Searching for Modernity. Socio-historical Perspectives on Techno Music and »das Deutsche«: Kraftwerk – Wolfgang Voigt/GAS – Dopplereffekt HEINRICH DEISL Conference Industrielle Volksmusik for the 21st Century: Kraftwerk and the Birth of Electronic Music in Germany. Aston University Birmingham, 22.1.2015 We are here in Birmingham, hometown of bands like Black Sabbath, Godflesh, Duran Duran, The Specials, Broadcast or DJ Kemistry, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was located here, too. So, first of all, I want to thank the organizers of this conference for giving me the opportunity to present some of my considerations on the band Kraftwerk in such an environment. My paper is called: »Searching for Modernity: Socio-historical perspectives on techno music and ›das Deutsche‹ in the works of Kraftwerk, Wolfgang Voigt aka GAS, and Dopplereffekt«. Which means that apart from Kraftwerk, I will talk about some outputs by the electronic music project GAS of Cologne-based producer Wolfgang Voigt as well as by the Detroit-German techno group Dopplereffekt. Late 2014 saw the publication of Electri_City. Elektronische Musik aus Düsseldorf. In this book, Rüdiger Esch, former member of the Düsseldorf-band Die Krupps, unravels the history of Düsseldorf’s pre-digital electronic pop music via cut-up interviews. Wolfgang Flür, Kraftwerk’s former drummer, writes in its introduction: »We wanted to overcome the domination of the AngloAmerican pop music by focussing on German traditions. Merely by chance we liked the modernist Sachlichkeit – the New Objectivity – and an efficiency, which by foreign countries was considered typical German. We played a type of music that regarded itself as futuristic, but worked with implications of the Silent film era.« Therefore, in my talk I want to outline a search for modernity, which is not modern in a purely avant-gardist sense, but which is grounded in appropriations of the past. Interestingly, this concept of a certain not Avant-, but so-called Retro-Garde is prominent in the two most known German pop bands; which are Kraftwerk and Rammstein. – And as we will hear in Alexei Monroe’s contribution, such concepts are also noticeable in bands like Laibach. We could condense the changes or transformations that were set out by Kraftwerk by the following catchphrase: Before Kraftwerk, German pop music was perceived as »schlager«. And after them, as »techno«. This phrase can serve as a first positioning of Kraftwerk’s contribution to the complex of an »industrielle Volksmusik« relevant to the premises of this paper and this conference as well. 2 I. As a beginning, let’s watch an excerpt of a documentary on Kraftwerk by Ohne Maulkorb, a youthoriented, pop cultural programme at the Austrian broadcasting station ORF from 1982 during the band’s European tour in that year. It features the allegedly last TV interview of Ralf Hütter. (Important to notice as Kraftwerk form that period on refused giving TV interviews consequently.) Ohne Maulkorb (ORF), 29.1.1982 My paper is divided in three parts. First: considerations about Germany’s political and art history since the early 1970s. Second: Symbolic or rather mythological implications of two constituting metaphors: the »Autobahn«, the highway, and, as its anti-thesis, »der deutsche Wald« – »the German Forest«. And finally: The translations of these implications toward GAS and Dopplereffekt. 3 We have to note two main differences in the historical development of popular music between the UK and Germany: First: UK’s pop music had, by definition, an international outlook. Second: It had no »Stunde Null«, no »zero hour«. The devastations by the National Socialists left a fundamental and traumatic void, through which German life, art, and music had to redefine itself. It was mainly the UK, in which in the first years of the 1970s so-called Krautrock became popular. Krautrock was one of the first waves of independent German pop or, rather in that time back then, avant-garde music, and a direct predecessor of the music Kraftwerk paved the way to. The famous Peel Sessions, in which BBC’s Radio-DJ John Peel featured bands like the group Faust as early as 1973, can be regarded as ground-breaking for what was later called »German Invasion«. What were the necessities of this »German Invasion«? Germany at that period was in a highly difficult and at the same time highly productive state of development. It was the peak period of the Cold War, and the country witnessed the first crises of poverty and unemployment after a more or less twenty years’ era of reconstruction. Concurrently, productions by the electroacoustic studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne – comparable to the Birmingham Electroacoustic Studio – and especially by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen initialized transfers between academic avant-garde