Jóhann Jóhannsson on Radio-Activity

It’s the transition period between earlier Kraftwerk and what they’d become – the first two albums are basically Neu! records. But then Klaus Dinger left and actually started Neu!, and Kraftwerk made Autobahn and really created their own sound.

Radio-Activity for me is probably – definitely – my favourite Kraftwerk record. The way that they integrate found sounds, short-wave Morse code broadcasts and news broadcasts, and incorporate them into the album as well as the vocoder sound that kind of became their signature. The robot sound.

It’s kind of a prophetic record, pre-empting the rise of the vocoder in the last decade or so and the introduction of things like mobile phone sound in the construction of pop songs.

Yeah. And it’s amazing in a way that it works – that they’re able to create these kind of simple pop songs, using very simple electronic percussions, all played by hand, before there were any drum machines to speak of. Kraftwerk have certainly had an immense influence on what I do, coming back to the idea of using simple forms and simple ideas expressed in a very strong way with a lot of character.