KRAFTWERKFEATURE

With AI beginning to take over the planet, it’s quite an eye-ear-opener to read Lester’s 1975 combination (as we used to call it in rock write circles) “think piece” interview with Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the uberlords of Germany’s pioneering techno-pop band, Kraftwerk. Somehow, as only he could, Lester manages to give context to the band’s futuristic synthesizerand vocoder-driven music and colder-than-freon image by beginning the story with thoughts on the relationship between sound and technology, including a nifty shoutout to the group’s homeland for its role in post-World War II counterculture by way of inventing methamphetamine (or, as we used to call it in recreational drug circles, speed)—a common-ground source of energy for such “high plasma marks” as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Blue Cheer, and, yes, CREEM itself.