Maybe Kraftwerk had a time machine.
How else could they have known thirty years ago what the ambient symphony of everyday life would sound like? The mechanical chirp of the cell phone. The alert chime of an incoming text or email. The assortment of bleeps, buzzes and bloops that emanate from the microchip-based brains of everything from our laptops to our cars.
On the German quartet's 1981 release Computer World, these synthetic sounds are woven into seven pulsing, intricate compositions that say: the future starts here.
If they sound eerily familiar now, think how they must have sounded back at a time when a Mac was a hamburger and a mouse was a rodent.
Kraftwerk was formed in 1970 when Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter, two classical music students at Düsseldorf College, got bored with studying the old powdered wig composers. Drawing on their love of synthesizers and experimental avant–garde sounds, they forged a style that they intended to be "machine-like" (Kraftwerk means "power plant").
But it was no ordinary machine. It had heart and mystery, and it threw off sparks of warm-blooded melody along with piston-pumping, robotic dance beats. Kraftwerk's sound became a blueprint for so much that followed – from techno and house to trance and hip-hop (Afrika Bambaataa's Kraftwerk-based song "Planet Rock" is often called the birth of hip-hop) – that you could argue they rank with The Beatles as the group who've cast the widest influence on popular music (Kraftwerk has also been sampled by hundreds of artists, from Madonna to Beck to Fergie)............
How Kraftwerk's 'Computer World' Predicted the Soundtrack of Modern Lifehttp://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/111281
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