Kraftwerk - On Record

By Johannes Torhout

In 1970, two music students in D sseldorf built a recording studio in an abandoned factory space, gave it the deliberately unglamorous name Kling Klang, and began making music almost nobody had a name for yet.

Fifty-five years later, that music has been sampled by Afrika Bambaataa, licensed by Coldplay, inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and performed in 3-D at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Tate Modern.

This is the story of how it got there. On Record: Kraftwerk traces the band's full arc, from the krautrock-adjacent chaos of its earliest, barely-remembered lineups through the run of albums - Autobahn, Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Computer World - that quietly rewired pop, hip-hop, and techno alike.

It follows Ralf H tter and Florian Schneider's obsessive, decades-long project of self-mythologizing through robotics, uniforms, and an almost monastic devotion to the studio, and it gives equal weight to the people who left: Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, whose brief stint in the band's earliest lineup led directly to Neu and the wider D sseldorf scene.

Wolfgang Fl r, whose tell-all memoir got him sued by his former bandmates. And Karl Bartos, who co-wrote some of the band's best-known songs before building a substantial solo catalogue of his own.

Author Johannes Torhout, a Belgian music critic known for a dry, forensic approach to genre history, pays particular attention to how Kraftwerk's catalogue was built and later curated. From the group's own selective 2009 box set The Catalogue, which quietly wrote three early albums out of the official record, to the ongoing 3-D touring show that has turned a forty-year-old back catalogue into a live museum exhibit.

The result is a portrait of a band that tried to erase its own personalities and, in doing so, became impossible to forget. Includes a curated Essential Listening guide, a full discography with track-by-track context, and a chapter-by-chapter source list for readers who want to keep digging.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBQCJQKD
• ISBN13: 9798188570712
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"