Kraftwerk
Trans Europe Express LP

The original inspiration for Trans-Europe Express arrived during lunch. Knowing that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider loved transport hubs, friend and Kraftwerk associate Paul Alessandrini took them to Le Train Bleu in Paris’s Gare de Lyon, from where the diners could gaze out at trains leaving for southern France, Italy, Switzerland and the Middle East. “With the kind of music you do”, Alessandrini told Hütter and Schneider as they ate, “which is kind of like an electronic blues, railway stations and trains are very important in your universe – you should do a song about the Trans-Europe Express.” Germinating from the seed of a paean to pan-European travel, the resulting album came to be dominated by one of Kraftwerk’s great themes: communication.

Roads, train lines, telephone and computer exchanges: the collapsing of distance by way of radio waves, satellite-beamed images and ever-faster modes of transportation; Janus-faced technology's enabling and alienating effects: Kraftwerk harnessed cutting-edge technology to create celebrations of and warnings against cutting-edge technology itself. During a French radio interview in 1991 Hütter spoke of how “movement fascinates us, instead of a static or motionless situation. All the dynamism of industrial life, of modern life. We really speak about our experiences, of life as it appears to us. Even the artistic world does not exist outside of daily life, it is not another planet; it is here on the Earth that things are happening.”

Produs Nou / Anul aparitiei: 1977 / Reissue 

Tracklist:

A1 Europe Endless

A2 Hall Of Mirrors

A3 Showroom Dummies

B1 Trans Europe Express

B2 Metal On Metal

B3 Abzug

B4 Franz Schubert

B5 Endless Endless