kraftwerk tour de france album review

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Tour de France Soundtracks

Electronic / Rock

Astralwerks

August 11, 2003

After 1981's Computer World , Kraftwerk were anxious to begin work on their next LP. Perhaps spurred on by the warm reception (after a short of period of inactivity), Ralf Hutter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur set out working on a forthcoming album, to be titled Technopop . Technopop was to feature songs including its title track and "Sex Object", which would later surface on 1986's Electric Café . Its first single was to have been "Tour de France", and that track was in fact released in 1983. However, Technopop was not to be: due to a series of circumstances-- not least of which, Hutter's bicycle accident, which kept him out of serious action for the better part of a year-- the band decided to stretch their deadline, incorporate a few more state-of-1986 recording techniques (including, gasp, sampling) and concentrate their full length ideas on Electric Café . "Tour de France"-- not a particularly classic entry in their singles catalog in the first place-- was left to drift into nothingness, and all was tidily swept under the mouse pad.

But you know Kraftwerk have never been ones to let perfectly customizable data lay unaltered. From the time Hutter and Schneider hooked up in Düsseldorf in the late 60s to their heyday of the late 70s/early 80s and on through their complete catalog reworking (1991's The Mix ), Kraftwerk have been a model of efficiently planned obsolescence. Taking a page from fellow tech-freak George Lucas (and Bill Gates for that matter), they don't even want to make their earliest releases available, making sure all client-side installations have been successfully updated to the most recent Kraftwerk sound.

To their credit, Kraftwerk have a knack for emphasizing their best ideas, as almost all of their records from Autobahn until Computer World are dazzling specimens of the single-minded desire to progress, and the synergy of four pretty distinct individuals. What's more, they're pop. Unlike virtually any other band from the first wave of Krautrock, Kraftwerk produced music that worked as both experimental museum piece and a dancefloor (or living room) beacon. They are like the Beatles of electronic music: inspirations to NPR coffee talkers, crusty academic types and regular folks who just want to get robotic every now and again.

So what a disappointment it must seem to witness the band rework "Tour de France" and slap a few new tracks down for their "new" LP, a soundtrack to the annual cycling event. I mean, in this fertile era for electronic music, when so many sounds seem ripe for the next revolution, you would think the godfathers of the genre would be serving up more than leftovers for our digital consumption. In fact, when the three-part "Tour de France" single was released earlier this year, many fans were disappointed: it would take more than modern tweaking to turn its thin melody and almost non-existent lyrical concerns (even for Kraftwerk) into something interesting. Bet step back-- perhaps surprisingly, Kraftwerk still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Their latest LP may not pack the same fortune-telling punch of their classic records, but it is nevertheless a distinctly engaging, sophisticated experience. And I think "sophisticated" is ultimately the perfect word for Kraftwerk, able to forge beautiful, instinctively appealing sounds out of mercilessly mechanical processes.

After the short synth-driven "Prologue", the album begins with the title track, divided into three parts. "Tour de France Etape 1" starts as a fairly quick, light splash of microhouse featuring patented vocoder vocalizations stating the title, and various stages of the actual race. There really isn't a melody per se, except for a recurring synth line sounding not unlike one of the perky jingles used as the soundtrack for your computer booting up. "Etape 2" modifies the texture slightly, with flanged effects panning across the mix and subtle harmony vocals, but otherwise proceeds unchanged; "Etape 3" drops a glittery, arpeggiated synth figure to start, but soon returns to the main theme of the first section. All three pieces are clearly part of one large "Tour de France" mega-mix, and probably work best when you opt to appreciate the small details instead of looking for epiphanies in the beats or hooks.

Things get a lot more active on the second half of the record, as tunes like "Vitamin" and "Aero Dynamik"/"Titanium" sparkle from the ever-pristine Kraftwerk polish. The latter tunes are practically perfect realizations of the power of a minimal, uncluttered mix of activity when you know how to highlight a beat (hint: they do). The calculated resonance of each percussive ping probably deserves its own article in a journal for electronic music, but we're free to just let them go by and by and by. "Vitamin" begins with an extroverted, constantly modulated synth line and fluttery, reverb-drenched chord cluster over which a patented Kraftwerk bot-beat runs its course. Similar to the title suite, the song works its magic via a repetitive power of persuasion, and also similarly features an optimistic, recurring melody.

