KRAFTWERK AT 50

50 years ago today, on December 1st, 1970, the world was introduced to a group who would change the nature of pop music forever. Recorded and mixed between July & September of 1970, the eponymous debut Kraftwerk LP would formally announce the arrival of Germany's most influential musical entity, not only of the decade, but for generations to come.

At the time, Kraftwerk were not quite the "machine" they would become in later incarnations. The group consisted of founders Ralph Hütter and Florian Schneider, who were accompanied by drummers Andreas Hohmann (side A) and NEU! co-founder Klaus Dinger (side B). Production duties were handled by Conny Plank. Emerging from a previous incarnation known as Organization, Ralph and Florian were still very much into their more experimental phase with much of the album consisting of free-form improvisations with Ralph handling the keyboards and Florian on heavily processed flute. There's a bit of guitar and violin in there as well and a touch of electronic percussion and early synthesizer embellishments. There's very little to indicate the kind of rigid, precise compositional style the group would evolve into by the latter half of the decade, beginning with the landmark 1974 Autobahn LP. Only the opening number, Ruckzuck, offered any indication of this with its initial "motorik" rhythm and syncopated echoed flute layers. This style surfaces intermittently throughout the album, but the bulk of it floats freely in the either of spontaneous improvisation.

It is perhaps because of this divergence from the "classic" Kraftwerk approach that the first three albums from Ralph and Florian have been essentially excised from the group's canon of official releases. None of them have had official reissues since their release with the exception of the 1975 Exceller 8 album, which compiles tracks from those first three albums and was released after the success of Autobahn. Kraftwerk themselves have referred to their first three albums as "archeology" and have only hinted at the possibility of a proper remastered reissue at some point in the future, though there has been little evidence of that actually occurring. However, there have been unofficial CD and LP reissues on the market since the 1990s for determined collectors to get their hands on.

Regardless of its official status within the group, the album still holds the core DNA of what would come to be the building blocks of modern electronic pop music. Those first few minutes of Ruckzuck alone are enough to provide a signpost that points directly to that future. A half century on and we're still nowhere near seeing the end of that tsunami of influence lose its strength. This is the point of detonation for it.