in chronological order, one each night, starting with “Autobahn” from 1974 and working up through “Tour de France” from 2003.
For more info: kraftwerk.com
http://youtu.be/6M5ZNETaNrk
Kraftwerk Autobahn rare original video
DIY Orchestra plays Kraftwerk
In this video featuring hackmeopen rockit (lead), xoxbox (acidic solo), meeblip se (arpeggio) & shruthi-1 (bass)
Shadow Bureau becomes more then a hobby to Bon Harris
The Shadow Bureau is a new project from Nitzer Ebb’s Bon Harris and A Matter Gray’s Jeehun Hwang. What at first started off as compositions for several indie films has since taken on a life of its own, featuring collaborations with the likes of Wolfgang Flür (Kraftwerk), Curt Smith (Tears For Fears) and Isabelle Erkendal (Peaches, West End Girls).
The band’s 2-track single “Don’t Give Yourself Away” is now available for listening on the band’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/theshadowbureau. The title track “Don’t Give Yourself Away” features Tears For Fears’ Curt Smith on vocals while the B-side “Axis Of Envy” features Wolfgang Flür (ex-Kraftwerk).
Enjoy
Showcasing the WMD Gamma Wave Source
The WMD Gamma Wave Source is a dual digital wavetable VCO that can create millions of timbres using onboard digital “effects”.
The Controls
1V/Oct – Pitch input, used with standard 1 Volt per Octave keyboards and MIDI-CV converters. 0-5 volt input.
Pitch 1 & 2 – Controls the relative pitch per channel.
WT 1 & 2 Select – Select the desired wave table from the chart. 256 are available, each producing a different sound. Click for the table chart.
Out 1 & 2- Oscilator section output, each puts out +-2.5V/ 5Vpp signal.
The Effects Section
The GWS has four effects pipelines. Two for each oscilator. The Routing table selects how the oscillators interact with the effects pipelines.
FX Select Knob – Pushing this knob in will select the column that the knob is adjusting. Turning it will adjust the LEDs in the select column and will alter the Routing or Effects selection.
FX Para 1 & 2 – These knobs control the FX parameter for the oscillator section. Each effect has a specific parameter that is controlled by this knob. Adujust to taste.
Para CV & Attenuation Knob – This is a CV input for modulating and controlling the effects on the oscillator. Press the WaveTable Select knob to activate CV control per oscillator section. The LED will light when CV control is active. The FX Para knob will adjust the center or edges of the CV control depending on the selected effect.
Effects Table – These are the available effects, they are all created mathematically using 8 bit processing. The result is generally lo-fi and edgy, but smooth fat sounds are also possible.
In this video:
Here’s a little Kraftwerk-like jam showcasing the WMD Gamma Wave Source wavetable oscillator module.
Our TR-909 Rim Out is clocking the Kilpatrick K4815 Pattern Generator and one side of a Livewire Dual Bissell Generator as a simple Attack/Decay envelope generator.
The pitch CV of the K4815 is running to the other side of the Dual-Bissel, using it to generate portamento. This is much more fun than your typical portamento as you have control of up and down glide rates.
The new Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano GR is being played using its new mono glide mode, which sounds really nice!
For filters on the Gamma we’re using a Division 6 Filtaire, modulated by the Livewire Vulcan’s sinewave, and a Metasonix R-54. We’re also using a Metasonix r-51 as our VCA and the Flight Of Harmony ‘Sound of Shadows’ karaoke delay.
Review of Synth-Werk – Going Kraftwerk all the way, or…
We have had the pleasure of reviewing the recently released sampler studio called Synth-Werk from Best Service, powered by Yellow Tools’ Engine 2. The product was originally released under the name Kraftworker based on the clear fact that with this sample library you get basically all possible sounds inspired by this legendary band.
Our first impression, browsing through this 7,7Gb large sound library, is impressive. Every possible sound we are trying to think of, coming out of the old studio in Düseeldorf, is there in one form or another, everything neatly packed into its respective catalogues; i.e. FX, Bass synths, Vocoders, Lead sounds etc. Although with a slight overweight, in our opinion, on the more recent sounds pertaining to Kraftwerk’s latest release – the “Tour de France soundtrack”. Which in no sense is bad, since a lot of those nice metallic echo based sounds used on that album will easily fit any modern electro, EBM, synth pop, trance type tune.
The favorite section is probably the one containing bass synths since they faithfully reproduce several of those unique and groovy synth bass lines that has made the sound of Kraftwerk so characteristic. This especially true, for several of the sounds using arpeggiator or other types of sequenced rhythms. Forest Kingdom is also something that sounded completely amazing to us. If you compare it with TITAN which we would assume is one of Best Service’s top selling products, and somewhat marketed as a “Kraftwerk-sounding product”, we can easily say that Synth-Werk takes you 10 miles deeper into the realms of the Kling Klang studio. One possible down side is the way all these samples have been named. They are more or less all, in each catalogue, branded as Bass 1, Bass 2, Bass 3 etc, making it very difficult to track which tunes you wanted and, thus, making the built in search function pretty useless.
Synth-Werk comes bundled with Engine 2, a sampler instrument developed in cooperation with Yellow Tools, a product that can either be used as a VST or stand-alone instrument. The use of Engine 2 is something that has generated a lot of debate on various forums (like KVR for example) – stating that they would prefer a more general wav library so that they can use any program they like, e.g. Kontakt, and that they do not need yet another VST or that it makes their systems slow. We loaded Engine 2 onto a MacBook Pro and can at least from a performance perspective say that Engine 2 was easy to install and ran smoothly all through the trial period.
3D concerts with Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk play the rather eerie Radioactivity, this is shot in 3D , View from the front.
Manchester 2009 Start of the 3D show , you can tell from the crowds reaction just how good the 3D show was.
Kraftwerk will give further concerts with 3D theme in the fall on the 12 and 13 October – giving three concerts in Munich. Yes, you read that right! Three concerts in two days – the 13 is done including two concerts, 20.00 respective 00:00. In turn, a 3D exhibition held on 15 October.
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