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Kraftweek 3 – Kraftwerk Kover Kollection 8

Volume 8 already (with enough saved for vol. 9 too)! This hour long mix has a bit of an angle over previous ones as I saved a lot of jazz, acoustic and piano versions for this and left out most of the electronic side.

Save for some timely skits that comment on the ticketing fiascos surrounding recent gigs, most of the music here is more organic than synthetic but shows how easily adaptable the songs are across genres. A Bollywood version of ‘Man Machine’, ‘The Model’ played on church bells, sung by a choir and covered by comedian Adrian Edmondson are just some of the delights in this edition.


I probably say this every time but this is one of my favourite mixes, it was a bugger to put together but some of the versions are just incredible. ‘Neon Lights’ played on a music box, the jazz versions of ‘Spacelab’, ‘Man Machine’ and ‘The Telephone Call’ by Mensch Maschine and the insane piano version of ‘Electric Café’. Whilst adapting the cover art I did a number of designs and thought it would be fun to see what ‘retro’ and ‘updated’ versions would be like so here’s a Kover cover that conforms to ‘Der Katalog’ too.

Posted in Kraftwerk, Solid Steel. | 5 Comments » |

Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol.6

KKK6 cover

Another Kraftwerk post (I’ll have to give them their own category) and time for the sixth installment of my Kraftwerk Kover Kollection to coincide with the final release of the remastered Catalogue box set on Monday.

katalog17-10-09_Karl Bartos

It’s up for a week, streaming via the Solid Steel site and I’ll be making it available via Soundcloud when the next show replaces it.

For those unfamiliar, I do these hour long mixes every year or so featuring cover versions, sample-heavy tracks or songs that obviously owe a debt to the Dusseldorf quartet. I had the idea to string these sources together several years ago and the more I dug, the more I found, the amount of material out there is mind boggling. Not so strange for such an influential band who rarely release new material, I suppose fans have to fill the gap somehow. For anyone wanting to play catch-up, the first 4 are available here with full artwork and track listings and I’ll be putting 5 up with 6 next week too.

At a festival in Warsaw the other week, DK and I had the pleasure of seeing ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos play. I was surprised at how much of the set was old material mixed with his solo stuff. His stage show pales compared to his former bands’ but he had full visuals and 5.1 sound all mixed live and hearing a new take on classic tracks was well worth the time we took to check him out.

 

Posted in DJ Food, Kraftwerk, Music, Radio, Robots, Solid Steel. | 2 Comments » |

Various Artists ‘Kraftwerk Kover Kollection’ vols.1-8

When I started seriously researching these cover versions, I couldn’t quite believe how many there were and how diverse the bands were who were doing them. I’ve now completed my 8th Kover Kollection mix, each with an average of 35 tracks in it, that’s 280 covers and they’re just the good / weird ones that I liked enough to use. For every eastern European rendition on woodblocks there are five pumping euro trance versions that sound horrible. What I try to do is filter the best of these and find the weirdest, most leftfield covers because Kraftwerk’s songs are so simple that it seems they can be transposed into nearly any style you can think of. Balanese, gamelan, country, death metal, classical, rockabilly, even played by an orchestra of instruments made entirely of vegetables (see part 2 for this one). There seems to be no end to their influence over today’s music makers.

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Kraftwerk month #31 Kover Kollection 7

To finish the month off here’s something that’s been in the pipeline for over a year – KKK vol.7. This took far too long to do and I completely redid the start three times before I was happy with it.
I already have over three and a half hours worth of tracks mapped out for vol.8, which will concentrate more on piano and jazz versions but I’ll let the dust settle for a bit as you can have too much of something. Thanks for all the suggestions and links to tracks or versions, some of them even made it onto this mix.


A quick word on the multitude of cover versions – the images below are just a few of the whole albums dedicated to Kraftwerk covers available, let alone all the single tracks scattered about various artists’ discographies. Every time I do a Kover Kollection, and use the web to research the tracks I’ve used, I find even more out there.

As with all covers, there are more misses than hits, although the Senor Coconut album does deserve singling out as a work of genius. Another that I recently acquired is the Mencshmachine ‘Hand Werk’ CD from Germany, an excellent album of jazz-based covers with a twist in the tail. Unlisted on the CD, and hidden after 10 minutes of silence once the last track has finished, is one of the most sublime covers I’ve yet to hear – the track ‘Spacelab’ from the ‘Man Machine’ album. It’s not on the web that I can find but the band have several tracks on their soundcloud page and I’ll be putting more of their music into the KKK8 mix, which will be better suited to their sound, more acoustic than electronic.

