By MIKE RUBIN

Published: December 4, 2009

Link

IT was at a party in 1970 that Ralf Hütter first glimpsed the potential power of the Man Machine. Kraftwerk, the avant-garde musical group he had founded that year with Florian Schneider in Düsseldorf, Germany, was playing a concert at the opening of an art gallery, a typical gig at the time. Trying to channel the energy of the Detroit bands it admired, like the Stooges and MC5, the duo had augmented its usual arsenal of Mr. Schneider’s flute and Mr. Hütter’s electric organ with a tape recorder and a little drum machine, and they were whipping the crowd into a frenzy with loops of feedback and a flurry of synthetic beats.

As the show climaxed, Mr. Hütter recalled: “I pressed some keys down on my keyboard, putting some weight down on the keys, and we left the stage. The audience at the party was so wild, they kept dancing to the machine.”

Thus began a careerlong obsession with the fusion of man and technology. It would take four more years (and three largely instrumental records of electro-acoustic improvisation) before Kraftwerk heralded the coming of electronic pop on its landmark 1974 album “Autobahn,” and another four years before the members proclaimed themselves automatons on “The Robots,” the band’s de facto theme song from 1978’s “The Man-Machine” album. But even in 1970 the hum of what Mr. Hütter calls electrodynamics was buzzing in his veins.

“This rhythm, industrial rhythm, that’s what inspires me,” Mr. Hütter, 63, said. “It’s in the nature of the machines. Machines are funky.”

Few bands have done more to promote that once incongruous concept than Kraftwerk. Though its image shifted over the years from conservatory longhairs to Weimar-era dandies to stylized mannequin machines, it consistently provided a blueprint for the circuitry of modern pop music. David Bowie, an early adapter, channeled the band’s chilly vibes for his late ’70s “Berlin Trilogy,” and in the early 1980s synth pop groups like Human League and Depeche Mode followed suit.

Kraftwerk also became the unlikely godfather of American hip-hop and black electronic dance music, inspiring pioneers in the South Bronx and Detroit. Today Kraftwerk’s resonance can be heard in works as varied as Radiohead and the Auto-Tuned hip-hop of Kanye West and T-Pain.

“Kraftwerk were a huge influence on the early hip-hop scene, and they basically invented electro, which has had a huge influence on contemporary R&B and pop,” the techno artist Moby said. “Kraftwerk are to contemporary electronic music what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are to contemporary rock music.”

Yet 35 years after “Autobahn” Kraftwerk remains relatively anonymous, thanks largely to a carefully crafted cloak of secrecy, one that an hourlong phone conversation last month with Mr. Hütter from Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio outside Düsseldorf failed to penetrate significantly. On topics ranging from the band’s creative hibernation of the last quarter-century (only two albums of new material since 1981’s “Computer World”) to Mr. Schneider’s departure from the group late last year, Mr. Hütter was pleasant but revealed little. “It’s important for me that the music speak for itself,” he said.

This month the music should do just that with the release of “The Catalogue” (Astralwerks/EMI), a boxed set of newly remastered versions of the band’s last eight albums, beginning with “Autobahn” and including all of the records with the so-called classic Kraftwerk lineup: Mr. Hütter, Mr. Schneider and the electronic percussionists Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos. (Five of the remastered albums are also available individually.) Like Mr. Hütter’s infrequent interviews, “The Catalogue” doesn’t divulge much that fans don’t already know. There are no liner notes, no unreleased tracks, no digital mini-documentaries, just some additional photos and revised album graphics.

The music, however, is much more generous. The remasters render Kraftwerk’s glistening, icy textures even more shimmering and crystalline, the repetition more entrancing. “Autobahn,” for example, welds a bouncy Beach Boys harmony to the hypnotic 4/4 motorik beat pioneered by the German band Neu! (whose Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother were part of an early Kraftwerk lineup) to create a 22-minute synthesizer symphony evoking a pleasant highway drive. (A three-minute edit of the song reached No. 25 on Billboard’s singles chart in 1975, the group’s only hit in the United States.)

“For the first time, I think the music sounds the way we always heard it and produced it in our Kling Klang Studio,” Mr. Hütter said.

