12. KraftwerkRadio-Activity
Pink Floyd were just an introduction to what soon arrived on the scene. Kraftwerk were the real revolution on the musical battlefield, creating the zeitgeist and defining a whole new sound for the future to come. Kraftwerk’s world of melodies, lyrics, themes and subjects are simple, almost childish, but totally complex. They have a brilliant deadpan humour in the good tradition of the greatest comedians, and they also have sadness and melancholy. Their witty combination of the radioactivity theme transposed with the activity of the radio is simply fantastic, as well as their obvious references to history and art movements like constructivism, etc. With Kraftwerk, our lives have transferred into a new reality and they have become a measure for all the music and albums we listened to after them. Tomaž Hostnik, who was the first frontman of Laibach, didn’t listen much music at all, but Radio-Activity he was crazy about. He committed suicide in December 1982 and we used ‘Ohm Sweet Ohm’ for his radio obituary. In 2005, we contributed a song to a compilation of Slovenian bands covering Kraftwerk, Trans Slovenia Express Vol. 2. Our contribution was a remake of an original Laibach song ‘Brat moj’ from 1983, but this time in German, called ‘Bruderschaft’, recorded entirely with Kraftwerkian sounds, which we created by ourselves. Around the same time Kraftwerk finally performed in Ljubljana. After the show, I had a chance to meet Ralf Hütter and we went together to a club in Ljubljana where a DJ accidentally put on ‘Bruderschaft’. I mentioned to Ralf that I don’t know this "Kraftwerk" song and asked him when they made it. He was completely confused by the song and the question, as he was already trying to figure out when they really did it. Finally he went over the dancefloor to the DJ to ask him about the song, but the DJ luckily didn’t have a clue, because he was playing a pre-prepared set. Maybe he finally figured out when Trans Slovenia was released on Mute.
