Ralf & Florian

Minimum-Maximum is the first official live album release by Kraftwerk, released in June 2005, almost 35 years after the group gave their first live performance.

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.

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…

Digitally remastered deluxe two CD 25th Anniversary edition of the Synth band's 1985 debut including a plethora of bonus material. Propaganda were a Düsseldorf band, and with hindsight you can see them as the halfway point between the city's most famous sons Kraftwerk and the common European language of Techno-Pop that flourished in Ralf and Florian's wake. But Propaganda were pipe-banging confrontationalists before they became a waking Pop dream. Ralf Dörper, a bank employee, music writer and member of Düsseldorf Industrial-Electronic band Die Krupps, founded Propaganda with vocalist Claudia Brucken, part-time DJ Andreas Thein and jeweler/goldsmith Susanne Freytag. None was a musician in the conventional sense but they made a demo version of 'Discipline' by Throbbing Gristle which found it's way to NME writer Paul Morley, then in the process of setting up ZTT with Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair. The rest is history. 26 tracks.

When the Bureau B label contacted Karl Bartos and showed interest in releasing any archival material he might have laying around the lab, the former Kraftwerk member (that is, "classic lineup" member, joining for the Autobahn tour and leaving somewhere between Electric Cafe and The Mix) wasn't interested. After all, he's a never-look-back futurist, but as the liner notes to Off the Record explain, he's an open-minded futurist as well and allowed this initially rejected idea to morph into something new. Kicking off with "Atomium" - a grand bit of robot techno and possible sequel to Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" - Off the Record uses Bartos' archival tapes, zip drives, or computer files from 1975 to 1993 as its foundation, then mashes these off-hours audio sketches (recorded "off the record" from his usual band) with new ideas, overdubs, and vocoder vocals…