After “Autobahn,” albums like “Radio-Activity” (1976) and “Trans-Europe Express” (1977) further refined the group’s experimental pop sensibility. Borrowing from the German tradition of sprechgesang, or spoken singing, Mr. Hütter’s flat, affectless voice — sometimes treated with a vocoder to further dehumanize it — is an odd match for the band’s lilting music-box melodies. “What I try to do on the synthesizers,” Mr. Hütter said, “is sing with my fingers.”

But for some critics the group’s synthetic songs just didn’t compute. “Fun plus dinky doesn’t make funky no matter who’s dancing to what program,” Robert Christgau wrote of “Computer World” in The Village Voice. “Funk has blood in it.”

Such distinctions didn’t seem to matter to club crowds: New York’s downtown scene embraced the group. François Kevorkian, a D.J. at underground clubs in the late ’70s and early ’80s, would use Kraftwerk to blend tracks by Fela Kuti and Babatunde Olatunji into his sets. “What was really remarkable was that their music was getting played just as much at Paradise Garage as it was getting played at the Mudd Club, and there were very, very few records that had that ability to cross over between all the different scenes,” said Mr. Kevorkian, who would later work with the band on its “Electric Cafe” album. “Kraftwerk was, like, universal.”

Kraftwerk had long been a staple of the D.J. sets of Afrika Bambaataa in the South Bronx, and in 1982 he and the producer Arthur Baker decided to combine the melody from “Trans-Europe Express” (which Mr. Baker had noticed kids playing on boom boxes in a Long Island City, Queens, park) and the rhythm pattern of “Numbers” (which Mr. Baker had seen wow customers at a Brooklyn record store). The result was the pioneering 12-inch single “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force.

“I’m trying to remember a record that created that much mayhem on the dance floor when it first came out, and I can’t,” Mr. Kevorkian said of the reaction to “Planet Rock.” Most early hip-hop songs were slow, “from 90 beats per minute to 110,” Mr. Bambaataa said. “We went to 130 beats per minute, and from that came Latin freestyle, Miami bass and all that.”

“All that” encompassed an entirely new genre, electro, which paved an alternate route for hip-hop. It’s hard to imagine the productions of Timbaland or the Neptunes without the innovations of “Planet Rock,” and its repercussions can still be heard the world over, from Bay Area hyphy to Brazilian baile funk.

The roots of techno wind their way back to Düsseldorf too. In Detroit the radio D.J. Charles Johnson — better known as the Electrifying Mojo — built a fervent following on the urban contemporary station WGPR-FM in the late ’70s and early ’80s by ignoring the rigid formatting of other local stations. He had fished a copy of “Autobahn” out of the discard bin at a previous station and soon acquired a copy of “Trans-Europe Express.” “It was the most hypnotic, funkiest, electronic fusion energy I’d ever heard,” Mr. Johnson said. Kraftwerk became a staple of Mojo’s show “The Midnight Funk Association.” When “Computer World” came out, Mr. Johnson played almost every song on the album each night, making a lasting impression on a generation of musicians.

“Before I heard ‘The Robots’ I wasn’t really using sequencers and I was playing everything by hand, so it sounded really organic, really flowing, really loose,” the Detroit D.J. and producer Juan Atkins said. “That really made me research getting into sequencing, to give everything that real tight robotic feel.”

Over the next several years Mr. Atkins, along with his high school friends Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, would become the pioneers of techno, which Mr. May once famously described as being “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”

Techno would eventually explode internationally in 1988, with raves in London and trance in Goa, India. Back in Detroit, “Computer World” would assume the status of a sacred text. Kraftwerk was “considered like gods,” said Carl Craig, a Detroit techno producer. “Black people could relate to it because it was like James Brown. It was just this kind of relentless groove.” Mad Mike Banks, founder of the Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance, said he considered the song “Numbers,” from “Computer World,” the “secret code of electronic funk.”

“That track hit home in Detroit so hard,” Mr. Banks said. “They had just created the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in.”

For Kraftwerk it’s a civic connection that has come full circle. In the last decade Mr. Hütter has developed relationships with some Detroit artists he inspired, including Mr. Banks. It seems to be a kind of “brotherhood, like Düsseldorf and Detroit,” Mr. Hütter said, saying he’s fascinated “that this music from two industrial centers of the world, with different cultures and different history, suddenly there’s an inspiration and a flow going back and forth. It’s fantastic.

