Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk – Minimum-Maximum (2005)

The death last month of Kraftwerk’s founding member Florian Schneider prompted an outpouring of love and respect for the phenomenal achievements of the pioneering German electronic act.

Kraftwerk has been a constant source of inspiration in my own little world of music consumerism across more than 40 years, but where does any newcomer start when it comes to discovering the music of Kraftwerk?

Well, the lazy way, and certainly the most cost effective way of doing it, is to start right here, with Minimum-Maximum, because virtually all of Kraftwerk’s key tracks are to be found in one form or another on Minimum-Maximum.

But that, of course, would be to deny yourself the pleasure of experiencing fine studio albums like Autobahn, The Man Machine, and Computer World. So while I’m about to strongly recommend Minimum-Maximum as a first-class example of Kraftwerk at its best, I also feel compelled to point out that nobody (and certainly no newbie) will totally “get” Kraftwerk purely on the strength of listening to one live compilation album, albeit a double album set. So do yourself a favour, you know what needs to be done, and the three aforementioned albums are all ideal tasters.

Kraftwerk’s musical influence can be seen everywhere – they are to electronic music what Microsoft and Windows ’95 were to operating systems, yet these four geeky German blokes somehow managed to anticipate the technological age way back when Bill Gates was still just a goggle-eyed naval-gazing schoolboy wearing oversized shorts. If Kraftwerk’s music was futuristic in the mid-to-late Seventies and throughout the Eighties (and it was), it has lost little of its impact thanks to all of the advances in technology that have taken place since … and hey, there’s been a few.

Consequently, it might be said that Kraftwerk as a “live” act has never sounded better than it has in recent years, even better perhaps than it did in its so-called prime – and what better way to test that theory than to pack up the laptops, processors, and synthesizers and take them on the road, on a world tour no less? ... something that ultimately led to the Grammy Award-winning Minimum-Maximum, a 22-track live extravaganza recorded in 2004 at a variety of venues across the globe (see London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, and several other less exotic locations).

It is, to cut a very long story short, a superb album; a live document and a Greatest Hits rolled into one, by one of the most important “bands” of all-time. Yes, all-time. I can’t really say much more than that.

Note – the album comes in two versions – English and German.

Ten Essential Kraftwerk tracks found on Minimum-Maximum: ‘Tour de France’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘The Model’, ‘Neon Lights’, ‘Radioactivity’, ‘Trans Europe Express’, ‘Computer World’, ‘Pocket Calculator’, ‘The Robots’, and ‘Aéro Dynamik’.