Music: April 2008 Archives
“I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling to realise that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation." - Andreas Pavel
How far we have come. If your iPod is of the Nano persuasion, kudos to you. If you’re packing 6G’s, you rock. iTouch? Awesome. iPhone? Spectacular. Anything electronic that has pinching, flicking and caressing as standard operating procedures deserves all accolades.
What holds all that together though is an enduring idea. One that was laughed off by the likes of Grundig, Phillips and Yamaha. One that plays an integral part in many of our lives - rest, work, play, exercise - you name it. Quite simply, the idea that it is nice to add a soundtrack to real life.
Andreas Pavel created the original portable personal stereo player. He fought court battles for 25 years with Sony who called their dubiously similar version the ‘Walkman’. He was at one point indebted to the tune of $3m in legal expenses. Eventually Pavel was awarded $10m plus royalties on a variety of future Walkman sales. The imagination of a man who wanted to hear his music on the go, no matter how many weird looks he got, is to be honoured. The determination to never let his creation be swallowed up by the power of Sony is inspiring. Pavel’s Stereobelt of 1972, while devoid of MP3, JPEG, WiFi, YouTube and the rest of the gang, represents the official birth of an era defining icon. Surprisingly enough, we couldn't find a digital photo of one...
“Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship; whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.” PAUL SCHNEIDER-ESLEBEN (Father to FLORIAN SCHNEIDER)
Florian Schneider, along with Ralf Hütter, was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk. If ever musicians swam against some kind of current, it was them. But so too did the other two long-standing members, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. I’m currently reading Flür’s book, I Was A Robot, because I hoped I might learn a little more about the enigmatic nature of Kraftwerk. And I have done so far, but in the process I’ve discovered a man that writes exquisitely about such things as the imagination, creativity and his own need for artistic freedom over everything else. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t talk quite so much about the music as the kind of human experiences that making music can create. I guess the same goes for any kind of pursuit, anything that takes you on a tangential journey to unpredictable places. Anyway, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling reading it. Maybe it will for you:
“I had known for a long time how it felt to be on stage. I had also experienced what it was like to be applauded. During my amateur period I had been in many groups, and I had grown very fond of them, even if they were not particularly successful. They were all bands, groups that I had founded. However, with Kraftwerk, the whole world stood open to me, and that was the thing - apart from my discoveries and my minimalist drumming - that most enchanted me through all my years with the group. Human contacts in every nation, countless conversations and the flirtations that often emerged from them, the universal cultural worldview that I was able to form for myself without just getting it from books - all of these things gave me wonderful experiences which later, following my painful separation, also helped me to find a way to myself, to the love and sound of my new music.”
