r/kraftwerk

My brain is like a radio that never switches off, playing in a lot of frequencies at the same time. It doesn't take long for it to make feel like the world around me has invisible, inaudible and intangible. It's like a curse.

Sometimes, I'm in a situation I want to enjoy, but then my brain switches my attention to my thoughts, and, when I notice, it's already over.

That's where Kraftwerk comes in. It talks about all of the things that my brain doesn't let me experience, and, by listening to the songs, I am able to remember that they exist. It especially helps when I'm in a situation while listening to a Kraftwerk song that fits it. Be it walking down the big city with Metropolis; Travelling with Autobahn, running with Tour de France, getting myself ready to work with The Man Machine or, on the stranger side, cleaning with Tanzmusik.

In that sense, Kraftwerk is to me what glasses are to someone with myopia. It allows me to experience some of the moments that I wouldn't be able to without, and, when the trains of thought in my head get too loud, I put on Franz Schubert, and things, for a moment, come back to being calm.

Despite its annoyance, though, this endless radio in my head is also a source of a lot of my ideas, which I call 'hypermentalistic associations', many of which involve Kraftwerk in one way or another, as the cryptic nature of the songs make them perpetual sources of ideas.

So... Does anyone else go through this, or am I even crazier than I thought I was?

At the end of last year, Kraftwerk released a bunch of recordings from the 1981 tour. It was pretty cool to see that, but this 'live album' always felt really odd to me, mainly because many songs were abruptly cut, such as Minicalculateur and Ohm Sweet Ohm.

It was also a bit strange that some of the songs were named in German even though they were played in English, and some of the names weren't even written correctly.

And that's without mentioning that the suites weren't divided like they usually are. The TEE suite is simply referred as 'Trans Europa Express', and the Radio Star suite is simply referred as 'Ohm Sweet Ohm'. It really felt like something Ralf would never approve.

Today, I decided to go to the Kraftwerk channel to take a listen, and the playlist was gone. I tried to look up 'Kraftwerk in Paris 1981', and I couldn't find a single song from it. It's like it never existed.

So, what happened exactly? Did someone else make these without Ralf's approval, or maybe a test that was never meant to last very long?

I don't know, but I really hope they make a more refined version of it one day.