Before I sign off I’d like to thank everyone who’s logged on, checked out the daily content and listened to the mixes. It seems it all went a bit viral around the third week and made Metafilter, with volume 3 clocking up over 50,000 plays!

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Kraftwerk month #20 Kover Kollection 3

Here it is, the ‘rare’ one, if something digital could ever truly be such a thing. This mix was hosted at the now defunct Bosbos.net along with four others but the link to this particular mix corrupted and I’d get people emailing me to see why they couldn’t download #3. This is one of my favourites and I really slaved over it around Xmas 2004. I spent way too long online searching for a rip of the sketches from the Little Britain comedy show with the punchline, “Computer Says ‘No”, which I was determined to get into the mix somehow. A lot of electronica and hip hop in this one and some great versions of ‘Autobahn’, although the Fink listed isn’t the same Fink from the Ninja Tune label, but another.This originally appeared 17/01/05 on Solid Steel.

Kraftwerk Kovers Kollection Vol.3 by DJ Food


Alternative artwork: For the third volume of the Kover Kollection I did some designs based on the pocket calculator and then on the theme of the ‘Meet the Beatles’ sleeve, I wasn’t too pleased with the results so I changed them, these have never been seen before.

Posted in Kraftwerk. | 4 Comments » |

Kraftwerk month #14 Kover Kollection 2

After the first mix I had tons of material left over and, with some of the obvious covers out the way, it was time to up the ante. The opener of ‘Radio Activity’ played by the First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra (is there a second?) does that pretty well.

Rare live versions of ‘The Model’ by Lloyd Cole and The Balanescu Quartet featuring David Byrne crop up and we start to see the pattern of many versions of the track appearing, it’s by far their most covered song. I think this one is possibly my favourite of all of the mixes as it features some amazing versions of ‘Pocket Calculator’, silly spoken word and the abstract cover art.

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Kraftwerk month #7 Kover Kollection 4


This one veers heavily into hip hop territory at the beginning but then into more rock and, inevitably, techno areas. I was using voice synthesizers to generate ‘lyrics’ over some tracks and it contains one of my favourite mixes: two versions of ‘Autobahn’ running concurrently in the left and right speakers.

Gorefest and The Balanescu Quartet had both done versions that I noticed were very similar in arrangement and tempo and, being that the track is so long, rather than play them separately I panned each one left and right and played them together, I like the fact that they’re just so opposite in terms of style. This one originally debuted on Solid Steel on 04/08/06


(and no, you didn’t miss pts. 2 & 3 yet, I’m just not putting them up in logical order)

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Top 10 DJ Food Kraftwerk covers from Tsugi magazine

Back at the end of 2014 the French magazine Tsugi devoted an issue entirely to Kraftwerk. They gave me a 4 page feature where I was asked to choose my top 10 Kraftwerk cover versions and I promised to post an English language version of the text here in the new year. Seeing as the magazine should have been and gone from the shelves by now, here it is.
Tsugi Kraftwerk cover
The questions from Tsugi magazine:

When and how did you discover Kraftwerk ?
When I was 11 in early 1982 ‘The Model’ became a no.1 hit in the UK and I was suddenly aware of this ‘new’ electronic group from Germany in the charts alongside The Human League, Depeche Mode and Gary Numan. As a result EMI reissued most of their back catalogue and I bought Man Machine, Computer World and Trans Europe Express on cassette which I loved.

What do you like in Kraftwerk ?
The melodies first and foremost but also the electronic drums and percussion, I just find the songs very pure, simple and timeless. Plus they were singing about the future, robots, spaceships, computers etc. and that appealed to me rather than love songs at that age even though they wrote those too.

Do you have a special story related to yourself and Kraftwerk ?
I actually first heard them when I was about 5 years old on a tape my dad had recorded from the radio although I didn’t realise it was them until much later. The song was ‘Autobahn’ and I always remember liking it when it came on the tape but was a bit scared of the breakdown part with the motorway sounds as it reminded me of the Cybermen in Dr Who. When I bought the reissues of their albums later on I realised that I already knew ‘Autobahn’ although it was a very edited radio version, not the long LP one.

Why are you so passionate about Krafwerk’s covers ?
Being a fan of the band was difficult because they didn’t release anything new for so long so I began to seek out cover versions as a way to fill the gap they had left. It happens with many artists who don’t release new music regularly these days – Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin are just two examples. Fans show their love of an artist by covering their songs.