Perhaps the only really disappointing aspect of Tour de France -- beyond the still-not-that-great version of the title song (which ends the album)-- is that it emits a muted, comfortable aura rather than the immediately striking tone of their classic releases. In the end, that probably won't make much difference in your enjoyment of this music, but if first impressions are very important, it could be a potential turn-off for those expecting a return to Kraftwerk's trailblazing status. Sure, they might not ever be heads of the class again, but when you own the school, smart students will probably listen to what you have to say anyway.

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Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk | Tour de France Soundtracks

The German electronica pioneers finally saddle up again to expand their 1983 EP.

T his came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):

T here was a time when kraftwerk were so far ahead of the pack they were practically running a different race..

Back in the ’70s when they were essentially inventing electronica and synth-pop with tracks like Autobahn , nobody could keep up with them. Since then, however, the sound they spawned has caught up and passed them by — mostly due to the fact that the K-men have been essentially coasting for more than a decade. With Tour de France Soundtracks , they finally make a belated return to recording. Sort of. Essentially a large-scale expansion of their 1983 Tour de France EP, this 55-minute journey is a musical travelogue through a mesmerizing landscape of percolating synths, lightly scritchy beatboxes, smoothly gliding grooves, knob-twiddling production and the familiar bike-chain and heavy-breathing samples. But while it’s a nice nostalgic treat for fans, it’s neither nearly as catchy nor as groundbreaking as their earlier work. If Kraftwerk want to be the pacesetters once again, they’re going to have to shift into a higher gear.

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‘Tour De France Soundtracks’: Kraftwerk’s Gear-Changing Final Album

Recorded to mark the 100th year of the iconic cycling tournament, Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ remains an enduring swansong.

Finally inspired to record an album of all-new material for the first time in 17 years, Kraftwerk’s 11th studio outing, Tour De France Soundtracks , found the group in an entirely different musical landscape from when they released their previous album, 1986’s Electric Café . By this point, electronic dance music had swept the world to become a cultural phenomenon, largely thanks to the pioneering synthesiser work Kraftwerk had originally set in motion in the 70s.

Listen to ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ here .

Keen to keep the wheels moving despite the departures of long-term members Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, group founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider invited Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz into the fold and set to work on a new album that coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Tour De France. Spinning out ideas from his fondness for cycling, Hütter was keen to explore the feats of human endurance achieved by the likes of tournament winners Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet, and headed to Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang studio to engineer the group’s much-anticipated comeback.

“Forward – that’s what you do with your bicycle. You move forward”

Remarkably, the genesis of Tour De France Soundtracks stretched back 20 years earlier, when Kraftwerk released an EP celebrating Hütter’s love of cycling. “In 1983 we were working on a concept for a feature film on Tour De France,” Hütter said, “so I wrote some lyrics and conceptual ideas for our album Tour De France .” No strangers to exploring modes of transportation on records such as the motorway-centric Autobahn and the train-inspired Trans-Europe Express , the original 1983 Tour De France song hinted at a new Lycra-clad reinvention for the one-time robots, and reached No.22 in the UK in August that year. Following a bike accident which landed Hütter in hospital, however, the album idea was put on hold and Kraftwerk moved on to record Electric Café instead.

Then, in 2003, in a bid to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tour De France tournament, Kraftwerk decided to revisit the cycling concept. Updated for the 21st century, the group’s cycling song was just as innovative as anything they had done before, with Hütter’s breathless vocals being recorded after running up and down the stairs in Kling Klang. Propelled by a winding electro beat and the sound of spinning spokes, this new version of Tour De France peaked at No.20 in the UK in July 2003 and saw Hütter recite French lyrics evoking the arduous journey of cyclists traversing the Alps.

After the group successfully fleshed out the concept into a full album, Tour De France Soundtracks finally saw light of day on 4 August 2003 and proved Kraftwerk’s momentum had only accelerated in line with the new era of electronic dance music they had helped usher in. With pristine ambient soundscapes and the throb of trance-enamoured synths, the wheels are set in motion on Prologue before leading into the glorious Tour De France (Étape 1-3), a 15-minute trio of tracks acting as an odyssey of perpetual motion. “We are very interested in the dynamics and the energy and the movement,” Hütter said. “The German word is ‘vorwärts’, forward – that’s what you do with your bicycle. You move forward.”

