Tone Float/Megaherz

VINYL FORMAT. Slow To Speak returns with a spectacularly eclectic high-quality 12" reissue featuring a chronicle of the esteemed lineage known as Kraftwerk. The group is most recognized for their pioneering of the electronic dance sound emanating from the seemingly boundless parameter's of European synthetic aural experimentation, exploiting the insistent use of controlled and concentrated repetition and harsh melodic rigidness to produce an indisputably new form of funk - at once owing it's lineage to American black music, and yet strangely alien and singularly unique. But long before their commercial success, founding members and core composers Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were humbly at work far from the public eye, busying themselves with the humble task of reinventing modern music as we know it. Of course, they were certainly not alone, as the new wave of post-hippie German experimentalists had, by the end of the 1960s, formed their own underground of anti-composition, disregarding conventionally rigid arrangement in favor of free improvisation and determinately uncharted, expansive liberated sound. As The Organization, Hutter and Schneider produced the mind-bending 20 minute instrumental "Tone Float," a controlled chaos of organic instrumentation and sparsely employed melody that stood miles away from the bastard child of post-industrial technological alienation that their later, colder and far-more singular music took on. The aggressiveness of this masterpiece hints at a musical vision far too universal to be tied down by the constraints of cyclical repetition or electronic composition - a philosophy of the uncharted, unrecognized and completely unencumbered, where the music was both a means & an end to the visceral multitude & psychic multiplicity, leaving the tired realm of the present with all it's endless routines and notions of lineage in the dust. Indeed, "Megaherz," taken from their first self-titled full-length as Kraftwerk, takes this refusal to be bound by the historical, material stringencies of cultural or artistic progression further, employing the harsh, factory-like sounds of wage-labor and immediately demolishing it with the heavy weight of delicate, dream-like walls of synthetic melody, once again denying both the physical and social weights of existential dread and subsuming them with the literally boundless possibilities of free sound. "The Hall of Mirrors," taken from Trans-Europe Express, reflects the group's later sound, where their preference of free-composition was slowly replaced by the careful and ironic exercise of social reflection - and yet, their project remained the same, as always: lifting aesthetic expression beyond the ties of the present, pushing it into unexplored realms of experimentation and sound with the conscious insistence on creating something truly autonomous from the boredom of everyday existence. Silkscreened lettering on jacket.