The Robots

“The Robots” opens The Man-Machine, Kraftwerk’s seventh studio album, released May 1978 on Kling Klang / Capitol Records. Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos. Sequencers, drum machines, the human voice processed toward abstraction. Lyrics in German and Russian / “Ja, tvoi sluga” / I am your servant. The choice was deliberate. Cold War era, two superpowers, and Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf standing outside both with a machine asking who is serving whom. The question has not aged.

Afrika Bambaataa heard “Trans-Europe Express” and built “Planet Rock” from it in 1982, the record that fused Kraftwerk to hip-hop and made the translation permanent. In Detroit, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson were listening to Kraftwerk alongside Parliament-Funkadelic and building techno from the collision. David Bowie and Brian Eno absorbed the approach during the Berlin years. New Order, Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys, virtually every electronic act that followed owes something to the architecture Kraftwerk built. They invented a music. Everyone else took it in different directions.

Kraftwerk formed in Düsseldorf in 1970. Hütter and Schneider co-founded the band and built Kling Klang Studio, where every Kraftwerk record was made. Bartos joined in 1975. Wolfgang Flür on electronic drums. Autobahn in 1974 was the breakthrough. Trans-Europe Express in 1977. The Man-Machine in 1978. Computer World in 1980. Four albums in six years that together redrew the map of what music could be. Schneider left in 2008 and died in May 2020. Hütter continues with a current lineup. The music they made between 1974 and 1981 remains the most influential body of work in electronic music.