Art and Kraft

WHILE many eyes will be turning to Las Vegas on April 26th to see what U2's Popmart tour is all about, the real hottest ticket in town this year will get you into a big field outside Luton on May 24th, where the unthinkable is taking place: Kraftwerk are coming out of their hermetically sealed King Klang studio in Dusseldorf for a rarer-than-rare live appearance. And if that's not enough, there's also talk of a new album later in the year, a mere 11 years after their last. Forget the new Oasis album: this is the music story of the year.

And here's why. The remarkable musical odyssey that was born out of four disaffected avant-garde German students in the early 197Os was later to reverberate around the early techno clubs in mid 198Os Detroit and the burgeoning hip-hop culture in any black urban centre in the US you could care to mention. To put it bluntly, any music that utilises a synthesiser - and that includes everyone from The Human League to Orbital, from David Bowie (Berlin period) to Donna Summer and from Grandmaster Flash to the Pet Shop Boys - owes a debt to Kraftwerk, as does most every "re-mixer who's gotten around to twiddling knobs in a studio in the name of musical art.

It's doubly remarkable that this cold, austere sound that was produced by the first post-Nazi generation in Germany had such a profound influence on black American music. Peeling back the layers of mystery, riddle and enigma that have enveloped the Kraftwerk legend over the years only reveals more mystery, riddle and enigma. They work six days a week in a studio that doesn't have a telephone or a fax, they don't have a manager, their record company knows next to nothing about them; but what is known is that they have turned down collaborative efforts with Michael Jackson, Elton John and David Bowie. They've make Einsturzende Neubaten sound commercial and My Bloody Valentine look prolific.

It began in a classical music conservatory in Dusseldorf, where the fledgling Kraftwerk (with a nucleus of Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider) would play their classical compositions by day; by night they would record white noise, feedback sounds on primitive (by today's standards) studio equipment. Early sightings of them reported a group of strange-looking people travelling around Dusseldorf in a car while hanging microphones out the windows - to sample the ambient sounds of traffic, you'll understand.

The first album, Kraftwerk, and the massive hit single Autobahn were early indications of their unique and inspiring approach to music. Apart from being one of the first bands to use sequencers and a drum machine, they also sculpted new low-frequency sounds and fashioned an hitherto unheard of electronic sound that was variously described as "head music, industrial folk music", "robot pop", "Dusseldorfian Beach Boy" and, in their own language, "Gesamtkunstwerk" ("total artwork").

In one of their few meetings with a member of the press, they rather loftily claimed to be "working without respite towards the construction of the perfect pop song for the tribes of the global village". indeed, their Luton appearance seems like a very strange idea when it is remembered that at the time Kraftwerk started out their contemporaries were the likes of Can, Yes and King Crimson, that they now have an average age of 50 and they haven't had any new records in the shop since 1986 (the patchy Electric Cafe).

In many ways, though, Kraftwerk have been hoist by their own petard. Back in the 1970s they were forever hassling computer companies to come up with new types of software that would do justice to their compositions. Where they seem to have floundered is in the relatively straightforward changeover between analogue and digital methods of recording. Their last studio album was a mix of analogue and digital, while a re-mix album, The Mix (1991) was totally digitally recorded.

"OUR instrument is really Kling Klang studio," said Ralf Hutter at the time of The Mix's release, "and we rebuilt it completely as a digital, studio, which we felt was necessary to update our music. So we spent a lot of time inventing and engineering some of the instruments and working on visuals. It's not just about the music, it's engineering and art and music all combined." Apparently it took them five painstaking years to digitalise all their analogue recordings.

Before their time (literally) and having paid the technological price for it, they're up and running again and this May they'll be showing us what goes into making up the phrase "musical legends". Tickets for Tribal Gathering 1997, which takes place at the Luton Hoo Estate on May 24th from mid-day to 8.30 a.m. the following morning, are priced £35 and are going very quickly. There's a special information line for the event on 0044181 963-0940.