“It’s percussive and dynamic. We never feel there’s nowhere left for us to go”

By aiming “to glorify the muscles of the human being” with a freewheeling sonic tone poem aided by Kraftwerk’s machine-like rhythms, Tour De France Soundtracks captured the trials of any hardened cyclist with their eyes on the prize. “The noise of the bicycle chain and pedal and gear mechanism,” Hütter said, “the breathing of the cyclist, we have incorporated all this in the Kraftwerk sound.” As an ode to sports endurance, the group even found room to explore health supplements, on the song Vitamin, as well as the metal that comprises the bicycle itself, on Titanium.

Seeing the human body as a machine, the album’s second single, Elektro Kardiogramm, continued to look at health and fitness by building a beat around Ralf Hütter’s pulse. “We took medical tests I did over a couple of years, heartbeat recordings, pulse frequencies, lung volume tests, and used those tests on the album,” Hütter said. “It’s percussive and dynamic. We never feel there’s nowhere left for us to go.” Released in October 2003, the song brilliantly reflects a cyclist’s commitment to reaching the peak physical performance necessary to complete the Tour De France’s various stages.

Given Kraftwerk’s role as sonic innovators who paved the way for dance music – particularly the rise of genres such as house and trance – it’s perhaps unsurprising that Tour De France Soundtracks shares much in common with contemporary EDM. Unlike most nightclub DJs, however, Kraftwerk saw an artistic opportunity to use the mesmeric quality of those styles of music to mirror the flow state of cyclists on the move. “The Tour is like life: a form of trance,” Hütter said. “Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life… in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything… so the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance.”

“Cycling is the man machine. It’s me, the man machine on the bicycle”

Tour De France Soundtracks’ third single, Aerodynamik, was released in March 2004. A shimmering five-minute minimal techno song about battling headwinds, it peaked at No.33 in the UK, its synth blips, pulsing rhythms and bubbling vocoder vocal offering a reminder of the divine synchronicity between man and machine, cyclist and bicycle. “Cycling is the man-machine,” Ralf Hütter once said, explaining elsewhere: “It’s me, the man machine on the bicycle.” With this in mind, it’s clear that Tour De France Soundtracks fits perfectly among Kraftwerk’s work, chiming with their commitment to opening our eyes to how humanity can be enhanced by technology.

Another of Tour De France Soundtracks ’ notable moments, La Forme – later to be remixed by Hot Chip in 2007 – can also be seen through this prism. One of the best Kraftwerk songs, it praises physical fitness and celebrates the fusion of a cyclist’s muscle movement with the mechanics of cycling itself. “When we worked on this album,” Hütter explained, “we tried to incorporate the idea of very smooth, rolling, gliding.” As a whole, Tour De France Soundtracks is best seen as a breezy soundscape that perfectly captures the process of cycling through challenging terrains better than any TV sports commentator can express. “Watch a ride through the mountains, switch off the sound and play our CD: you will be amazed,” Hütter said.

To this day, Tour De France Soundtracks is the last album of new studio material released by Kraftwerk. Not only did it peak at No.1 in Germany – the group’s highest chart placement in their homeland – but it also made an impression in the UK, reaching No.21 and proving that Kraftwerk’s decades-long standing as the godfathers of electro-pop was beyond doubt. Finding the group as forward-thinking as ever, Tour De France Soundtracks released the breaks and gifted us with yet another tour de force.

“We are still here,” Ralf Hütter said a year later, when asked what he was most proud of. “And we are still moving forward.”

Find out more about Kraftwerk’s pioneering electro legacy .

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Tour de France: Remastered

Label: release date: 12/10/2009.

Following the Computer World tour, the largest and longest that Kraftwerk had ever embarked on, the band discussed the matter of exercise. Having noticed how close associate Emil Schult seemed to have the most energy out of all of them, they adopted two habits he had recently taken up: vegetarianism and cycling.

Along with music, cycling can be seen as the second great love of Ralf Hütter’s life. The band’s leader and now, following Florian Schneider’s departure in 2008, sole remaining original member, it’s said by some that the intensity of his love for and addiction to cycling is at least in part the reason for the massive slowdown in Kraftwerk’s output post-1981. Hütter took to cycling every day, encouraged the rest of the group to start doing the same and enrolled them with a Düsseldorf cycle club where they adopted the nickname ‘Radsportgruppe Schneider’ (‘The Schneider Cyclist Club’) and wore a uniform of black pro-cycling wear. Allegedly they chose the colour of their outfits to match the night, when is when they worked in the studio, and the coffee they drank vast quantities of while talking about music.

