https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxdI_AtweP8
Kraftwerk decided not to go on tour following the 1986 release of Electric Cafe (now known by its original title, Techno Pop). The lukewarm reception proved that it was a wise decision, and was probably the cause of a long period without working on new material. Instead, after digitizing their studio and Kling Klang headquarters in Düsseldorf, they (or more correctly, their engineer and future band member, Fritz Hilpert) devoted themselves to transferring all their sounds from 24-track analog master tapes to disc.
The 1991 Kraftwerk album, The Mix, sprang directly from this process. A collection of 11 tracks from their entire post-Ralf und Florian’ catalogue, rebuilt from scratch in new formats, supposedly more danceable, is controversial and divisive for several reasons, and stands out as the most idiosyncratic release in the Kraftwerk catalogue. Apologists and defenders argue that it is an ideologically sound way for a band that has always avoided marketing to circumvent a greatest hits package, which their record label, EMI, was pressuring them to release. However, the argument seems misleading: Metallica and AC/DC have avoided releasing greatest hits albums, so why not Kraftwerk?
But The Mix, even if its tracks were present in their original formats, is not really a greatest hits compilation. It does not include “Showroom Dummies”, “The Model” or “Tour de France”, for example. At the same time, the 1981 B-side, “Dentaku”, the Japanese version of “Pocket Calculator”, is the only track included that was no longer considered part of the Kraftwerk canon.
Given the innovation and power of the original tracks, recreating them in a “modern” language was always going to be a difficult task, even if the remixers were the composers themselves. At its worst, The Mix is overwhelmingly devoted to an unbearable neutralization of its original material. The cast-iron grey and blurred “Computer Love” somehow becomes New Order remixed by the Wrexham ravers of the early nineties, K-Klass; its sterile drum fills and staccato keyboard stabs neither support nor reimagine the song in any way, but simply stand in its way.
Fortunately, this is by far the worst that The Mix has to offer, as its other flaws are redundancy rather than active damage. “Music Non Stop” is a less interesting rhythmic companion than “Musique Non Stop”; “Pocket Calculator” and “Dentaku” are exhaustive exercises in funk reduction, transforming the original’s right angles, so un-funky that they are funky, into an innocuous linearity; “The Robots” sees its corrosive power replaced by pleasantness, and the new version swirls light trance atmospheres around a prominent synthesizer line that is subtly hidden in the background of the original.
Compromise and blandness are deeply un-Kraftwerkian traits, and fortunately there are moments when The Mix manages to shake off that feeling of being so excessively unnecessary. The “Trance-Europe Express”/”Abzug”/”Metal on Metal” sequence achieves this by leaving the sound of the original suite practically intact, changing instead the emphasis so that the “Metal on Metal” section, with its intense beat, becomes the dominant conclusion, unlike the central transitional role it plays in the Trance-Europe Express album version. “Radioactivity” succeeds not because of its snare drum pattern, which replaces the original’s aching majesty with a more danceable tempo, but because of the robotic haiku of consequences – “Tschernobyl/Harrisburg/Sellafield/Hiroshima” – that emerges at regular intervals. It is not subtle, but it is effective.
The The Mix version of “Autobahn”, one of Kraftwerk’s most iconic tracks, illustrates both the worst and the best of this album. For much of its duration, the new version is irredeemably useless: a flanger-drenched synthesizer chord here, an accentuated beat there, but with all the original’s fluid spirit abandoned and forced to find its own way. In this context, the glorious naivety of the melody, whose sublimity is due, at least in part, to its brush with dazzling stupidity, sounds bland. However, in the breakdown, the original’s vibrant vocal harmonies are completely reworked, and the final result sounds like androids trying to emulate Bavarian yodeling. In itself it is nothing revolutionary, but it evokes the idea of what The Mix could have been if Kraftwerk had opted to work these tracks radically, instead of updating them to the early nineties dance music industry standard.
Although it hurts to admit, the judgment of Emil Schult, a long-time Kraftwerk collaborator (who painted the original cover of Autobahn and, indeed, the “fifth robot”, helped the band formulate much of its visual and thematic grammar) seems correct when considering The Mix: “Would Leonardo Da Vinci have retrieved the Mona Lisa and repainted it? I suppose not. ‘Autobahn’ did not need a Kraftwerk remix.”
Certainly, the path the band had taken since Electric Cafe was not to the liking of two of its members. Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s junior partners since 1974, left in 1989 and 1991, respectively. Flür stated that he resisted becoming “the best-paid caretaker of the world’s most famous sound laboratory”, while Bartos memorably stated in 1993 that “by the end of the eighties, Kraftwerk was a paralyzed giant. The internal structure did not allow for new ideas”. Given the scarcity of new ideas in The Mix and the apparent absence of new material, his words proved depressingly accurate.
Source: Drownedinsound
