Austin Kleon

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Kraftwerk in the studio


My 5-year-old’s favorite band is Kraftwerk, so we spend a ridiculous amount of time listening to their music. I downloaded a BBC Four documentary, “Kraftwerk: We Are The Robots,” for him to listen to on our walks, and when our local record store was out of stock of any Kraftwerk CDs he didn’t already own, we bought a used copy of Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, and Music.

I got really interested in Kling Klang — the private, secretive studio in Dusseldorf where they recorded my favorite records. Kraftwerk were really smart about taking any profits from their music and channeling them back into equipment and studio space so that they could remain independent. “We have invested in our machines, we have enough money to live, that’s it,” said Florian Schneider. “We can do what we want.”

But even though they could work whenever they wanted to, however they wanted to, this didn’t mean they weren’t disciplined. “We are not artists nor musicians,” said Ralf Hütter. “First of all we are workers.” Wolfgang Flür describes a typical working day:

In the Kling Klang studio of my time, we met up every evening around 7 or 8. Then we would watch mostly TV news. After, we drank mostly coffee or went for an ice cream at a nearby ice cream shop. Then we went to the next room, which I called the rehearsal room — the “Kling Klang.” And we made some Klang. Or Kling. It depended how we felt. Someone came up with a headline of a newspaper or maybe a TV report, then some melody was played around that theme. It developed over the following days, more and more. Lyrics came up, rhymes as well. And last, not least, a rhythm was drummed. That’s how it worked.

Again, they had all the time and space they wanted, so they could experiment. “We are playing the machines, the machines play us,” said Hütter. “We would improvise,” said Karl Bartos, “jamming together for two or three hours.” Each band member had his own little workstation, but sometimes they’d sit behind the console and just let the machines run. Later, they’d listen to the tapes, figure out which sections they like, then turn those sections into songs. Maxime Schmitt, one of their friends and collaborators, said it was a lot like working on a film, editing from rushes. And even though they often used more pro studios to mix their records, the recording all happened in Kling Klang.

Here’s the boy in our own little Kling Klang, listening to a mix:

I wanna dance with (or without) somebody


I was born in ’83, so I have a soft spot for 80s pop, especially the kind of stuff they played on 94.7 in Columbus, Ohio, “Sunny 95” (a rounding up that always confused me), which my mom listened to non-stop at the pool and in her ’86 Honda LX-I. (“Playing the 70s, 80s, and today!”)

A pop pinnacle of those days, for me, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a song that’s so perky (and also a steal from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) but also has this tinge of sadness beneath it — a bit of lyrical dissonance — which, when you think about it, pop music has always been full of, but there were lots of my favorite cases from that era: Prince’s “1999” (nuclear war), Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (about Vietnam vets) and “Dancing in the Dark” (a song about writer’s block!), Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” (teenage runaways), etc. Those are the kinds of songs I really love: sad songs with a beat.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion is like Sunny 95 in a blender, and her song, “When I Needed You,” pulls off that 80s blend of lyrical dissonance really well. “The song sounds really happy now,” she says in an episode of Song Exploder, “but it’s a really sad demo.” She said it was nice to hide to the original emotion (inspired by a messy break-up) underneath a dance track, so it wasn’t so “all out there.”

I’ve been listening to so much Jepsen lately, but nobody else in my house wants to hear her. I’m reminded, again, of Whitney Houston, but for another reason: I once read a New York Times article from 1994 about her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which chronicled how sick everyone was of the song, so much so that it had inspired various criminal acts, like when a mother of two threw her upstairs neighbors’ stereo out the window:

“It was driving us all up the wall,” Ms. Hall told a local newspaper at the time. “I had just had enough.” The incident, in fact, became one in a series of several — all, oddly enough, in England — at the height of the song’s popularity. In October, a 20-year-old woman from Middlebrough County was reportedly sentenced to seven days in jail after she played “I Will Always Love You” so loudly and so often that her neighbors complained of psychological torture and the police charged her with noise pollution.

We all want to dance with somebody, but, it seems, sometimes we must dance alone… with headphones.

My DJ set for KUTX

Photo Feb 06, 11 18 35 AM

Art Levy heard me on KOOP 91.7’s show Free Samples (thanks, Matt!) and asked me if I’d come in and record an hour-long DJ set for My KUTX. It was so much fun. I love listening and playing music, but rarely get to write or speak about it, and this is the first time I’ve done any DJing except for a short-lived radio show I had in college.

You can stream the set online, or, if you’re in Austin, you can listen live this Saturday (2/11) at 6PM central on 98.9.

Here’s a Spotify playlist of the set, and another playlist of songs that didn’t make it.

Photo Feb 06, 12 05 07 PM

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