“All this positive energy, this feedback coming back to me, is charging our battery, and now we’re full of energy. It keeps my Ralf robot going.”

Indeed, compared with Kraftwerk’s near invisibility throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s, the last few years have seen a relative flurry of Kraftwerk activity. Laptops have allowed the group to take its Kling Klang Studio on the road, so it has been touring regularly, adding 3-D graphics to the live show this year. Now that “The Catalogue” is completed, Mr. Hütter has promised a new Kraftwerk album soon, which would mark the band’s first recording without Mr. Schneider. If Mr. Hütter has any reservations about working without his musical partner of four decades, he kept them to himself; perhaps robots are incapable of showing emotion?

“There’s so much to do,” Mr. Hütter said. “I feel like we are just starting.”

skirt 29.90e

dress 36.90e

jkt 49.90e - bless you!

cardi 25.90e

skirt 29.90e

new Kling shop in the Italian Quarter in the city centre.

love this brand. the prices are so reasonable.

you’ll pick up some really cute cool bits!

http://www.kling.es

The new KLING Concept Store opened yesterday in the city of Dublin, Ireland. Visit us at 2, Blooms Lane Lower Ormond Quay Italian Quarter Dublin 1, Ireland. More info at www.kling.es/klingdublin

Edgar Frick and Marilyn Frack appeared to be wrinkling their brows more than usual. And, in fact, their brows appeared to be more than usual. As I neared the leather-clad duo, who were also looking even more than usually feral – yet still urbane – I discerned that they had Star-Trek-derived rubber prostheses on their heads. And their leather suits had somehow managed to acquire a number of loose socks and other light fabric items, apparently (if unbelievably) held on by static.

Well, what the heck. It was the Order of Logogustation’s pre-Hallowe’en masquerade. If I could come as ogham (in a rather scratchy suit), they could come as…

“Kling-ons,” Edgar said, raising his glass of sparkling wine. He tapped it with Marilyn’s and they simultaneously chimed “Kling!”

“Oh, yes,” Marilyn said, chuckling, “we’re having a crackling good time this evening.” She made a little frisson that caused her fizzy wine to slosh.

“Careful, dear,” said Edgar, “you’re sprinkling.”

“And apparently you’re both pickling,” I observed. “But I see you’re testing the limits of our truckling and stickling, coming as a pseudo-morpheme.”

“Are you heckling?” asked Marilyn, her eyes twinkling.

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “Any word taster with so much as a darkling inkling will pick out the tickling of a good pseudo-morpheme. Of course one most usually uses pseudo-morpheme to mean something that’s a morpheme in one place and appears falsely as one in another, such as car in carpet.”

“But copter in helicopter can be called one,” Edgar pointed out. “And so why not kling, which shows up in so many places?”

“Although sometimes across syllable boundaries, and sometimes with a long or even syllablic /l/,” I reminded him.

“Well,” Marilyn said, “they really all fall into one of two sets: verbs with the frequentative le suffix, with ing added, like tinkling, and nouns ending in k that have the diminutive or relational ling suffix added, like duckling.”

“And they have that stop-liquid movement of the tongue that sets your skin prickling,” Edgar added, running his finger up Marilyn’s spine. Marilyn obliged with another frisson.

“You’re certainly not missing the echoes,” I said, looking at their static cling and their glasses. “But you are missing one word that doesn’t fit either pattern.”

“Well,” Marilyn said, eyebrow arched, “I don’t have an inkling what that would be.”

“You rather do,” I said. “You just said it, in fact.”

“But inkling comes from inkle!” Marilyn protested.

“Inkle is really a backformation,” I said.

Edgar raised an index finger. “It’s you against the OED, old boy.”

I raised an index finger right back at him. “But even the OED gives only two citations that they don’t themselves describe as backformations, and they can’t say where those come from. Whereas the American Heritage Dictionary has a rather anfractuous explanation that follows it from niche through nik, ‘notch’ or ‘tally,’ through nikking, meaning ’slight indication’ or ‘whisper,’ to ningkiling, which, through false splitting, went from a ningkiling to an ingkiling, or an inkling.”

“Well, that’s a bit of linguistic swashbuckling,” Marilyn said, crinkling her nose.