Hütter had always been the sports-lover of the group, attending football matches and playing golf. Given the stress he places in interviews on Kraftwerk being interested primarily in daily life, it seemed natural that sport would at some point prove an attractive theme to write about, although other members of the band were less convinced of its conceptual suitability. Tempting as it may be to daydream about a golf-themed Kraftwerk album, though, cycling at once seems a natural fit; as Hütter remarked to Pascal Bussy in 1991: “It is the man machine.”

Originally intended to be a track on Kraftwerk’s ill-starred Techno Pop LP, 'Tour de France' was released as a single in June 1983. As things turned out it would be another 20 years before it featured on an album, Tour de France Soundtracks , the title of which has now been shrunk to Tour de France . A sleek, oiled rush of sound, Tour de France is the first Kraftwerk album since 1981’s Computer World in which music and lyrics work in tandem as part of a defined, unified construct.

Reaping the benefits of this focus, the opening quartet of ‘Tour de France Étape 1’, ‘...Étape 2’, ‘...Étape 3’ and ‘Chrono’, rank as a junior partner to the epic journeys of ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Trans-Europe Express’. A liquid techno pulse that surges forth and recedes like a peloton, this suite's central spine is a cyclical derailleur hiss that flows on through 18 minutes of atmospheric metamorphoses, and marks yet another of those moments of immersive trance for which many would have been justified in thinking, by the time 2003 rolled around, Kraftwerk had lost the knack.

Typically Kraftwerkian in its focus on an element of daily life that would be considered beneath the attentions of most songwriters, the descending filtered clangs and shimmering synth detailing of ‘Vitamin’ house a slow-motion paean to, well, vitamins. The acid-flecked drive and starlit pads of ‘Aéro Dynamik’, meanwhile, see the band dip a wing simultaneously in the direction of both the Berlin and Detroit techno variants which they played such a large part in creating. Seemingly referencing the serious cycling accident Hütter suffered in the Alps in 1983, ‘Elektro Kardiogramm’ begins with a heartbeat and a similar respiratory sample to that which opens the original ‘Tour de France’. Fascinatingly, it contains some discordant organ-style playing embedded deep in the mix that seems to hark back to the improvisatory passages of 'Autobahn'. Utilising a delicate, tightly-sprung breakbeat and minimalist melody line to develop its powerfully claustrophobic feel, 'Elektro Kardiogramm' also underlines the priority Tour de France awards the 'track' in favour of the 'song', and perhaps suggests the reason for the 'soundtracks' suffix in the original title.

Slipstreaming one behind the other, the tracks Tour de France comprises are wonderfully self-assured pieces of work. Even as the album slows into the somewhat meandering bleep-laden territory of Ralf Hütter solo composition ‘La Forme’ its litany of cyclists’ buzzwords – _ ‘Preparation/Musculation/Concentration/ Et, condition’_ – exerts a Zen-like aura that proves absorbing.

The album closes with the original ‘Tour de France’, its arrival foreshadowed by a minor-key interpolation of its bright, skeletal melody into ‘La Forme’s brief coda, ‘Regeneration’. Without this it might have felt thoughtlessly tacked on, and it could still be argued that it makes a less suitable concluding track than might have been hoped for. Nevertheless, it remains a winning piece of musique concrète pop, a spinning bike chain and ragged breaths underpinning Hütter’s pre-robot vocals listing the race’s famous stages and infamous climbs.

A valuable addition to Kraftwerk’s oeuvre, Tour de France allows the hope that there might still be one more great album to emanate from the recently relocated Kling Klang studio. Ralf Hütter has suggested that new material might be forthcoming in 2010, but long-time observers will know that holding one’s breath isn’t advisable. Desirable as such a thought is, were we never to hear another note from Kraftwerk we’d still have had as much from them as from any musicians in the modern era. In particular the trilogy of Trans-Europe Express , The Man-Machine and Computer World hold their place in the musical landscape that they did so much to shape, their sublime fusion of human emotion and machine functionality as endlessly evocative and influential as asserted by Hütter in an interview he gave Keyboards magazine in 1992:

“Kraftwerk is permanent. Durability is a central concept in art. Our sounds and programmes are immortal. Thanks to the computer someone else will be able to continue what we are doing...”

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Kraftwerk – Tour De France Soundtracks

Tour De France Soundtracks sees just two of the original four of Dusseldorf’s finest line up behind their machines – Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider are now joined by Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz. And though the Tour De France is over, it’s immediately clear that future events have their perfect soundtrack here.

