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Some quotes from Ralf Hütter's that are just spot on various topics, mostly about their music of course:
"The 'soul' of the machines has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life... in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything... so, the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance."
"Some people reach the trance with physical exhaustion, taking drugs or 20 cups of coffee. We do it with music."
"It's our music, we are manipulating the audience. That's what it's all about. When you play electronic music, you have the control of the imagination of the people in the room, and it can get to an extent where it's almost physical".
"What we were very much considering was the simultaneity of past, present and future today. I think visions and memories synchronise together, and I think certain things from a little way back look more towards the future than things which are pseudo-modern today. The real modernism may be somewhere else, a different way to what we think is modern."
"Just walking around wearing a Walkman completely transforms your reality. That's where musical developments were very much ahead of the optical. Music is in advance on this level because you don't have things across your eyes. you are still alert to your environment."
"We see the synthesizer as a kind of acoustic mirror, a highly sensitive analyzer of the human element - in a way that earlier instruments never had been. Therefore it is much more suitable to express the human psyche and its feelings like, for instance, the piano or the guitar."
"We generally keep our audience contact to a metaphysical level really because we have little time to look around - although we are very aware of their response. The only exception is with 'Pocket Calculator'."
"Actually we find some energy in the environment of people who come to see us and who make us play in another dimension and at a higher psychological level, because of a certain tension, different from the studio, and in which we are interested. We are also going to play in South of Asia to see what it brings to our music : we are open to any vibrations that could change our music."
"We want to make people aware of reality, by bringing out in our compositions the sounds of cars and trains, and ideas of the beauty of the sounds themselves."
"We don't want to be linked only to our past works. Kraftwerk's music doesn't stop, it's "music non stop". We're going towards the future."
"When I first heard the phrase "virtual reality", I thought that, to me, music has always been like a virtual reality. With something like "Autobahn", you can actually see the surroundings as you listen to it, because our music has a very visual quality. So when I first read about virtual reality, about people stepping inside these computer-generated worlds, I thought: "We've been doing that with music all these years".
"I think late recognition a victory. Nowadays electronic music is as popular as we thought it could be. "
"Movement. The idea is to capture non-static phenomenon because music itself is a non-static phenomenon. It deals with time and movement in time. It can never be the same."
"Our music is in a phase that isn't finished yet. Through this circumstance of imperfection we enable the listener to have his own reflections."
"We also kind of dance when we perform. It's not that we actually move our bodies but it's this awareness of your whole body. You feel like a dancer."
"People are working on certain things, but by doing so I think, as far as I know, they discover the complexity of the human brain. Lately, we have been doing basic work on more random — or subconscious? — music. Composing, not by chance, well, like we say sometimes: We play the machines, and sometimes the machines play us. It’s interaction, to be relaxing and enjoying the rhythm, like driving your car, or leaning back and having your friend drive a little bit, leaning back and enjoying the movements."
"It is about showing possibilities and limitations of possibilities. And also dynamics. I think there’s a lot of energy in our music, at least that’s what I feel, and we get that feedback from the different cultural communities where we’ve been playing the last year, from Moscow to Santiago, Chile, from Sydney to America. We’ve been playing in Miami, in November, so I think it’s nowadays in the world community."
"The idea for the song came when in the early days, we were traveling a lot thru an autobahn in Germany, from universities to art galleries, from city to city and after the concerts we'd go back to Dusseldorf as we couldn't afford to pay hotels. We used to travel on my Volkswagen and think: "Someday, someone will be playing our music in a car radio". From that came the concept for "Fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn". In the song, we used syntetizers to imitate the engine sounds, creating songs like the ones from cars. It's a techno fantasy."
Last updated: July 22th 2005
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