“And we nonetheless have to deal with the ink, which is an indisputable pseudo-morpheme,” Edgar said. “There’s no ink in this word, but who can’t think of an ink spot when saying it? Or perhaps a little pen imp peeking from the inkpot?”

“Ah,” Marilyn purred, “a darkling little darling.”

“And there’s a word that goes both ways,” Edgar said, almost leering. “Darkling, such a nice poetic word, suckling at the teat of Erato.” (Marilyn gave another frisson and tossed back her sparkling.) “Originally dark plus ling, but more recently backformed to darkle.”

“No need to engage in wanton Eraticism while tackling these words, you Greekling,” I said.

Marilyn winked and stroked the back of a fingernail down my cheek. “Oh, don’t be a weakling,” she said, cackling.

“We cling? Oh,” I replied, “I’m glad to let you cling.” Which they were. To each other. But they were closing on me, too.

Marilyn gave me an elevator look, and I don’t think she was reading my ogham. “Edgarrrrr,” she mrowled, “I think someone needs a spankling.”

At which point I made myself scarce in a twinkling.

Lleva el nombre de un tono rojo de pintalabios. Empezó triunfando en internet y después de sacar su primer disco “I Love Your Glasses”  se ha convertido en el nombre de referencia de la música indie y folk de nuestro país.

Yo la conocí cuando visitó el hormiguero. Aquí os dejo el video por si no lo habéis visto. 

Además de triunfar con la música, también lo está haciedo con su particular estilo. Lleva dos temporadas siendo imagen de la firma española Kling

.

Verkar som man gått och blivit mainstream, men jag tycker tametusan att det här är fashion på hög nivå!

Fashion

Shooting on St.Mitchell Castell (France)

See it here http://www.kling.es/backstageA09/

Äntligen blev det av, tack mormor och morfar Horn för en underbar dag hos Pippi, Emil, Ronja och gänget.  Käre kusin Simon, var lysande som Anton i Katthult, tack för den härliga sångstunden!  (Och tack Pia för allt ditt fix ) För fler fantastiska (jo, vi lovar) bilder, klicka här.

Atención compradores compulsivos, ahí va la nueva colección de otoño de la marca Kling, para la que Russian Red (Lourditas) ha prestado su imagen en anteriores temporadas.

¿Quién es la nueva chica Kling? Adelante, conócela pinchando aquí.

New Kling on the block

Friday 31st. July, release exclusively online at www.kling.es

I’m sorry if lately it’s been all health care, all the time — it’s the news of the hour, and I’m learning as I go.
The new plan in the House pays for healthcare with a surtax on wealthy families and a payroll tax on companies that do not provide health insurance.

That’s a problem. Now I’m not one of those who thinks taxing the rich is bad in itself; it’s the payroll tax that is problematic. It’s a retrenchment, instead of the promised reversal, of the subsidy for employer-provided insurance, which leads to high rates of medical bankruptcy.

And there’s no way to argue that raising payroll taxes won’t cost jobs. If you believe in wage rigidity at all, then making the marginal worker more expensive will make companies less likely to hire him. Arnold Kling and Paul Krugman have been batting this back and forth for a while, but I think there’s no escape from it. Krugman (who knows Keynes backwards and forwards, which I can’t say of myself) argues that under Depression conditions, with short-term interest rates near zero, lowering wages shouldn’t increase employment.

“Suppose that wages across the US economy had been, say, 20 percent lower than they actually were. You might be tempted to say that this would make hiring workers more attractive. But to a first approximation, prices would also have been 20 percent lower — so the real wage would not have been reduced. So how would lower wages lead to higher demand for labor?
Well, the real money supply would have been larger — but the normal channel through which this might increase demand, lower interest rates, was blocked by the zero lower bound. ”

But let’s think about this for a moment. Suppose you raise payroll taxes. Let’s say that increases prices, and so contracts the money supply, in a mirror image of Krugman’s argument. But it is possible to raise interest rates if they’re starting at zero, so it’s not clear why this shows that demand for labor won’t drop. Please, correct me if I’m missing something — I’m pretty sure it’s more likely to be ignorance on my part than stupidity on Krugman’s.