Do you think that sometimes covers are better than originals ones ?
Occasionally they can be, when someone takes the song into a new style or territory and these are the ones I primarily look for. I don’t see much point in recreating a techno version of a Kraftwerk song although people have done it very well. For me the most interesting ones are those that transpose the songs into a new style but still retain the essence or ones that take the song to an extreme that becomes comedic.

How many covers have you ?
Of Kraftwerk, probably about 300 but there are many more out there, for every cover I hear and like I probably hear another two techno / electro / house versions that I discard because they are just poor copies of the originals.
Tsugi KraftwerkFoodspread1
What are your 10 favorites cover records and for each, could you explain me why?

Gaudi & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Dil Da Rog Muka Ja Mahi (KKK vol.7)
An Indian version of ‘The Model’ but only just, I’m not sure how I found this, possibly on a now discontinued blog of cover versions of various artists. I think the blogger listed 70 different versions of The Model alone.

Makoto Inoue – Europe Endless/Neon Lights (KKK vol. 1 & 3)
Beautiful Gamelan versions of these rarely covered songs, this cover really takes it to another genre entirely, transposing the melodies to sound like an ancient tribe is playing the songs. Nothing electronic about it at all, in fact a lot of my favourite covers are ones that take Kraftwerk’s songs into other genres of sound altogether.

Das Erste Wiener Gemueseorchester (First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra) – Radio Activity (KKK vol.2)
The whole thing is played on vegetables, I’m not kidding and it’s as mad as it sounds but you can heard the song in amongst all the weird sounds. One of the weirdest Kraftwerk covers I’ve ever heard.

Miladojka Youneed – Pocket Calculator (live) (KKK vol.2)
A rawkus almost country version with saxophone and harmony singing. you can almost see the stetsons on their heads. This sounds as if the group has learnt the song from reading the notes and lyrics in a book but never heard the original but they sound like they’re having such a great time playing it.

Satoru Wono feat. Meiwa Denki – Dentaku (KKK vol.2)
A Japanese version with very busy percussion and woodwind instruments, very odd but works perfectly. The vocals still sound robotic but there are spoken in Japanese making this even more alien, the playing is very mechanical and precise despite the organic sounds of the instruments.

Alenia – Home Computer (KKK vol.4)
Quite a straight electronic version but I brings something to the original I can’t put my finger on, maybe this is one of those covers that makes the song perfect for today’s clubs, it’s a bit heavier than the original but still quirky.

6Blocc – Digits (KKK vol.5)
A very detailed dubstep version that updates ‘Numbers’ for the dance floor, it cleverly re-edits the drums and bassline into a half time skank and just about keeps everything from falling down.

Case Managers – Autobahn (KKK vol.5)
Absolutely bonkers Australian version, sounds like it was recorded live at the BBQ after many beers had been consumed, very funny. The singers (all male) seem to get drunker and drunker as the song progresses, the absolute opposite of what Kraftwerk are on record.

Menschmaschine – Spacelab (KKK vol.8) Beautiful jazz version, just stunning, the whole build up of the intro had me from the first listen and I’d say this is probably one of my favourite Kraftwerk covers ever. In fact I recommend the whole Menschmaschine album of jazz cover versions of Kraftwerk’s music

Scala & Kolacny Brothers – Das Modell (KKK vol.8)
‘The Model’ is the most covered song in the band’s catalogue but this one is by a female choir from Belgium. Again another example of a version where there are no electronics and the song is easily carried by the melody and lyrics across to another genre.

You can find all my Kraftwerk Kover Kollection mixes so far here:

Tsugi KraftwerkFoodspread2

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Kraftwerk Special by Mr Sushi inc. KKK 7.5

I did a mini Kraftwerk Kover Kollection (7.5) mix for Mister Sushi‘s Kraftwerk special radio show a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s some more info on the show:
In May 2012, London Fields Radio returned to multi-arts, multi-venue festival Land of Kings in Dalston to host an evening of pop-up radio with guests and hosts from across the festival line-up. We took over the Print House Gallery until midnight with a special selection of shows.

In this podcast, Nuts N’ Bolts presenter Mister Sushi hosts a one-off show in celebration of our favourite Düsseldorf quartet, Kraftwerk, a band whose influence can be clearly seen across Land of Kings festival this year. He’s joined by DJ, blog and club night Feel My Bicep to talk about how and why their legacy lives on in east London today and he premieres an exclusive mix by DJ Food filled with some of his favourite Kraftwerk covers.

Posted in Kraftwerk, Radio. | 4 Comments » |

Kraftwerk month #11 Mash Ups & Bootlegs

Girls On Top ‘I Wanna Dance With Numbers’ 7″, Frenchbloke & Son ‘Sexy Model’ 7″, Late Night Radio 12″, ‘Dark Side Of The Autobahn‘ Mordant Music 7″ picture disc.

