ARTIST: Kraftwerk
TITLE: Radio-Activity
YEAR RELEASED: 1975
CHART ACTION: #140 US
SINGLES: Radioactivity
OTHER SONGS YOU MAY KNOW: No
LINEUP: Ralf Huitter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flur
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: Kraftwerk begins to forge out its commitment and vision to melding pop music to avant-garde electronics.
SOME WORDS, PHRASES AND CLAUSES ABOUT THIS RECORD: Beeps and bloops abound. Voices put through synthesizers to make them sound scary (especially in German). But, there’s melody, musicality, and lots of stuff that was sampled by all sorts of bands.
Kraftwerk was moving electronic music away from the ‘hey look at what this machine can do’ towards making it a real creative asset to music. The single, “Radioactivity” was a simple-sounding song that made the synthesizer a palette for musicianship.
Not every track works – which happens when you are experimenting. But unlike their first big album, everything is worth keeping as they fit together as a whole thematic piece, and the shorter tracks are intros and codas which captures the essence of the work.
NOTES & MINUTIAE: They used an Orchestron, a synthesizer that used pre-recorded sounds much like a mellotron.
IS THERE A DELUXE VERSION: No
GRADE: B+: Surprisingly listenable even with the interludes and experiments.