C/D: Kraftwerk's "The Mix"

this whole thread is so aesthetically wrong on so many levels...

I must restrain myself...

must restrain...

If Paul and Ringo got together and redid the classic Beatles singles for a greatest hits album and used the production technique of say, um, Our Lady Peace I think it would be pretty clear to most people that this would be a massively shitty thing to listen to.

Why is it when you apply this idea to electronic music a lot of seeming bright people don't see the connection.

appeals to venerate history and support posterity are so fucking lame in the realm of popular music.

brass tacks: kraftwerk ran out of creative steam so they put out an album of overly long remixes with crap hi-gloss over-production.

If you don't see this, becuase it is really really obvious, you are fucking up.

I mean it was awful. Anything that was great about the group was just gone. You get these overly drawn out mixes that just need to be trimmed down. To compensate for a lack of new tunes they just they a bunch of ear candy onto the old arrangements and it was not as lean or stark or majestic as the older material.

The brilliance of Kraftwerk was the combination of raw sonics and conservatory grade song craft. Those records are tied to a very specific time and place and studio technology. There was a spirit of growth and adventure and progress on those old records. The Mix completely lacks the spirit and feeling that made Kraftwerk so vital and life changing. It was product for product's sake, the progress and adventure had gone, and in its place you just had the motions of creativity. It was like this cultural/business mechanism was set into motion and it just kept grinding along without direction or purpose because they just had to do something with the brand name. To use a religious metaphor, listening to the mix is like taking part in a ceremony, but never actually receiving the sacrament.

read the posts, I never brought up soul. I explained objectively why I prefer the feel of certain sequencers over others. Jess is the one who put those words in my mouth, and he still owes me a case of Bass Ale.

This is rockist Audacity!

But that doesn't change the fact that the same level of kraft (if not kreativity) went into making these cuts, resulting not in some crapppy house music but a record with the same kind of kareful sonic placement found in klassic Kraftwerk. If anything, I think it's a significant step up from the genuinely confused Electric Cafe.

Perhaps more polemically, I'd even argue that the cuts taken from one of their best records, Computer World, are given a rather nice spit 'n polish -- that record's only fault was a slightly crusty production.

Are the mixes really much longer than the originals? I'm not a Kraftwerk fetishist, but the versions on The Mix have never felt any longer to me. (Autobahn for one is a lot shorter.)

Kraftwerk's problem is that they were rockists as much as their fans are, enslaved to the idea of a 'finished' piece of work that never arrives. I'm fond of the Mix because it's them loosening up a bit.

When this record came out it was at the height of Sheffield bleepiness. There was a palpable feeling of disappointment in the air over 'The Mix'. It was evident that Kraftwerk had run out of inspiration. Their muse had definitely flown for good - but they wanted to continue to milk their own legend. On the other hand, it's not a colossal disaster of a record. For many people, it was their first encounter with Kraftwerk. To hear these tracks in remix form without having heard the originals would be a far more exciting experience than to hear them as reworkings of perfect songs which required no reworking. Especially if you had no particular expectation of Kraftwerk continuing to write their curious and aspergic music long into the 21st century, bringing out fresh tracks ever couple of years, then The Mix would sound special and fascinating, and not like a coffin door slamming shut.

The Mix is a kind of human tragedy - the death of an artistic resolve. Wolfgang and Karl have written extensively about the draining of Kraftwerk's creative impetus, while Ralf and Florian remain silent. For many electronic artists familiar with their work, the career trajectory of the band holds some kind of dread secret. Why did they give up? How do they keep going, having given up? It's creepy, uncanny, and disturbing. What does it say about the nature of the use and abuse of creativity while in the limelight?

And if you listen past your disappointment in there being no new material, there are some moments of real, genuine magic -- the aforementioned computer barbershop in "Autobahn," the snappy "Pocket Calculator." Especially in light of their lack of, erm, radioactivity in the last 13 years, having those versions is a pretty nice addition to their catalog. For that matter, I think it should be quite easy to separate the record from the era in which it came out -- unlike a lot of that "Sheffield bleepiness" of the early 90s, The Mix sounds decidely not dated today.

Bleep held up just fine. I love Warp Classics Vol 2, that's as good as anything out of Detroit and Chicago from that era.

Guess I'm gonna buy it now, my interest has been piqued.

at least it wasn't as much of a disaster as the Elektric Music stuff, though the last song from Esperanto, 'Overdrive', singlehandedly trumps all post-83 Kraftwerk and a great deal of everything else in the process...

The digital retool of 'numbers' was incredible. And the three new songs were great, I enjoy listening to them.

'pacific' has as much to do with classical and jazz craft as it does pop i.e. a noticeable chunk, but what separates those three crafts really?

What killed them was that the technology they had exclusive access to in the 70's became commerically available for a lot more producers. They were just over-run by a flood of records. Yeah there was a great deal of innovation outside of there camp, but how many people did it take to do it? There was never really another group that covered as much ground. There were a lot of pockets and producers who had variations and progressions on their theme, but few individuals pushed as far.

New Order and Depeche Mode come to mind, but who else pushed as far and had as long of a career?

(and in response to the comment about the cabs upthread, i've really warmed to their remix album over the years, too.)

the mix sounds dated. it is just that there are actual tunes propping up the cheese-ball production. Bleep would have dated a lot better if there had been even a hint of basic songcraft involved in those records.

taylor your get out of jail free card is that you never really say much of anything except to throw a bunch of vague generalizations and loaded terms around which you can then retreat from and say "when did i define (x)". everyone knows you didn't define dick. at the very least we can tentatively assume that that "basic songcraft" involves actual tunes? or maybe the lack thereof? since you've admitted more or less that you don't even know what "basic songcraft" means and the paragraph is so convoluted to begin with (so is the mix bad because it has actual tunes but the dated bleep production weighs them down? does "bleep" signify a certain deviation from the idea of "basic songcraft" or refer to the production style of the time? does "basic songcraft" = the actual tunes that bleep doesn't have? and if so, how has the mix dated badly since it has those actual tunes? or was the bleep comment a totally superfluous sentence tacked on at the end? etc etc adfuckingnauseum) that i'm not sure how it even qualifies as criticism.

how in the fuck is this not redundant to the point of ridiculousness then? and how does it relate to the bleep comment?

of course, what are the new homecomputer and pocket calculator if not bleep? (fwiw i think those are definite improvements on the 'computer world' versions)

-- strongo hulkington (dubplatestyl...), August 12th, 2003.

Not to get into an argument with a man called Strongo Hulkington (I picture a cross between Henry Rollins and The Hulk)... but it's not redundant to point out the absence of songcraft in this record, and more than it's redundant to point out that a car has a missing wheel.
It is an obvious point... but then it's intyeresting to speculate (as ex-members of Kraftwerk do) on how it is, excactly, that such an inspired outift gradually lost the will to write new material - and yet did not break up. That, to me, is the interesting question. The Mix was the first palpable evidence that Kraftwerk hadd lost their creative spirit. Why did it happen?

So heres a question for yoos. Suicide to thread? How do you fools feel about the raw first album vs. the hi-polished Ric Ocasek- produced 2nd album? I like em both, but #2 is definitely my favorite. I think the synths sound so good, way more variety & punch in the sounds, although the first album has a nice spacyness throughout- but raw & dated at the same time in the best possible way. No band could do that so well as a band crossing elvis with sci fi spaceship shit. Me love it.

"Denial"

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