If the graphic design industry had a house band it would be Kraftwerk. Their aesthetic, musical output and cultivated air of mystery are all of endless fascination to us.
(from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/15/kraftwerk-ralf-hutter-music-about-intensity-the-rest-is-just-noise )
What about the Trans Europe Express album. Bartos once described that as being a message of European unity …
“Yes,” interjects Hütter with a smile, “But he was not the composer.”
So was that not the case?
“It’s like … where we live [in Düsseldorf] is the Rhineland. It’s Germany, but there was a British sector, it used to be French. It’s close to the Netherlands and Belgium. So we were brought up multilingual, whereas with other parts of Germany – say, Bavaria – it’s different. Ours has very multi-European connections. It’s a four-hour drive to Paris, so we were always going to discotheques in France or hearing new bands in Brussels or spending the weekend in Amsterdam. It’s very pan-European, so when I wrote the lyrics with Emil [Schult, their longtime visual artist collaborator] it was like a fantasy story about that.”
Even back in the 70s, when Kraftwerk must have seemed more like aliens beamed down to earth than human beings, the music was always accessible, always able to connect with people, always alive to the possibilities of collaboration. Did it surprise Hütter when black audiences in New York and Detroit took it to their hearts and used it as a building block for hip-hop and techno?
The album packaging was as beautifully produced with the same attention to detail as the music. The cover featured all four members of the band, resplendent in red shirts, black ties, neat haircuts and bright red lipstick artfully arranged on a staircase in some far distant European office building. The stark imagery and typography was, according to the credit on the back, “inspired by El Lissitzky”, the influential early 20th century Russian avant-garde artist. Solid information about Kraftwerk was impossible to find; the internet hadn’t been invented, music press interviews were nonexistent and I didn’t have the address for the fan club. This lack of information only made the band and their music more appealing
(From no more rules : graphic design and postmodernism rick poynor page 75)
In 1982, when Neville Brody was designer of The Face, he fashioned the opening spread of a feature about Kraftwerk in a style that referenced both Die Mensch-Maschine and its graphic origins in Lissitzkys work.
(From no more rules : graphic design and postmodernism - rick poynor page 70)
In 1978, the german electronic music group Kraftwerk released the latest in a series of highly original albums whose austere synthetic melodies and pulsing robotic rhythms would have lasting influences on the development of dance music. The 12 inch record was titled Die Mensch-Maschine (‘The Man Machine’) and its front cover announced at first glance that its musical and aesthetic concerns were radically different from most popular music at the time, whether rock, disco or punk.
The four band members, wearing identical red shirts and black ties, were framed by diagonal rules and panels of block like reminiscent of Russian Constructivist typography of the 1920s, a historical reference confirmed by the use of red, black and white as the main colours. The same slanted composition and typographic manner was used on the back cover, which also featured various geometrical shapes. A credit confirmed that the design by Karl Klefisch had been inspired by the work of El Lissitzky, avant garde ‘constructor’ of such works as About 2 (1992); the back cover was, in fact a quotation from one of the books pages. Die Mensch Machine was not a parody in any sense, but two ideas were communicated clearly: that the music, too, was to be understood as ‘avant garde’, infused by a spirit of bold artistic exploration ; and that it was ‘futuristic’, anticipating the a new world that would be different from everything we know, but in some sense still positive. Nevertheless, the designer and musicians chose to construct an image that was backward-looking, if not quite nostalgic, and whether they intended it or not, the cover could also be read as tongue in cheek and humorously camp in its straight-faced seriousness. If Kraftwerk’s music was so progressive and new, one might ask, why did it need to be represented by imagery that referred ambiguously to a moment of political failure in the past?
(From Kraftwerk music non stop) (Utopian links)


(Nostalgia links)


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