KRAFTWERK
THE BEGINNING OF KRAFTWERK




I studied Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf from 1965 to 1971. This was a time of a total new orientation in culture and society and a time of experimentation in art and music. While experimenting with colours in abstract painting, to examine the sound of the colours I experimented with different instruments - double bass, cello, electric bass, electric guitar, Hawaian guitar, clarinet and tenor saxophone - to measure the colours of sound.

At first I worked on my own, and then with a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1967 we formed a band named PISSOFF and played at parties at the Academy. We also made a performance with Joseph Beuys, a professor of art at the Academy, in Creamcheese, the in club in Duesseldorf at the time.

A young student heard us, loved the extreme sound and power of the band and contacted me. His name was Florian Schneider-Esleben. We started doing more experiments in sounds with different instruments. Florian used some electric flutes and an electric violin. I recorded this music, which already sounded like Kraftwerk, with my old Telefunken tape recorder, and Florian's father took photos of us making music.

One year later, in 1968, Florian got to know a Hammond organ player named Ralf Huetter and he asked me to do some music together. We found the drummer Paul Lovens and in 1968 and 1969 we did a lot of gigs in the old part of Duesseldorf and in neighbouring towns.

At the same time Ralf formed a band called Organisation in Aachen, where he studied architecture, and I played the double bass at the Duesseldorf theatre and as a studio musician to earn some money. In the Godorf studios on the Rhine I met the sound engineer Conny Plank. We found out that we had the same ideas in sound and music and we became friends. I recorded in his studio and gave this contact to Florian. So it happened that the first Kraftwerk LPs were produced by Conny Plank. I think without the old "sound fathers" Conny Plank and me there would be no Kraftwerk.

In 1970/1971 Ralf left Kraftwerk and Florian and I experimented with a lot of different musicians, including Klaus Dinger (drums), Houschäng Nejadepour (guitar) and Michael Rother (guitar). I left Kraftwerk in 1971. In 1972 I joined the band NEU!, which consisted of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, and we toured Germany doing concerts. After that I formed my own band, Fritz Mueller, and toured with a mixed-media show - a combination of arts, theatre, literature, films and music - and issued the Fritz Mueller Rock LP: "This guy was surfing lightyears before the spirit of time. A masterpiece!!!" (Coloured Rain). "Headscratchingly odd Nurse With Wound list item" (Mutant Sounds). "A German Zappa with rocking of poppy, electronic and psych varieties. Enjoyable maddening" (Mojo). "Fritz Muller Rock is an anarchistic, unsettling mix of Zappa-eque piss-taking and trashy straight-ahead rock'n'roll crank" (Record Collector).

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