50 Years Kraftwerk – Europe Endless

Onassis Stegi on the radio. Movement Radio, the Athens-based international online radio station broadcasts non-stop since early November. Thanks to a wide range of original radio programming, curated by Detach (Voltnoi & Quetempo), Movement Radio tunes in to the world, featuring notable producers from the Greek and international scenes, as well as to the present time and the current affairs. Thus, following the coverage of the US Presidential Election, on November 3rd, it will host, in collaboration with Goethe Institut-Athen, a 24-hour special on December 18, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kraftwerk, through a digital conference and a tribute to their music.

Celebrating 50 years of Kraftwerk, this digital conference intends to explore the history of Europe through their concept albums (“Autobahn,” “Trans-Europe Express,” “Radioactivity,” “Man Machine,” “Computer World”). The project will take the shape of an e-conference at Onassis Foundation You Tube Channel and a dedicated radio program/musical tribute on Movement Radio by its producers and dj’s.

Through their retrofuturist aesthetic universe, consisting of sound and technology, graphic design and performance, the Düsseldorf pioneers created an enigmatic Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork that changed the course of music forever. By totally ignoring the popular rock traditions of the time, Kraftwerk put music and lyrics to the Rhineland’s industrial soundscape, sang about the materialities of everyday life in postwar Europe – factories, motorways and railways, computers, robots, nuclear power – and created a sound that even as we speak, half a century later, appears pristine and untouched by time. According to Uwe Schütte, author of “Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany,” their music can be seen as “a contribution to the political, cultural and moral rebuilding of Germany” after the World War II. Their themes expressed the forward-looking Zeitgeist of the post WWII generation, the belief in science and technology as the drivers of history, and a much-needed social transformation for societies ruined by war and Nazism. A social transformation within the, then nascent, European project, which represented a spatial and cultural constellation of cosmopolitan nations, interconnected by autobahns and trans-Europe express trains.

Kraftwerk’s music expressed a particular mid-century futuristic imaginary, ample with social expectations about a brighter future of more peace, equality and prosperity. This future ‘utopia’ is perhaps our present, a time that these past expectations gradually deflated through a process that Mark Fisher has described as “the slow cancellation of the future.” The results of this process can be witnessed in our present dystopias of a less united Europe, characterized by endless crises, and a lack of vision of a (common) future.

"50 Years Kraftwerk – Europe Endless" aims to revisit Kraftwerk’s artistic output and re-contextualize it within a 21st century aesthetic and sociopolitical discourse. Setting nostalgia aside, this tribute to the band’s thematic and musical palette, can be a vehicle to revisit an era of progressive ideas and important social transformations in post-war Europe, an era that not only shaped but still informs our present.

What can these narratives convey to our societies, currently experiencing a blurring of the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres, and a cancelled future? Could we transform their meanings outside their ecosystem and involve them into a 21st century critique?

With: Uwe Schütte, author of the book ”Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany”; Daniel Miller, label boss of Mute Records; Jens Balzer, pop critic; David Stubbs, author of the book “Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany”; Lisa Blanning, author; and Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou, journalist.

"50 Years Kraftwerk – Europe Endless" is curated by DETACH for Movement Radio