Karl Bartos, a member of Kraftwerk during the group’s "classic" mid-70s to mid-80s period, is set to release a new solo album, Off The Record (artwork above), on March 18 via Bureau B. Have a listen to a clip of lead single ‘Atomium’ below:
Having left Kraftwerk in 1990, Bartos went on to produce his own work with Electric Music, Electronic and solo, before co-founding the MA in Sound Studies – Acoustic Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he held the position of visiting professor until 2009.
While Communication from 2003 was Bartos’s first solo outing, Off The Record will essentially pre-date that record, as it draws on sonic sketches he made "off the record" during his time in Kraftwerk. Having trawled over these, and augmented them with further material from the rest of his archive, Bartos has honed them down to 12 tracks of "iron crystal music (referring to the Atomium building, a structure built in the shape of an iron crystal cell for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair), vocoder newspeak, robot sounds, digital glitch, techno pop, catchy melodies, electronic avant-garde, roaring silence, futurism, and, of course, those rhythms!"
Bartos will be touring the album next year in what promises to be something of an audio-visual spectacular – we don’t have too much information, but the text accompanying the announcement runs: "Forget about technical nostalgia in 3D; instead tune into LiveCinema: 90 minutes of music and film – rhythmical, modern, intelligent."
For the meantime, have a look at the tracklisting below:
- ‘Atomium’
- ‘Nachtfahrt’
- ‘International Velvet’
- ‘Without A Trace Of Emotion’
- ‘The Binary Code’
- ‘Musica Ex Machina’
- ‘The Tuning Of The World’
- ‘Instant Bayreuth’
- ‘Vox Humana’
- ‘Rhythmus’
- ‘Silence’
- ‘Hausmusik’
