See second picture — I can’t figure out what “der Stromspule” is. I know it literally translates to “current coil,” but what is that? A transformer, an inductor?

I know it’s a bit weird to post a translation request in this sub, but I thought you all might like to see the article, and I know we have a lot of native German-fluent English speakers here. For the English speakers I will put my best effort at a translation in a comment (it wasn’t done by an LLM; I went through and translated it line-by-line).

Please excuse the sun-dappled lighting. I was having a lot of trouble with glare from the room lighting.

Danke, Leute!

Hello everyone, i’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, but i thought you might be able to help.

recently, one of my sons passed away, and at seemingly the last minute he picked the song “Ohm Sweet Ohm” as the song he wants to be played at his funeral. one thing we shared together was music, and i have heard some of kraftwerks music but never spoke about it with him or even knew he was aware of them. the song itself is quite beautiful, however it has no lyrical content outside of the start where it just says the title of the song. my son loved music a lot, and so I would have assumed he would’ve picked a song with some meaning to it. If anyone could help explain what the meaning is behind the song or some analysis or even just what he may have been thinking when picking that song it would be very appreciated. perhaps it is a reference to something? I am not too sure. thank you anyway

I went along to see Kraftwerk in May. This time my 25yo son went along. Having declared "music like that is shit" some months earlier, he raved about the entire package. He has remarked several times since how he has been listening to their music, and it's influences on early hip-hop and modern electronic music. Then today, he asked if I'm ever considering selling my collection, would I give him first call. His face was a picture when I told him that I would be leaving my entire music collection to him and his sisters to do what they like with. So I think I have another convert to carry the flag when I've passed on.

"I grew up with Kraftwerk. The first track I owned was ‘Tour De France’. It was my favourite electro track. Another one was ‘Clear’ by Cybertron. Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter were all in there as well. I hated most things with singing on or anything with a song structure. I just wanted the beats and there was loads of them about. It was ubiquitous. At the time you either bought a Street Sounds album or you were listening to Stu Allen on the radio. Manchester was a bit of an island for American dance music full stop. There were obviously scenes in other places, but here we used to get exposed to that culture all the time. When I moved to Sheffield a few years later I found that they had been not into hip hop at all, but funk and reggae. It was so different from Manchester and not that far away. It was like another dimension.

[...]

Originally, when I was younger, I would be editing tracks from other peoples cassettes using the pause button. People talk about the warmth of analogue but I think warmth is a strange concept. I would like someone to explain the concept to me! I tend not to inherent descriptive terms I can’t understand. That term warmth is a little bit weird if it does exist. I once heard Kraftwerk described as cold, but they are anything but. Kraftwerk are not just funky, their sound is amazing – like a weird, rotating, magic puzzle box from the future. Just an amazing most pristine, perfect sound. Just beautiful."

It is worth reading the entire interview with Sean:

https://thequietus.com/interviews/autechre-interview-oversteps/

Here are some excerpts from my video footage of the show. I shot it with an actual camcorder, not phone. This was my first KW show ever and I was amazed by their performance.

Spacelab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20OjR7u2b0Y

Airwaves/Tango: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5eC-0QYbCM

The Man-Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR73aOvDtoI

Autobahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVfeON5l2T0

Computer Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeIIw2ODpeA

The Model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXbSOHyk6qI

Neon Lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVEbEgRAcc8

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3F88BN-lAs

Radioactivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpTbEJctcus

Tour de France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElaWoEZ2ThY

Pocket Calculator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZKbkoTK4S4

Planet of Visions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrFnMrIwPx0

Music Non Stop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSO-MdVMagU

The Robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibU0mSWP2P4

Finally, someone has uploaded an episode of the BBC kids series Out Of Bounds, which aired in the UK for 6 episodes on BBC 1 back in 1977.
I’d been trying to figure out what this series was for ages. I remember it used a short section of Autobahn for the theme tune and was something to do with gymnastics, but I hadn’t seen it since I was 8 years old. Eventually I managed to find out what it was, but no video evidence existed until recently.
But what I didn’t remember was that the end credits use Kometenmelodie II.
Strangely Kraftwerk get no mention in the credits.

Best night in Veszprém

About how people talk about Kraftwerk. Everyone always talks about how innovative they were, how they were pioneers and all that, and how much influence they had on future music. But so few talk about just how GREAT the music is. They're never allowed to just make great music, it always has to be innovative in some way.

Thank you for listening to my little rant.

