Zeitkratzer plays Kraftwerk, live at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2017)

Berlin-based new music ensemble Zeitkratzer have been around since the late 90s, releasing numerous albums of work by Stockhausen, Cage et al, as well as two volumes of tracks by Whitehouse, and even a fully scored version of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.  Artistic director Reinhold Friedl jokes that "everybody thought Zeitkratzer is a cover band" following the success of the latter, which made a friend suggest to him that they should cover some early Kraftwerk, leading to an album earlier this year.

I don't have any of those albums at present, but I'm definitely keen to stock up on the evidence of this concert held on 18 November, as part of the 40th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  How about this for a setlist, Kraftwerk fans: Harmonika, Stratovarius, Wellenlange, Vom Himmel Hoch, Atem, Ruckzuck.  Half of those didn't feature on the album, hopefully suggesting a second volume to come.

Friedl agreed with his friend that early Kraftwerk would be a good idea, and an important one, given the continued absence of their first three records on any official reissue - he wryly takes Ralf & Florian to task here for "a falsification of their history".  No disagreement from me there, but most importantly, how does it sound?  Pretty damn good on this evidence.  The material taken from the first Kraftwerk album is inventively arranged whilst sticking faithfully to the structure of the originals.  The stuff from Kraftwerk 2 however is in a different league.  Always Kraftwerk's most experiemental record, this leaves plenty of room for Zeitkratzer to take the sparse source material somewhere unique - in particular, the lazy jamming of Wellenlange being transformed into a thing of understated beauty (just listen to that piano part!) was a revelation to me.  Highly recommended.

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Kraftwerk - Electric Café (1986)

Staying in the German-electronic-80s zone for the time being, here's a not-so-classic album that I've been trying to give an honest re-evaluation.  And to be honest, it still sounds great.  Once the rhythms of Boing Boom Tschak really kick in I always wish it could be twice as long; the rest of that Techno Pop/Musique Non Stop suite is great too, probably their last great extended/conceptual work; and the last three tracks are at least entertaining.  In fact, Der Telefon Anruf/The Telephone Call always strikes me as another quite touching portrait of loneliness and isolation, from the same narrator as on Computer Love five years earlier.  No such redeeming features on Sex Object, unfortunately; especially not those truly hideous bass sounds.

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