Kraftwerk

Released to coincide with Kraftwerk's forthcoming June 2017 tour - their first UK dates since the breathtaking shows witnessed at the Tate Modern in 2013 - Atlantic Records is proud to announce the release of Kraftwerk 3-D: The Catalogue on May 26th. This is the ground-breaking 3-D Kraftwerk concert brought thrillingly to life developed using high definition 3-D with Dolby Atmos surround sound and presented to the technological and audio standards one would associate and indeed come to expect from the pioneering Germans led by founder Ralf Hütter…

What might have been simply seen as an agreeable enough debut album has since become something of a notorious legend because Kraftwerk, or more accurately the core Hütter/Schneider duo at the heart of the band, simply refuses to acknowledge its existence any more. What's clearly missing from Kraftwerk is the predominance of clipped keyboard melodies that later versions of the band would make their own. Instead, Kraftwerk is an exploratory art rock album with psych roots first and foremost, with Conny Plank's brilliant co-production and engineering skills as important as the band performances. Still, Hütter and Schneider play organ and "electric percussion" – Hütter's work on the former can especially be appreciated with the extended opening drone moan of the all-over-the-place "Stratovarius" combined with Schneider's eerie violin work. But it's a different kind of combination and exploration, with the key pop sugar (and vocal work) of later years absent in favor of sudden jump cuts of musique concrète noise and circular jamming as prone to sprawl as it is to tight focus.

This is the japanese version of Kraftwerk - Concert Classics. Various versions seem to exist. With transparent and with black jewelcases. On the back and front of the case a blue sticker is attached. Therefore transparent jewelcase have another cover with the Autobahn logo in blue on black. When the CD was released in 1998 a Japanese press release is said to state that the concert was recorded in Dallas Broncos Bowl on 1/5/1975. However latest investigations to a series of recordings from Denver clearly indicate this recording coming from a 20/05/1975 gig in Denver.

During the mid-'70s, Germany's Kraftwerk established the sonic blueprint followed by an extraordinary number of artists in the decades to come. From the British new romantic movement to hip-hop to techno, the group's self-described "robot pop" – hypnotically minimal, obliquely rhythmic music performed solely via electronic means – resonates in virtually every new development to impact the contemporary pop scene of the late- 20th century, and as pioneers of the electronic music form, their enduring influence cannot be overstated…

Kraftwerk is a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely considered as innovators and pioneers of electronic music, they were among the first successful acts to popularize the genre. The group began as part of West Germany's experimental krautrock scene in the early 1970s before fully embracing electronic instrumentation, including synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders.

The Man-Machine is closer to the sound and style that would define early new wave electro-pop – less minimalistic in its arrangements and more complex and danceable in its underlying rhythms. Like its predecessor, Trans-Europe Express, there is the feel of a divided concept album, with some songs devoted to science fiction-esque links between humans and technology, often with electronically processed vocals ("The Robots," "Spacelab," and the title track); others take the glamour of urbanization as their subject ("Neon Lights" and "Metropolis"). Plus, there's "The Model," a character sketch that falls under the latter category but takes a more cynical view of the title character's glamorous lifestyle. More pop-oriented than any of their previous work, the sound of The Man-Machine – in particular among Kraftwerk's oeuvre – had a tremendous impact on the cold, robotic synth pop of artists like Gary Numan, as well as Britain's later new romantic movement.

After finally releasing a new track, commissioned by Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, Kraftwerk proceeded to open it up to a whole new set of remixers. Featuring four remixes by Detroit's influential Underground Resistance, one from British electronic musicians Orbital, one from seminal DJ/producer François Kevorkian, and several from Kraftwerk themselves, this ten-track CD shows what Kraftwerk can sound like in the modern world. Considering that Kraftwerk is often quoted as a major influence on Detroit techno, its unsurprising that the remixes by the Underground Resistance far surpass either of the other two mixes. Revamping the songs in a "Kraftwerk living in Detroit" sort of way, UR pay homage to one of the forefathers of their art. Fortunately, none of the mixes mimics another, a relatively difficult feat when working with material as sparse as a Kraftwerk song. All of the remixes are worthwhile additions to the vast canon of Kraftwerk material.

Like its predecessor (similarly designed right down to the traffic cone cover, though green instead of red), Kraftwerk 2 has never been properly re-released, giving it the same lost-classic aura as the first album, or at least lost, period. Thankfully, bootleg reissues in 1993 restored it to wider public listening; even more so than Kraftwerk 1, its lack of official reappearance is a mystery, in that the band is clearly well on its way to the later Kraftwerk sound of fame. Stripped down to the Hütter/Schneider duo for this release, and again working with Conrad Plank as coproducer and engineer (this album alone demonstrates his ability to create performances combining technological precision and warmth), Kraftwerk here start exploring the possibilities of keyboards and electronic percussion in detail. Given that the band's drummers were gone, such a shift was already in the wind, but it's the enthusiastic grappling with drum machines and their possibilities that makes Kraftwerk 2 noteworthy.