A few quick tidbits:
- The flickering synth sound on “Neon Lights” was created by Florian plugging Ralf’s Polymoog output into a Minimoog to process it and triggering the Minimoog with a sequencer.
- The strange, watery drum sound on Numbers was created by sending the drums (programmed by Karl) through a Bode Frequency Shifter.
- Ralf and Karl co-wrote most songs from the Man-Machine through Electric Cafe. Florian took care of speech synthesis and sound effects. Wolfgang didn’t do much in the studio other than building the cabinets for the synths. He did play live though.
- If you’ve ever felt stuck working on music, the saga of making Electric Cafe (aka Techno Pop) is the ultimate worst case of this! Multiple trips to studios in Germany, the UK, and New York working with different engineers and multiple equipment upgrades across 5 years to produce an album that no one was happy with.
The 600 page book covers his entire life in exhaustive detail, much more than Kraftwerk - his parents, his classical training, playing in cover bands, being a professor, his solo work, etc. Before he tells you how he composed a song, he feels compelled to give you the history of Western music from Bach to Stravinsky. So if you do get this, be prepared it is incredibly long winded.
I listened to the unabridged 19.5 hour English-translation audiobook which presented its own minor challenges. The reader is a native German speaker who flew past German names and phrases too quickly and mispronounced some English words. However, it was still pretty listenable.
