Collecting Kraftwerk records – update 2024 – English Version

Kraftwerk is first and foremost Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben.

In early 1970, the album ‘Tone-Float’ was released under the name ‘Organisation’, only in the UK on RCA, and is now a sought-after collector’s item. On 1 December 1970, the famous ‘Hütchenalbum’ (Red Traffic Cone Album) was finally released by Philips under the name Kraftwerk, with the support of Klaus Dinger and Andreas Hohmann.

Some may remember the song ‘Ruck-Zuck’ as the title track of the ZDF political magazine ‘Kennzeichen D’. The album sold around 50,000 copies and Kraftwerk won several music awards at the end of 1971.
The Trans-Europe-Express picked up speed. The album and the title track ‘Autobahn’ finally made the breakthrough in 1974.

Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider continued to develop and refine their robotic pop on various albums until 1986. They worked with a changing team of collaborators, including Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger in the early 70s, and later with Wolfgang Flür (1973-1987) and Karl Bartos (1975-1991). This line-up is considered by many to be the classic Kraftwerk line-up.

After the departure of Wolfgang Flür, Fritz Hilpert was hired at the beginning of 1987. Fritz Hilpert remains a permanent member of Kraftwerk until 2022. A trained musician and sound engineer, he was responsible for digitising the analogue music and sound tracks. This was a huge and important task, a Sisyphean task that took several years to complete. Thanks to digitisation, Kraftwerk can upload the digital data almost anywhere in the world and remix their electronic folk music over and over again without having to lug around a huge machine park. For Ralf Hütter, this is “like a dream come true” (musikexpress 08/17).

In the second half of the 80s, Kraftwerk shifted its focus to in-house services. Only when the transformation process was complete in 1991 did the musicians return to the road with an extensive European tour. On this tour, Kraftwerk presented their new album ‘The Mix’ live, which was created from the extracted digital files. The Mix’ contains only well-known songs from their repertoire in a new guise. Kraftwerk’s songs now sound more transparent, more modern, faster. The whole album sounds like a unified whole. However, Karl Bartos left Kraftwerk after the completion of the album; Henning Schmitz completed the quartet again from 1991.

A creative hiatus followed until 2003, interrupted only by various remixes and a few seconds of commissioned work for Expo 2000. In 2008, Florian Schneider left the band for good. His musical work was taken over by the three remaining musicians. Stefan Pfaffe, who is responsible for the visualisation of Kraftwerk’s music as a video operator, joined the band as a fourth member in 2008.

Kraftwerk have influenced countless artists, including Afrika Bambaataa, David Bowie, DAF, Depeche Mode, Human League, New Order, OMD, Radiohead, Run DMC, Ultravox to name but a few. The rap, house and techno scenes in particular have been heavily influenced by Kraftwerk’s music.

In 2003 Kraftwerk released ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’, their last studio album of new material, but they continue to tour live with great success. Kraftwerk concerts regularly sell out within minutes of being announced. After the death of Florian Schneider in 2020, Ralf Hütter became the last original member of Kraftwerk.

After 2003, a number of highly interesting vinyl releases appeared in the form of remixes, remastered pressings, coloured editions or edited live recordings.

The eight albums from ‘Autobahn’ (1974) to ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ (2003) were reissued in 2004, mostly with new artwork, as ‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (The Catalogue)’ and released as a promo CD box set. It was not until 2009 that this CD box set was finally reissued with revised artwork for the individual albums and a redesigned outer CD cover. At the same time, eight lavishly designed vinyl editions were released (but no vinyl box set). In 2020, the vinyl editions were reissued in their presumably final form on coloured vinyl, with each colour corresponding to the respective cover artwork. The remastered albums sound wonderfully full, rounded and modern.
Five of the eight albums (Autobahn, Radio-Aktivität, Trans Europa Express, Die Mensch-Maschine, The Mix) were given new covers, Electric Café even got a new title (Techno Pop) and a slightly different track list (see below), Tour De France Soundtracks was shortened to Tour De France in the title. In fact, 1981’s Computerwelt is the only album that has remained almost unchanged, apart from a few changes on the back of the cover. Behind these massive changes, the artists seem to want to combine these eight albums into a stylistically, visually and thematically unified iconic work of art in a minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired design. It almost looks like a future Kraftwerk legacy.

The album ‘Electric Café’ was renamed ‘Techno Pop’. The B-side of the new pressing contains two shorter tracks, ‘Der Telefon Anruf’ (3:50) and ‘House Phone’ (4:56), instead of the one long track ‘Der Telefon Anruf’ (8:03) from the first pressing. A good reason to have both pressings in your Kraftwerk collection.

Finally, 2017 saw the release of 3D (The Catalogue), an eight-album box set of live recordings from previous tours. The concept of this work seems to be to make the material, which was actually recorded live, comparable to the material of the last eight studio albums. To make the comparison easier, all non-musical sounds have been removed and there are no audience noises. This seems to reflect the artists’ desire to be perceived as a ‘real’ live band and not as robots playing pre-recorded songs from a hard drive. The members of the Recording Academy liked the album so much that Kraftwerk’s 3D (The Catalogue) was not only nominated for a Grammy in the category Best Dance/Electronic Music Album in 2018, but actually won the Grammy. In addition, Fritz Hilpert was honoured with a Grammy nomination for Best Surround Sound Album for his 3D mix.

Kraftwerk play their music, which they describe as “electronic folk music”, both on record and live, in German and, for their international audiences, in English and, on appropriate occasions, in French (Tour de France), Spanish, Russian or even Japanese.

Almost all of Kraftwerk’s original releases have seen a dramatic increase in price in recent years. The prices of the original German-language releases have risen particularly sharply.

copyright CPG Books

Prices are for near mint records (German pressings unless otherwise stated).