These are among the best reworkings I own on vinyl because the artwork perfectly mirrors the contents. I can credit the Girls On Top record for igniting my love of mash ups, I picked it up because of the cover and took a listen in Rough Trade over in Ladbroke Grove the week it came out. It was so insane I had to have it and I remember being slightly worried it would clear the floor the first time I played it out. The crowd went mad for it. ‘Sexy Model’ is a genius pairing of Right Said Fred‘s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ with Kraftwerk’s most known hit; “I’m a model, you know what I mean”. It’s also backed by a latin take on ‘Neon Lights’ and comes on transparent vinyl with a free badge. Graeme Ross, aka ‘Son’ in the duo, helped me greatly when I was first compiling the Kover Kollections too.

Late Night Radio is a mind boggling medley in the same vein as the Stars on 45 records but pitting Kraftwerk with Vangelis, has to be heard to be believed. ‘Dark Side of the Autobahn’ is an excellent coupling of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ with ‘Autobahn’ (as you can probably guess from the title), as well as snatches of Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Simon & Garfunkel and Peter Cook. The B side plays the same track backwards and all of these can be heard scattered around the various Kraftwerk Kover Kollection mix series. Below is a strange artifact from Russian that I picked up, a 5″ red flexi disc of ‘Boing Boom Tschak’, these things pop up all the time for bigger name groups but this is the first Kraftwerk one I’ve seen.

Posted in Kraftwerk. | 3 Comments » |

Kraftwerk month on DJFood.org #1

I’ve decided to make March ‘Kraftwerk month’ on the site, which means I’ll be posting something Kraftwerk-related every day at least. This had been bought on by the recent news of the 8 night residency at MOMA in New York and the subsequent fact that no one I know has managed to get a ticket.

Volume 7 of my on-going Kraftwerk Kover Kollection mix series is way overdue so I plan to have that done by the time the group play their back catalogue (I should attempt vol.8 as well but back in the real world…). Volumes 5 and 6 are already on the web but, due to my old host site BosBos.net no longer being active, I thought I’d put the first four up here as well, one a week, starting with volume …1.

The one that kicked it all off in April 2004, some quite obvious choices here when you start to think of cover versions, don’t worry, they get more obscure as the mixes progress. I’m always on the look out for new versions so please send suggestions but don’t be offended if I don’t include them in future mixes as for every one that makes it, four or five won’t as I’m looking for the odd and left of center rather than the multitude of straight electro / techno covers that are also out there. Also included here is the original artwork I did for the mix: front/back and CD on-body.

Posted in Kraftwerk, Mixes/Solid Steel. | 8 Comments » |

Mixcloud Select Exclusive Mixes

DJFood MSX-01I’ve decided to start doing occasional exclusive mixes this year for subscribers to my Mixcloud Select channel, ticking off that to-do list of themed mixes I’ve been meaning to do forever but never got round to. We’re currently at 99 subscribers and once we hit 100 I’ll post the first of these – a follow up to the 2011 Lynch Party Mix that featured various remixes and productions by Brendan Lynch & Max Heyes aka the Lynchmob.
That means a lot of tripped out 90’s era Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Asian Dub Foundation, Ocean Colour Scene.. no, wait! come back! – these guys made them sound so good and it includes a couple of unreleased Weller remixes too.
For £3 a month you get a weekly archive Solid Steel mix or similar from my archives dating back to the early 90s, full track list, detailed notes and stories from the era. Future exclusives will include an Eno remix collection, the infamous unreleased Sesame Street ‘D Is For Dig’ compilation remastered and at least 2 more Kraftwerk Kover Kollections.
All brand new mixes will be exclusive for at least a year before being made public. Hit the purple button to subscribe, Friday 10.30am GMT is usually the drop time so, if one more person subscribes by then, the first exclusive goes up.

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Beautify Junkyards

SONY DSC

It’s nice to see a band come through who you caught early on. I think Riz Maslen (Neotropic) turned me on to Beautify Junkyards years back after she did some work with them. They had done an excellent cover version of Kraftwerk‘s ‘Radio Activity’ which I stuck on volume 8 of my Kraftwerk Kover Kollection mixes.SONY DSC

They released two albums and a 45 appeared on Ghost Box‘s ‘Other Voices’ single series, and now the label are releasing a third LP this March, ‘The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards’. On first listen, the single, ‘Aquarius’ is their best yet and the video, directed by João Pedro Moreira, suits it down to the ground. Pre-order HERE

SONY DSC

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Kraftweek 1 – ‘Autobahn’ live at the Tate Modern

I’ll be posting a week of entries dedicated to Kraftwerk from today (Kraftweek? – sorry) highlighting ephemera, esoterica and oddities to do with the band. Friday the 8th will see Solid Steel premiere the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol. 8 – this time heavily focusing on jazz, piano and acoustic cover versions.