and pop music. Creatives like the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Joseph Beuys both as an artist as well as a professor at Düsseldorf’s art academy would prove highly influential for establishing a contemporary German identity. From the perspectives of Cultural and of Sound Studies, one might say that this period formed a sociology of independent and distinctive articulations on life, art, and music. Kraftwerk – PopArt. Simon Witter/Hannes Rossacher, BBC Documentary, 2013 4 As based on a political and cultural coming to terms with Germany’s past, many Krautrock musicians on the one hand didn’t want to copy Anglo-American standards. But, on the other hand, they couldn’t refer to a tradition or a canonical corpus. Kraftwerk’s proposal was to transcend the problematic German heritage to a ›glorious past‹ of the Weimar period, resulting in a modernity that decidedly was rooted in a context of clichéd ressentiments about Germany; as boldly seen for example at the inner sleeve poster of their 1977’s album Trans Europa Express. The following example binds together two of them: One is velocity, symbolized by the train. Velocity, as one of the most significant perceptions of the 20th century, was called dromology by the French philosopher Paul Virilo. The other is the static movements of the four pale-faced expressionists, evoking references to German silent movies by Fritz Lang or Friedrich Murnau. Let’s conceive Kraftwerk’s song »Trans Europa Express« under conditions of the collision of dromology and filmic expressionism. Cover of the single »Trans Europa Express« (1977) featuring a Schienenzeppelin from the 1930s 5 II. »Trans Europa Express« leads us to the second part of my paper: the »Autobahn« and the »deutsche Wald«. In his article »The Autobahn goes on Forever«, Biba Kopf (Chris Bohn as music journalist and editor-in-chief of the magazine The Wire) wrote in 2002: »The one country to successfully challenge American road mythology is pre-unification West Germany, where the Autobahn has superseded Route 66 in the roadmap of rock history«. In regard to the before-mentioned dromology, Kopf calls the bands of the German Invasion »Dromomaniacs«. The »Dromomaniacs« as a metaphor for velocity can be considered as well established in popular music history and in academic research. As these perspectives have become a common narrative, in this paper I however want to talk about a theoretical route less travelled by, which is the metaphor of the German forest. From 19th century’s Romanticist times on, the »deutsche Wald« became an identity- and nationbuilding myth. Ranging back to Roman times with the battle in the Teutoburg forest, the »deutsche Wald« was the stage for the Nibelungen saga, and for the National Socialists it was a fundamental part of their »blood and honour«-mythology. Remarkably two years before Fritz Lang had done Metropolis – a film that provided the basics of all discourses on technology and techno music ever since –, he in 1924 shot Die Nibelungen. This film epos allegedly was one of Hitler’s most favourite movies. And in the so-called Heimatfilm of the 1950s and 1960s, the German forest played an important role as well. Why? Because it was a narrative and a projection of purity and authenticity. Elias Canetti writes in his anthropological study Crowds and Power from 1960: »The mass symbol of Germany was the military, which was the marching forest. No other country of the modern world kept alive such a strong feeling towards the forest.« So when Kraftwerk used track titles like »Morgenspaziergang« – a wayfarer’s journey in the morning – or »Franz Schubert«, and used images like the cover portrait on the English version of the album, we are confronted with a modernism that implies diametrically opposed states of thought. This recourse on Romanticist forms produced a catalyst between the period of the Weimar Republic and the necessities of a post Second-World-War Germany. This retro-garde touch became Kraftwerk’s second most prominent concept next to their »dromomaniac man-machine robots interface«. In an article by Andy Gill, published in the music magazine Mojo in 1997, Ralf Hütter called this approach »Romantic Realism«. 