"MD: Aside from the war, German music was also a big influence for you. Do you still remember the day when you first heard Kraftwerk?

BS: I remember that I didn’t like Kraftwerk the first time I heard them. Next to my grandfather a strange lad was living, his name was Philip. He was really nice, but his parents kept him locked up. Bad things were happening behind closed doors. I remember I would ring the bell, and his mother wouldn’t open the door—she’d tell me that Philip had headache or something and couldn’t meet me. On one of the rare occasions we actually met, Philip played Autobahn for me. And I remember that I was missing the guitars in the song. I simply didn’t get it. A couple of years later, I fell in love with Trans-Europe Express, though. I thought that album was harmonically extremely rich. I especially liked the sound of the Mellotron. I was very aware of the importance of sound in general, so when I’d listen to a rock record, it wasn’t just about the melodies or the arrangement—but also about the guitar sound. And Trans-Europe Express just sounded great—like a dark electronic soup. I didn’t miss the guitars for a single moment.

MD: Legend has it that you wrote ‘Blue Monday’ with the intention of composing a song played entirely by machines. That’s a very Kraftwerkian approach.

BS: There’s an element of Kraftwerk in it, for sure. But by the time I wrote “Blue Monday”, I had already done some gigs with Cabaret Voltaire as well. The early Human League and OMD’s first steps must not be forgotten either [Note that he cited three bands also strongly influenced by Kraftwerk]. I remember some very non-commercial early gigs in Manchester. Once I had understood that you could make music without guitars, I felt like there were no longer any borders. But also, on a completely different level, I was totally into electronics. I loved technology and tinkering with things. I had properly learned how to solder memory chips on top of each other. There were no computers back then—you simply couldn’t buy one. You could buy a sequencer, but it would cost you the equivalent of a semi-detached house. Suffice to say, we didn’t have any money. So I used to get this magazine called Electronics Today and one day, they had a synthesizer on the cover. At the time I suffered from insomnia, so when I couldn’t sleep, I worked on building my synthesizer."

Note I said Electric Cafe and not Techno Pop. I don’t really like house phone

here are my reasons,

The Beatles took music styles that were already known, such as rock ‘n’ roll, pop, blues etc, and built off of them, whereas Kraftwerk, created and pioneered in an entirely new genre.

A lot of modern day pop music, hip hop and electronic music heavily rely on what Kraftwerk once did.

While The Beatles are known for their songwriting structure, vocal harmonies and studio arrangements, Kraftwerk are known for genre creation, technological framework and Electronic instrumentation, building their own instruments ( such as electronic pads that were used as drums, a modified version of the vocoder, and even had the idea of making jackets as instruments)

Don’t get me wrong, The Beatles are a fantastic band when it comes to songwriting, but for influence to today’s music and technology, Kraftwerk win by a mile

Ciao a tutti!

Sono italiano e ultimamente mi chiedevo se ci fossero altri fan italiani dei Kraftwerk in questa community.

Ho conosciuto alcune persone che conoscevano i Kraftwerk, ma non ho mai incontrato nessuno che fosse un vero fan. Lo stesso vale per artisti come Gary Numan, OMD, The Human League, Devo e la scena synth/new wave classica.

A volte mi sembra di essere l'unico.

Se sei italiano, mi farebbe piacere avere tue notizie!

So I actually kind of like the first album...it's definitely not making my top five, but I listen to "Megaherz" a lot. I wrote a review of it in my substack (here). There's parts that I really don't like, but I also think Florian Schneider is fantastic on it. His flute-playing is soooooooooo good.

Anyways...what do other people think?

An excellent read!

No offense please, but seriously. Its not that im trying to say that this album is bad or something, its just whenever i listen to this album it does not feel like KW, maybe except Metropolis, this one on the contrary is literally goat, especially live versions. Spacelab and Neon Lights are good too but... not so good al'

The Robots sound way too repetitive - something that could be said about a lot of Kraftwerk songs but others like Home Computer actually feel more experimental and interesting with way more stuff and samples used, rather than this one. Same about self titled track.

The Model is understandably quite popular, and i am pretty sure its because this is uuh the most normal? song by KW. but still, hearing something like this after TEE or Computer World is... strange to me.

Once again, the album itself is ok and i dont think its a bad one. its just i see everyone glaze it and i dont really get why. Maybe i got too influenced by Radioactivity (no pun intended) and in need of more experimental stuff like this.

Title explains it all. Fun (fun... like computing) to see both of my favorite bands getting mixed up.