He’s not the only one to think this: Gauti Eggertsson thinks that raising payroll taxes would increase the costs of doing business for firms, and drive the AS curve upward and inward, forcing businesses to raise prices. This, he says, would reduce deflationary expectations and actually help end a recession. Again, I don’t understand what mechanism prevents firms from hiring fewer workers when the cost of labor rises.

Arnold Kling gets to the bottom of the veterinary v. human health care spending comparison very quickly:

If the consumer is the pet, then the consumer is definitely not paying full freight. I blame third-party payments!

I’m surprised no one called that out earlier.

Die SPD ist schon arm dran: Die Etablierung der Linkspartei als fünfte parlamentarische Größe macht ihr schwer zu schaffen, Schröders Abkehr von der “Links von der Mitte”-Strategie ist nicht aufgegangen, innerparteiliche Querelen und das Verbrennen einer Personalie nach der anderen zeugen von Perspektivlosigkeit und nicht vorhandenem Konzept. Und derweil sich die Sozialdemokraten selbst demontieren, dürfen sie sich auf ihrem Weg zur drittstärksten Partei allerlei anhören. Zum Beispiel das hier:

(via)

Sitter och läser en artikel i DN om musikindustrin och pojkbanden och ett leende på läpparna breder ut sig. Det är vid ytters få tillfällen jag ser något positivt i att människor inte kan försörja sig eller tjäna massa pengar på det de håller på med. Att det inte längre är lönsamt att ta fram en musikgrupp som en produkt är bara bra. Vi behöver inte skiten! Vill bara klargöra att det inte är annan musik än hårdrock som är fin nog att lyssnas på, utan det är själva grejen i att något är framtaget för att säljas som vilken skit som helst som är problemet.

För mig bygger musik på känslor, kreativitet och hitta nya sätt att uttrycka sig musikaliskt på. Musik är ingen skrivbordsprodukt där man sätter ihop lättast möjliga kombination för att maximera profiten, utan något som kommer från hjärtat, magen, skrevet och får nackhåren att resa sig! För min del får NEUROSIS ångestfyllda tonkonst mig att må ligga gott som RANCIDs baktaktspunk och hade DOWN sålt lika många ex av Under The Over som Gessle gjorde av sin senaste kulturförpestning så hade ingen varit gladare än jag!

Så det är med glädje jag läser artikeln och hoppas att trenden håller i sig. För trotts allt är det så att kvalitetsmusik, oavsett gener, fortfarande säljer skivor, dessutom sker en ökning av försäljningen i mindre och nischade genrer. Viker inte försäljningen mer för skitmusiken så finns det en lösning som Fredrik Strage har skrivit om här, givetvis är det en utopi men vi kan ju alltid hoppas…

Det ligger ju verkligen rätt i tiden att parata om det här nu när PiratPartiet har tagit sig in i EU-parlamentet, och i ärlighetens namn har jag inte mycket till övers för dem. Enligt en av deras valafischer så “bygger de kunskapssamhället”. Jag eller hur! Gå in på The Pirat Bay och kolla vad folk laddar hem i första hand. Inte fan är det folkbildande direkt. Läste också någon krönika på Newsmill om att (fel citering här nu men andemeningen framkommer) “man inte kan få tag på obskyra Marokanska artister”. Hör av er till en riktigt skivbutik så ska ni se att de oftast kan importera den åt er, för betala ville man göra. Och ja, jag håller med om att det hade varit lättare att bara kunna köpa den elektoniskt på nätet, men jag har djävligt svårt att tro att det är prioritering ett (1) för PP-sympatisörer, samt inte går att får tag på ändå.

Läste också på en blogg från Sweden Rock Festival att PP hade raggat röster på festivalen. Kling har givetvis rätt, dessutom så har ju skivförsäljningen inte backat lika mycket för hårdrocksgenren som för andra.

Köp. Mer. Skivor. (Det är bra för själen!)
//H

NP: Revolting – Tenayfly Viper (Dreadful Pleasures, 2008)

Solo con confirmación aquí

The Gallery Room organiza su tradicional rastrillo de colecciones de firmas como Uno de 50, Dolores Promesas, El Ganso, Evita Peroni, Kling, Santino o Alicia Rueda, con descuentos de hasta el 70 € en prendas de la nueva temporada. Aprovecha para echar un vistazo el próximo fin de semana… ¡pero recuerda que sólo se puede pagar en efectivo!