Karl Bartos - The Sound of the Machine

For Bettina

Clang! Its been a hard days night, and Ive been working like a dog It was this song that changed my life the Beatles A Hard Days Night. Back then I was 12 years old and in the middle of puberty, and even though I didnt understand much English, the music spoke to me. That was the moment when sound took on a new meaning for me and I knew I wanted to become a musician.

When I began to teach myself the guitar not long afterwards, I soon couldnt imagine how my life would be without music. I didnt have a plan, just a wish to get better at it and play the music I was drawn to. That lent order and purpose to my life.

A little later, I learned the percussionists craft at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Dsseldorf, so that I could perform the masterpieces of classical music in an orchestra and make them come to life. I met extraordinary people along the way. My teachers were outstanding, passing on not only theoretical and practical knowledge but also dedication to music. Not by holding long lectures and recommending reading, but by letting me join the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein without much ado, for example, and allowing me insights into their lives. That was the time when I began to think deeply about music, and I have not stopped to this day. This book is the story of my life, the story of my sound biography, and for that reason it is also a book about music.

Through an enquiry to my teacher at the conservatory, I unintentionally ended up in the music industry, which had grown into a multi-million-dollar business over the second half of the twentieth century. This book is therefore also about the band Kraftwerk, placing the music we made together in the context of its time.

I remember very well how I fell under the spell of electronic music and became part of whats known as Kraftwerks classic line-up. To begin with, my job was playing electronic percussion. My contributions were apparently useful enough to make me a co-author of all our compositions from the Man-Machine album up to the point when I left the band. It was during this period above all that I regarded myself as a band member. My contribution, I thought, was audible and visible for both insiders and outsiders. After all, I brought plenty of life and music into the Kling Klang Studio. I remember our writing sessions and sound rides as if they were yesterday, and the amazing feeling of being part of a community where the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Or thats how it seemed to me at the time.

Innovations and musical ideas rarely fall fully-formed from heaven. When I read musicians biographies, I always find it interesting to learn about the inspiration for their various songs. So in this book, Ill be taking you along inside the Kling Klang Studio, showing you some of the sources for our ideas, providing context and background information, and describing how we created our music using compositional craft, dedication, emotion and a pinch of intelligence.

Over almost sixteen years, I worked on six Kraftwerk albums plus one maxi-single about a French sporting event that was to be the basis for another album. Nonetheless, for the public I only became visible and audible when I left the band.

After my years in the Kraftwerk cosmos, I had to start by reinventing my life and asking myself: What does Karl Bartos sound like? Along that path, I was fortunate enough to meet and work with fantastic artists like Johnny Marr, Andy McCluskey, and Bernard Sumner.

My time as a guest professor of Auditory Media Design in the Sound Studies masters programme at Berlins University of the Arts was another source of inspiration and development in my work.

Naturally, journalists and interviewers have always brought up my past. But the events that took place in the Kling Klang Studio were too complex to explain in just a few words. A rush-job autobiography in the form of an early evaluation seemed an inadequate response. I wanted to take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture to form my opinion from a distance. One day, I told myself, I would return to the project in detail.

Over thirty years after leaving Kraftwerk, Im now holding the finished manuscript in my hands The Sound of the Machine. Happily, I neither have a drawer full of unpaid bills, nor do I owe anyone a favour nor feel obliged not to comment for any other reason. I am independent, which means I can tell the whole story as I experienced it. Much of what happened in those years has been forgotten or was never known, due to the unusual conditions we worked under in Kraftwerk. In this book, I write about the creation of our music, look at our social behaviour, let you share our communications as far as I can, and try to describe how things developed over time. If I manage to lend a new perspective on Kraftwerks music and perhaps encourage you to think about the nature of music in general, I will have achieved my goal. I certainly hope I do.

Ever since I heard that famous opening chord of A Hard Days Night I have been immersed in music. The mysterious thing about music is that it sounds different to every one of us, and means something different as well. For some of us it is divine, while others want merely to escape their everyday lives with its help. Some say it can teach us something of life. I know someone who cant understand that people perceive anything other than sound in music, while philosophers define it using metaphysical and psychological terms.

Coming out of a concert a few days ago, I heard admiring conversations peppered with adjectives such as great, amazing, marvellous and the like. When we ask why someone finds a particular piece so extraordinary, it becomes clear how difficult it seems to be to say something more engaging about music.

And yet it is possible to talk about music or at least its worth trying. We can represent it and study it in the form of musical notation. Nor is depicting its frequency spectrum in three-dimensional form a problem, so as to analyse it over time. And computers the most universal machines of our day enable a very precise inside view of musical content in the form of data. But Im afraid I have to disappoint anyone who assumes its possible to even approach explaining what music really is. Only music itself can do that.

Karl Bartos, Hamburg, 31 May 2022

Back to the Beginning. Haus Kederlehen. The Little Reich Chancellery. The Berghof. Headquarters US Army 1945. Gasthaus zum Untersberg. Auf Wiedersehen Berchtesgaden. Dsseldorf on the Rhine. Unterbilk. How I Met Maximilian in the Education System. A Happy Family. The World in My Head. My Life Gets a Soundtrack. Radio and Television.

I glance in the rear-view mirror, change down a gear and hear the engine killing the cars speed. On the way into the valley, where the road curves to the right, I hold my breath. Ahead of me the mighty peaks of the Watzmann rear up into the Upper Bavarian sky, and below me lies Berchtesgaden with its church towers, streets and houses. Its exactly as if Id driven straight into a picture postcard. My birthplace of Marktschellenberg is embedded in the breathtaking landscape of a world-famous national park a few minutes drive from Berchtesgaden. The area on the edges of the Alps in southern Bavaria is so beautiful that it looks strangely artificial, almost.

To help me write this book, Ive come back to where my life started out, to compare the images in my mind with the real settings as they are today.