11. KraftwerkRalf Und Florian
Had you already decided on your selection before hearing the news about Florian Schneider’s death?
MH: Yes I had. I was really impressed by that album, I thought it was really charming. They said they were doing electronic European folk music and it’s true. It doesn’t borrow from Anglo-Saxon music – it doesn’t borrow from German folk music either – but they disowned it and it’s a shame.
I saw a concert in Brussels, it was just the two of them, and I saw them in their previous band Organisation, believe it or not, at a rock festival in Germany in 70 and that was impressive also. So I remembered that performance. I didn’t listen to the first two albums so much but this one was exciting and I wanted to get a drum machine. It felt like… a future, not the future. It felt like something to do and to add to the mix. I had a drum machine, you know like that thing that organ players have to play in cafes, they play like the cha-cha-ha. I used that on the first Aksak Maboul album, a track called ‘Saure Gurke’ which strangely enough is reminiscent of techno. For me I was trying to do a Kraftwerk, post-Terry Riley kind of sound but I stumbled on these chords. Sometimes the same influences generate the same effects – someone who listens to Kraftwerk and Terry Riley, and the jazzy chords, the same thing happened with Kevin Saunderson in Detroit. It’s reminiscent anyway. And working with drum machines, even primitive ones, led me to electronic music later, especially when it happened in a big way in the late 80s.