Tour De France Etapes 1-3 are largely variations of the same piece and weigh in collectively at over 18 minutes of vocoded voices, clipped pulse rhythms and delightful bleeps and bloops – showing that the instruments may have radically changed since Kraftwerk’s debut but the thinking behind music making has not. These three tracks and what follows sound quintessentially Kraftwerk, even if the overall sound is necessarily tinged with modernity. There’s still room left for some older analogue sounds to interrupt as the record plays – and that’s a very good thing.

They were always a group who did things ahead of their time, and time has clearly caught up with them. Parts of this record wouldn’t sound out of place on a Gat Decor or even Richie Hawtin compilation – Aero Dynamik in particular is chock full of such hallmarks. Hawtin’s pulse rhythms could have been taken straight from a Kraftwerk record, so the similarity is less of a surprise than it sounds.

Elektro Kardiogramm isn’t a million miles from a stab at humour – they may be Teutonic, but let’s not assume they can’t smile occasionally. It ticks along at a pace made for drunk people to do robot impersonations to. Where it and every other track differ from previous albums is the lack of unvocodered voices – there’s no Showroom Dummies or The Model here with German-accented English words, just computerised French words. If a criticism was to be made, it would be that there’s a great deal of the same voice effect throughout, save for some spoken vocals on the very last track, and it could do with more variation.

But when the album finishes on Tour De France, with a rhythm of cyclists exerting themselves over a wonderfully optimistic, sparkling synth backing, who cares. It’s a great album, and it’s great to have Kraftwerk back. Let’s hope they don’t take another decade to make a follow-up.

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ALBUM REVIEW

Kraftwerk tour de france soundtracks, tour de france soundtracks.

Release Date: 08.19.03 Record label: Astralwerks Genre(s): Rock

Another Piece of an Amazing History by: peter naldrett - uk correspondent

A klassic! Dankeschön Kraftwerk! 01-Aug-2003 9:34 AM

Kraftwerk - Tour De France Soundtracks

  by jon rogers, published: 3 / 9 / 2003.

Label: Select Label Format: CD

First album in 17 years from german electro-pioneers kraftwerk finds them celebrating the world's toughest cycle race and remaining "a power house still to be reckoned with".

"We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit." Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 'Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' (1909) Like the Italian Futurists at the beginning of the last century the celebrated German electronic pioneers have celebrated the technological inventions of the day. 'Radio-Activity' (1976) glorified the nuclear age, 'Computer World' (1981) did the same for information technology while 'The Man Machine'(1978) glorified robots. Their classic albums 'Autobahn' (1974) and 'Trans-Europe Express' (1977) eulogised the car and the train respectively. The Futurists would see Kraftwerk as kindred spirits. And they also managed to revolutionise conceptual electronic music. It's easy to over-state a band's influence but in the case of Kraftwerk it is genuinely deserved. It's probably easier to list the areas of popular music that the band hasn't yet reached. It's been a 17-year wait for fans of the group to hear new material as 'Electric Café' was unleashed from the Kling Klang studios in 1986. Even then, cynics might point to the fact that 'Tour de France' was released as a single back in 1983. As the title and cover imply, celebrated now is the bicycle and in particular the annual Tour de France, the toughest event in the cycling calendar. As ever, the band's perfectionism is self-evident with the four radically re-worked versions of 'Tour de France' and tracks like 'Aéro Dynamik', 'Titanium' and 'Elektro Kardiogramm' perfectly creating the sounds of cycling along; complete with circling pedals and chains, pounding heart beats and the feel of the air rushing past with the sun beating down as the peloton moves from stage to stage. All are wonderful modern day techno pop symphonies. As with earlier songs like 'Pocket Calculator', 'Tour de France Soundtracks' displays their not just dry but arid sense of humour.Vocalist Ralf Hütter seems to have developed a peculiar French accent and seems to revel in the amateur dramatics of it all. 'Tour de France', though, isn't quite in the same league as 'Autobahn' or 'Trans-Europe Express'. While the Teutonic German four-piece might well be still wearing the maillot jaune where as before they were way out in front, now those in pursuit have significantly closed the gap. The awe and wonder that greeted the first time the needle was dropped on earlier albums has largely (but not totally) evaporated. Kraftwerk though remain a power house still to be reckoned with.

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Tour de France [Single]

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