Tonight the group kick off eight nights at the Tate Modern in London with ‘Autobahn’, their biggest chart hit after ‘The Model’. I’ll be going alongside fellow fan Osymyso who graciously got me a ticket after the Great Tate Ticket Meltdown of last year. I, like many others, spent half a day fruitlessly trying and failing to get any joy from their phone lines.

The original album was released in 1974 but back in 1985 – after ’82’s No.1 success of ‘The Model’ and ’83’s ‘Tour De France’ single but the non-appearance of the aborted ‘Techno Pop’ album – ‘Autobahn’ was reissued and ‘digitally re-mixed’ with amended artwork. The back cover photo of the old line up in the back seat of their car (itself visually altered at the time to reflect the changing line up) was replaced entirely with a black and white live shot of the band from the mid seventies.

Aside from a new catalogue no. (Auto 1) there was virtually no other info on the sleeve, even the track titles were relegated to the labels on the disc despite a colour inner sleeve bearing the blue Autobahn logo inside on both sides. To my ears there is no difference in the audio at all, ‘digitally remixed’ probably being used for ‘remastered’ in this instance. The advert to the right was taken from a copy of Record Mirror from June 15th ’85.


Here’s the fantastic appearance they made on ‘Tomorrow’s World’ around the time of the original release, check Florian at the end.

Posted in Gigs, Kraftwerk. | 2 Comments » |

Kraftweek

Tomorrow I’ll be starting a week of posts relating to a certain German band who will begin eight nights at the Tate Modern museum in London. Each day will feature something, hopefully that most of you won’t have seen or heard before, connected to the band just for the fun of it and because they’re bringing Der Katalog to the UK. Friday’s Solid Steel will feature the eighth volume in my Kraftwerk Kover Kollection mix series alongside an excellent set from Israel’s Group Modular.

Posted in Kraftwerk. | 2 Comments » |

Love, love, love!

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog these last two weeks because I’ve been busy finishing the fulldome show for this weekend’s FulldomeUK2012 (tickets still available) and gigging in Tel Aviv, Berlin and Bucharest. There’s loads of stuff to come when I can find time to photograph and upload it all though. The studio is a mess, I can’t find anything without moving piles of crap, I need a day to sort stuff out but today won’t be it unfortunately.

Also this Sunday sees an appearance at The Regeneration Festival at the Tabernacle in London that runs for Saturday and Sunday and features Time & Space Machine, Wolf People, Bardo Light Show, talks and films on the psychedelic experience.
Besides that there’s all sorts of things going on behind the scenes as we prepare for 2013 and Solid Steel being 25 years old, starting with a new residency in Brighton at the Blind Tiger, starting this Friday with DK with support from 2econd Class Citizen and Banks.

Coming up: The 4xLP repress of ‘The Search Engine’ – yep, still not done, we went back and changed the cover from a heavy card gatefold to a quad foldout gatefold (remember the limited edition Paul’s Boutique LP? yes, like that), so I have to reconfigure the artwork this week.

Currently finishing a mix for Solid Steel that has a high proportion of music I was given in Israel, both old and new that is up there with the best of anything currently released on labels like Finders Keepers or Now Again (see the post of Markey Funk‘s ‘The Mystery of Mordy Laye & The Group Modular‘).
On Saturday I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the ‘Man Machine’ performance by Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf next January (thanks Tony Morley!) so I will be doing Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol.8 to coincide with that early next year (the group are doing their 8 albums over 8 nights thing in their home town in case you didn’t hear, tickets sold out in less than 2 hours).

Posted in DJ Food, Gigs, Music. | 1 Comment » |

Solid Steel – Yppah 1981 & DJ Food KKK7 preview

Mine and Yppah‘s mix from last night’s Solid Steel – without chat, you can listen to me and Jon fluff our lines over on StrongroomAlive if you want. Yppah’s mix contains tracks all released in 1981, and, coincidentally, ends with Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ before we get a taste of half of the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol.7 which debuts here tomorrow in full.

Posted in DJ Food, Kraftwerk, Mixes/Solid Steel, Ninja Tune, Radio, Solid Steel. | No Comments » |