Another little summary for my friend Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussed on albums from 1991. I don't think I do a great job on this one, but it's true that the record is far better than it has any business being.
KRAFTWERK – THE MIX (EMI)
There are many prodding poles used to nudge an artist over a contractual finish line: best-ofs, B-side collections, live sets, remix anthologies. But the least common is the rerecording of old material, often in a stripped back format, employed because brings the listener closer to the heart of the music [did you mean to type “costs very little to produce”?]. Kraftwerk are famous for many things, but producing one of the few artistically satisfying examples of the “new jog round old paddocks” genre is one of their least celebrated achievements.
The band hadn’t released an album for 6 years when The Mix hit the shelves, an album of 11 classics – well, 10 if you admit that 'Dentaku' and 'Pocket Calculator' are the same song in different languages, and 8 if you’re prepared to note that 'Abzug' and 'Metal on Metal' are just bonus bits of 'Trans Europe Express' - given a shiny digital makeover. The tracks sound fantastic, all muscular and sleek, with a new techno heft not overpowering the crackly transistor bubblegum charm found in the originals. Some of the tracks cleave very closely to the original arrangements, with opener and lead single 'The Robots' being the familiar song wearing its big bot pants. The next track, 'Computerlove' is also pretty much in line with the old version in arrangement terms, but it’s encased in a burnished techno carapace owing a fair bit to Model 500 (which seems like a fair bout of influence exchange). One might argue that The Mix fills any sonic gaps in the original songs with electro-Polyfilla killing off the human heart that used to beat within, but if any band can make a virtue of soullessness, it’s Kraftwerk.
The record is most fun when it throws in some new, and surprisingly playful, innovations. 'Pocket Calculator' hasn’t been playing long before it throws in some odd jazzy clusters of percussive buzzing synth notes, as if mecha-Cecil Taylor had dropped into the studio, and 'Homecomputer' opens up clean dubby chasms beneath that famous rising motif. Perhaps most noteworthy is the absurd drop into a three-register vocal break six and a half minutes into 'Autobahn' with cyborg trills that sound like an Italian opera troupe have all swallowed Stylophones.
Astonishingly, not only is The Mix satisfying as an album in its own right, but it marked the point at which Kraftwerk essentially stopped writing new music and returned to their back catalogue in an inward-looking spiral that continues to this day, marking out an improbable space between heritage act and conceptual art: as the final track title has it, this is Music Non Stop, but also music with no new starts.
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