Robots ♥ Summer

Pretty nice work, this short video ad for last years Summer of Love festival in the Czech Republic. Kraftwerk in a bumblebee vehicle, flying in over their followers. Jeff. Mills, Tiga, CJ Bolland and Elektrabel being ... pollinated, I assume.

Autobahn vas ein Monster

The cover of this Kraftwerk compilation from 1975 is just pure pleasure. Read that sticker. Read it again. I believe that the wonderful thing was found exclusively on a British edition of the record?

Bootwerk - A Bastard Pop Tribute To Kraftwerk

Wow, this is rather uninteresting.



Mashup Industries proudly presents "BOOTWERK - A Bastard Pop Tribute To Kraftwerk".

Nineteen artists have created Kraftwerk mashups for this mp3 only compilation. Kraftwerk meets Dolly Parton, The Beastie Boys, Genesis, Depeche Mode, Fergie and Robbie Williams.

It's new, it's well conceived and it's free to download, but you don't need it.





Oh, and another small and almost completely unrelated tidbit of information: Swedish techno producer Cari Lekebusch has released three records on the Heroes International label under the alias The Mantis. The second of the three records, "Kool & Deadly", was released in 2005 and features a bootleg Kraftwerk remix/track also called "Bootwerk". Listen here.

New old music from Harmonia

Krautrock supergroup Harmonia was created when Cluster/Kluster members Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius joined forces with ex Kraftwerk member and Neu! founder Michael Rother in 1973. The band released the brilliant albums "Musik von Harmonia" (1974) and "Harmonia de Luxe" (1975). In 1976, they recorded an album with Brian Eno. The album, titled "Tracks and Traces", wasn't released until 1997.

This fall, Groenland Records (Europe) and Water Records (US) will release a so far unreleased 1974 live recording by Harmonia. This is brilliant news, of course. The title will be the rather imaginative "Live 1974". The release date seems to be set to late September. CD and LP. Look out.

Waaalking!

Once again, the four Kraftwerk characters appear in Calpurnio's comic strip "El Bueno Del Cuttlas". You will find the original here. And don't forget to look through the archives on that site. Kraftwerk will show up on more than a few places.

Bernd Becher RIP

Together with his wife Hilla, Bernd Becher has acheived great success as a photographer of industrial buildings, selling tons of grayscale coffetable books to the post industrial generation and being awarded a row of prestigeous awards, including the Hasselblad Award in 2004.



A lesser known fact is that Bernd + Hilla Becher took the above picture for the inner sleeve on the first Kraftwerk album.

June 22:nd this year, Bernd Becher passed away.