Kraftwerk Catalog Views
For anyone accustomed to the CD versions of Kraftwerkj‘s albums, The Catalogue is more interesting to the accustomed who are also completists, collectors, and die-hard fans. I am none of the latter but as accustomed as I can be with the CD versions without actually having owned any of them. By the time I started listening to Kraftwerk in my early teens, around 2004-2005, The Catalogue had been circulating as a rumor for quite a while before ultimately being announced by Ralf Hütter himself earlier this year. So thatm’s why I, metaphorically speaking, soiled myself when I finally brought home and opened this monstrosity of a discography box.
The Catalogue (German edition: Der Katalog) is a boxed set comprising eight albums by Kraftwerk that were released from 1974 to 2003. All albums are digitally remastered, with most of the cover art redesigned, including rare photographs in the liner notes that were not part of each album's original release.
This box set is an opportunity to find out-- a remastered, sealed-off package of what Kraftwerk (or at least remaining founder Ralf Hutter) would like you to consider its canon. This starts with 1974's Autobahn. The three albums Kraftwerk made before are beloved of many fans, but the group routinely ignore them as inconvenient prologues charting the band's messy discovery of electronics. The Catalogue skips past these to give you a run of five consecutive masterpieces, two albums whose flaws are at least intriguing, and then 2003's very fine Tour De France. Most of these remasters are available as separate issues (due to licensing issues three of them aren't in the U.S.), but the box as a whole is as full a Kraftwerk story as you're likely to be officially offered. As such it invites you to consider their achievements and development in relation to themselves, not to wider history.
Computer World is the first album in The Catalogue with no nods to history-- it abandons the 20s and 30s as touchstones and explicitly relates to the then present day, that giddy era at the start of the home computer boom. Then as now, tech enthusiasts preached imminent social transformation with a mix of excitement and hope. Kraftwerk were happy to reflect this: I program my home computer/ Beam myself into the future. But as was often the case, their lean arrangements and simple lyrics put them into a deliciously ambiguous place between delight and mockery. The appealing bounce of Pocket Calculator sounds rather faux-naïve after Computer World has coolly outlined the new networks of power which computer technology was enabling.
Kraftwerk Catalog Images
