Many thanks to Mr. Baker for alerting me to two top-drawer BBC documentaries about synthesizer music, both of which can be enjoyed in full on the computernet:

Watch the whole thing here.

Synth Britannia connects the dots between British suburbia, JG Ballard, A Clockwork Orange, Kraftwerk, and the ethos of punk music. “All of the infrastructure around punk, we absolutely loved,” says The Human League’s Martyn Ware. “It’s just that we saw the actual music as being quite old fashioned.” Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür puts a finer point on it: “We saw ourselves as engineer-musicians instead of dancing boys.” Which brings us to…

Watch the whole thing here.

“At a time when most of the Western world was rocking out to guitar gods, something very different was brewing in Germany…” Opening with the obligatory 1960’s clip of hippies and cops running through the streets to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, we are told that yes, young people around the world were angry at The Man but that in Germany, “the establishment had much more to answer for…”

The dark pull of history bears down on the motorik beat of Kraftwerk, Neu!, et al, and ‘Krautrock’ is properly contextualized as an escape from the horror following World War II. In search of a hard break with past German cultural traditions, synthesizers became a political statement, an act of forging a new cultural identity. You can only cover so much heavy material in an hour, but this documentary does an excellent job of mapping left-wing politics, the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and the birth of the synthesizer via names like Fassbinder, Herzog, Popol Vuh, Roedelius, Stockhausen, Can, and Kraftwerk.

And thanks to The Ballardian for turning me on to a Kraftwerk bootleg recorded in ‘71 back when Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother of Neu! were part of the Kraftwerk line-up alongside Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Dinger and Rother take the lead here, delivering surprising blasts of ear-shredding monster rock, especially in the latter half of the aptly-titled Heavy Metal Kids.

My money is on “K2 (Ruckzuck)”, which opens with a few woodwinds before launching into a caffeinated beat that offers a glimpse of the syncopated & synthetic motorik that was just around the corner:

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Kraftwerk — K2 (Ruckzuck)
Live at Gondel Kino. Bremen, Germany, June 25, 1971.

Now that you’ve got an earful of synthetics, go play with Mr. Baker’s latest synthesizer experiment here.