MIXING IT UP
What happens when a sound engineer and his Kraftwerk CD meet beer-soaked Lakers fans in a Venice div
By Cole Coonce
"We have done electronic accidents. And it is also possible to damage your mind. But this is the risk one takes. We have power. It just depends on what you do with it." -Florian Schneider, "Kraftwerkfeature," 1975.
Ten or twelve years ago, I was doing a sound gig for chump change, mixing a couple of quiet little alt-rock bands on a Friday night at some beer-smeared beatnik-bum beach café on the Venice boardwalk.
It was a small venue with a public-address system more suited to, say, a Catholic church in East L.A. than an r'n'roll club, but, as a sound engineer, I wanted to "tune" the room - adjust the sound to match the club's acoustics and squeeze as much cackle out of the amps and speakers as inhumanly possible without blowing anything up - before the musical acts began their sound checks. To that very end, I carried a copy of electronic pop-music pioneer Kraftwerk's then-brand-new-hot-off-the-waffle-iron greatest hits compact disc, The Mix.
Why? The Mix is perfect for "tuning a room." Like every recording Kraftwerk has ever made (be it Trans-Europe Express, Die Mensch Machine, Computer World, or the new Tour de France Soundtracks), it is sonic perfection. Kraftwerk - Ralf, Florian, and two other Krauts who answer to anything from Wolfgang and Klaus to Fritz and Henning - understand how electrons sing.
Ahhh, The Mix. In the early 1990s, the members of Kraftwerk had felt kinda cheated by the state-of-the-art in recording, as digital consoles, tape machines, and hard drives were immediately supplanting the analog analogues they had been using in Düsseldorf, Germany, since 1969. From the beginning, they were always ahead of the means available to capture their music - lush-yet-minimal aural landscapes that some pop-music critic once labeled "a postcard from the future."
Kraftwerk - cutting-edge musicians who built their own rhythm boxes in 1974, because contemporary drum-machine technology would just not do - could not just put out a greatest hits package. Nein. Recording technology was catching up with the quartet's sensibilities, so they RE-RECORDED their "hits" ("Autobahn," "Pocket Calculator," "Radioactivity," etc.) from scratch and said "take that" to Eurythmics, Aphex Twin, the Orb, Depeche Mode, and every other soda-cracker musician who hit one white key on a "digital workstation" and called it macaroni.
But I digress ... . It is 1993 or so, and I am in a dank, besotted nightclub, flipping switches on amps and power supplies, oblivious to the rainbow coalition of beach city and dogtown drunks and hoodlums who have gathered to watch the Lakers in an important playoff against the Phoenix Suns on the bar's big-screen television. I hit "play" on The Mix and ...
DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DOOOOO ... DU DUH ... DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DDDOOO DDDUUHH DOOOOO ... DUH DU ...
"We're charging our batteries/And now we're full of energy .../We are ze robots .../We are ze robots ..."
The two dozen or so lowlife hoops fans gathered around the Lakers/Suns broadcast are mortified, and plastic cups of tepid beer fly in my direction. It seemed innocuous enough, stress-testing tweeters and woofers with a blast of Kraftwerk chanting "We are ze robots" over synthesizers purring like a pushrod Mercedes engine at full song down the autobahn. It wasn't.
It becomes a near-riot. But, as I dodge cups and dive for faders and volume controls, something very strange happens. The music stops, but the jeers continue. Unlike the white dudes and the Mexicans, the African-American basketball punters are pissed that I have turned the CD off.
"Yo, man, that's motherfuckin' Kraftwerk! They dope!"
"Motherfuckin' Kraftwerk? Man that shit is BAD! Uh huh!"
"Homey, I was in Amsterdam, and that's all the DJs motherfuckin' played."
You could have knocked me over with a motherfucking function key.
The next day, I told my pal Ikky Shivers, also an electronic musician, about how I nearly started a riot twice - first by white folks, for putting on Kraftwerk, and then by black folks, for turning it off.
"You do understand that Kraftwerk is really just soul music, yeah?" he asked.
I answered in the affirmative. "Jawohl," I told him.Published: 04/29/2004
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