6 III. This brings me to the last part of my talk. As shown before, the »deutsche Wald« is a highly ambivalent metaphor, which, after the composer Richard Wagner and the National Socialists, at least in Germany represented mainly crypto- or pre-fascistic aspects. In order to make history fruitful again for artistic practices, Kraftwerk used a certain ironic twist by transferring the German forest into a by-product of a vague retrofuturistic modernity. The German Forest becomes a postcard view (as in the lyrics of »Europa Endlos«) or a vague image while looking out of the window of a TEE, driving from one city to the other. In the works of GAS, one of the many projects of Cologne-based producer Wolfgang Voigt, this twist is twisted again by a sonic re-transfer. By blending Minimal Techno with samples of string and brass instruments, this approach is exactly what could be called an »industrielle Volksmusik«. During the late 1990s, Voigt released several records that deal with the »deutsche Wald«: 7 Of course, titles like Zauberberg or Königsforst evoke connotations of a particular German setting. Let alone the project name GAS, which can be read as an aggregate state; but also as poison gas. Certainly, GAS is not about ›German chauvinism‹ or »Deutschtümelei«, but a stringent effort to combine expressions Germany is famous for – which is Romanticist music by Beethoven or Wagner as well as techno. As Wolfgang Voigt puts it in the documentary before shown, GAS was the attempt to bring »the German forest into the discotheque«. Repetitive electronic music can be considered as a soundtrack of the acoustic experience of the age of industrial capitalism transcending it into a commodity; which is pop music. But we have to be aware that this »industrielle Volksmusik« became a blueprint for popular art practices, which nowadays is called techno, only by transformations through Afro-American pre-techno communities. Combining elements here are concepts of technology, future, and, as cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun poses, »a nexus of post-humanization«. While for Kraftwerk ideas of science fiction, robots and dromology meant a facilitation of working processes, for Black communities they meant processes of social accessibility. Considering rock’n’roll, soul, funk and disco music and labels like Motown as an Afro-American »Volksmusik«, it was only logic that this heritage merged with the technological pop discourse of 1970s’ Germany. This is especially true with Detroit Techno, which from the early 1980s on established a feedback connection between Germany and the USA. One of the most distinctive projects coming out of these transatlantic repercussions was Drexciya that later became Dopplereffekt. 8 Dopplereffekt don’t comprise referential trajectories to the »deutsche Wald«; but »Deutsch-sein«, »being German«, was one of the leading metaphors in their output. Like Kraftwerk, they describe themselves as »music workers« or »engineers«. But whereas Kraftwerk and GAS put up for debate still certain aspects of human conditions, Dopplereffekt just display the paradigm of data, and accordingly the results of human actions within a technological framework. Considering album titles like the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk from 1999 and track names like »Scientist« or »Sterilization«, we indeed are confronted with a questionable use of positionings of Germany’s history displayed earlier. Nevertheless, they present interpretations of an »industrielle Volksmusik« from Afro-American and decidedly techno perspectives. On their EP »Tetrahymena«, released in 2013, Dopplereffekt focussed on biotechnology. The video of »Gene Silencing« shows a scenario after the seminal concepts of the man-machine. Here, the human being becomes irrelevant. It’s not even a de-humanized or cyborgian, but a total post-bodily condition. As a conclusion, we might say that through Kraftwerk a transformation of the difficult heritage of Germany’s history was outlined. Their views defied ambiguous proposals, most notably shown by diametrical concepts of dromology like in Trans Europa Express and of an updated Romanticism as in the piece »Franz Schubert«. Whereas Kraftwerk positioned German music internationally, Wolfgang Voigt/GAS put this approach upside down, resulting in an »industrielle Volksmusik« in a German context. And finally, Dopplereffekt established an axis between Germany and the USA by setting out a framework of Afro-American electronic dance music. Whereas GAS can be seen as a comment on the search of modernity within an »industrielle Volksmusik«, Dopplereffekt demonstrates its transatlantic repercussions as a retrofuturistic reading on techno music. 9 Apart from the narrative of the metaphor of velocity, »das Deutsche« in these three cases refers to the emblematic metaphor of the »deutsche Wald« as a projection of appropriations of social processes of the past. In contrast to Italian Futurism or Russian Constructivism, two movements crucial for the development of the conceptual iconography of these three examples, Kraftwerk’s and Dopplereffekt’s visions of modernity are configured by multi-layered implementations of historical references. As with GAS, these references are updated by musical parameters, producing visions of modernity via sound. From these perspectives, it seems that the famous saying by Marshall McLuhan, posted in his book The Medium is the Massage as early as 1967, proves still valid: »Our technology forces us to live mythically.« 10