Kraftwerk
Autobahn [50th Anniversary Edition]
KLING KLANG/RHINO
The other night I watched Ralf Hütter and whomever else he called Kraftwerk at this time perform a 50th anniversary tour date in celebration of Autobahn, the album that found he and the project’s late co-founder Florian Schneider stripping themselves down from their initial avant-garde acousto-muzik trappings into pure electronics. Kraftwerk didn’t play anything from Autobahn that night beyond the 1974 record’s bouncingly harmonic, rhythmically motoring title track, and even that was weirdly abbreviated from its recording’s 22-minute breadth. Yet its crisp display and blunt beauty in concert that evening said more about Kraftwerk’s famed fourth album than if the quartet showed slovenly devotion to its full track list.
Cutting but lush, frigidly distant but not without warmth and humor, Hütter and Schneider’s Autobahn (additionally featuring its then-new member Wolfgang Flür and hermetically sealing production from Conny Plank, the man most responsible for showing krautrock the way) could be the album that made electro-pop—or, at the very least, gave it a hard nudge. Relayed now in its clean, brand-new Dolby Atmos mix, Autobahn 50 is still recondite and abstruse (and louder) without sounding superficial. Could it be that with an Atmos remastering such as this, the ice floe of “Kometenmelodie 1” into “Kometenmelodie 2” and the throbbing, luminous repetition of “Morgenspaziergang”—to say nothing of the insistently reiterated pulse of the title track—now shows its ghosts in the machine to be more flesh than shadow?
Yeah, kind of. The tiny slivers of its avant-classicist past—bits of Hütter’s trance-y guitar and Klaus Röder’s electric violin on “Mitternacht”—are clearer and more palpable, yet somehow fall in line with the rest of Autobahn’s chilly symmetry. And here, once and for all, Kraftwerk pulled away the mythical language of psychedelia from the kosmische tradition while maintaining its experimentalism toward all things robotic and electronic.
