Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, a largely graphic view

I’m posting this for myself for reference, it’s something I began to write a year or two ago, but never got round to finishing. I don’t expect anyone else to read it.

I recently began to browse eBay in order to acquire vinyl copies of the Kraftwerk albums that I already own on CD and, in some cases, previously owned on pre-recorded cassette or vinyl. In the early 1980s I was the owner of three of the four seminal albums that the group released. The exception was the group’s first hit record, Autobahn, which also served as my own introduction to their music. The album remains in my father’s possession: it’s the nearest thing, at least from my point of view, that my family has to an heirloom. Over the years I’ve parted company with the non-CD versions of the albums for a variety of reasons: theft, carelessness and the desire to take advantage of the portability of CD.

I’m no vinyl purist, in fact my record player remains on the top of a bedroom cupboard where it was stored some years ago when my children were young. I’m repurchasing the vinyl albums now, primarily to be able to look at the graphics at their original size, and I’m therefore taking care to secure copies that retain their original inner picture sleeves. The little details become much more obvious in the original 12” format, more of which later. I’m also keen to get a sense of what the group’s records were like when they were first released. Held in my hands, there’s something distinctly talismanic about these LP sleeves, a quality only strengthened by the increasing virtualisation of music in recent years.

My first successful bid resulted in the arrival of the group’s 1977 album, Trans-Europe Express. It was delivered to my work address and sat propped up on my desk for a number of weeks. It’s not a mint copy, but it is in decent condition with only a few minor marks and the ghost of a circle caused by the impression of the vinyl disc on the outer card sleeve. I know it’s a cliché, but I value my copy’s marks and stains. The signs of wear and tear are unique and infinitely more endearing than the unsettling cracks that CD jewel cases are all too prone to acquire.

Over the weeks of my increasing acquaintance, I’ve become fascinated by, and increasingly enamoured of, the front cover of the Trans-Europe Express album. I’ve yet to tire of looking at it and find myself caught up in the enigma of the four men and the music the image prefigures. The act of repeated looking has prompted some thoughts about its visual design, how the record was intended to be experienced at the time of its release and how that image has metamorphosed in what is, at the time of writing, almost three decades since its release.

=== THE FRONT COVER ===

The front cover remained the primary subject of my examination. On removing the album from its brown cardboard packaging I’d expected to tire of the seemingly straightforward image and to turn my attention to the inner sleeve. However, I became increasingly mesmerised by the group photograph. Small thumbnails really do fail to do the image justice. There’s something fascinating about the scale of the large group portrait which occupies most of the 12″ square surface.

The first impression is of the photograph being, in some unspecified way, unreal. The four men seem to float before the viewer like a gentle illusion. Although they appear to be ordinary, soberly dressed men, there is undoubtedly something odd about the image. Each of the four men gaze into the distance, each in a different direction, but always upwards and outwards. Three pairs of blue eyes, one a hazel brown. The group are arranged in pyramid fashion, a variation of which would be reprised nine years later for the cover of Electric Cafe. The tallest member, Florian Schneider, is at the rear and seems to be very slightly larger in scale than his colleagues. Each man’s complexion is smooth and entirely free of blemishes, their expressions are serious, intent, but calm. The light shines on their brilliantined hair and smooth, blank foreheads as if to say ‘we are intellectuals, the focus of our endeavour is the mind’. The light casts shadows that are subtly inconsistent and creates a pale halo around the group, illuminating the men against a sepia backdrop. The suits and ties of the two founding members of the group, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter, are sober grey affairs; the sartorial choices of the two percussionists, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, are a little more daring: the former has chosen a black shirt and gold tie with green and red detail for the occasion, the latter sports a shiny black jacket and slender black tie with leaf motifs traced in white. It’s impossible to tell whether they’re standing or sitting.

The sense of unreality can in part be attributed to the image’s composite nature, each man photographed separately and then placed seamlessly beside his colleagues with the skilled use of airbrush and scalpel. The name of the photographic studio responsible for this careful construction is visible in the bottom left corner of the photograph: ‘J. Stara, Paris’, a name that Google refuses to reveal any information about, an enterprise steadfastly of another, pre-digital era. Indeed, the group themselves couldn’t look more out of time, more removed from the punk movement exploding around them. These four men are models of something. Though they’re too detailed to wholly represent the titular showroom dummies of the album’s third track, there is much about them that is inaccessible, they’re forever still. There’s no eye contact with the viewer and the arrangement of the four men projects a sense of distance, of removal from their audience. Seen from another perspective, these men might be urbane professionals, perhaps a small company of architects or town planners – the photograph captures them in contemplative mood.

The group’s name and the title of the album preside above the group photograph. Rendered in white against the black background of the cover’s border, the double-spaced Futura Serie caps is a sans-serif typeface redolent of elegant efficiency: there is no wasted movement here, no extraneous decoration in the design of each letterform. The back cover credits ‘Ink Studios Dusseldorf’ for the ‘Typografie’. Each of the four words is bordered horizontally by three slender white lines that stretch to the edge of the photograph, subtly evoking both rails and musical staves. There is a hint of delicate tension between the sleight of hand nature of the portrait and the dignified typography that sits above it.

=== THE OTHER GRAPHICS ===

The group photograph that serves as first and lasting visual impression of the album, Trans-Europe Express, is the album’s predominant image. However, there are three further surfaces (six if you count the labels and the spine of the cover) to examine. Two of these surfaces reveal further photographs of the group. After the deceptively simple, but rich presentation on the front cover (analogous in many ways to the group’s musical approach as a whole), the back is something of a disappointment. It’s rendered in black and white, as if to emphasise its secondary importance. The single, fairly small group portrait is noticeably more informal, subjected to less post-processing than J. Stara’s highly stylised assemblage. The image is the work of a different photographic studio: Maurice Seymour New York is written in a whimsical, almost florid typeface in the bottom right corner of the image. The group are placed before a curtain and this time affably, if still a little distantly, engage the viewer’s gaze.

The final, inner sleeve photo shows the group seated at a cafe table. Perhaps they’re waiting to be served, certainly no condiments or glasses trouble the small table with its chequered cloth. Behind them can be spied an alpine scene, green mountains and a blue lake, while above the quartet a large tree partially obscures a blue sky replete with hazy white clouds. The tree would surely provide these rosy-cheeked men with ample shade were not the whole image a studio confection, attributable this time to Emil Schult, the group’s fifth non-musician member. Perhaps they have travelled to this spot by rail, perhaps they’re sojourning here to escape for a quiet moment. What’s certain is that a stanza of the album’s first track, Europe Endless appears to perfectly encapsulate this scene:

Flüsse, Berge, Wälder
Europa Endlos
Wirklichkeit und Postkarten Bilder
Europa Endlos

(Rivers, mountains, forests
Europe endless
Reality and postcard pictures
Europe endless)

The other insert surface restates the track listing and supplies credits against a backdrop of musical staves. Each song is illustrated by a line drawing or manipulation of musical notes.

With its muscular, capped arpeggios and the remorseless clatter of its metallic percussion, the title track conveys a sense of immense power channelled into ceaseless forward motion. The Trans-Europe Express is experienced as a mechanical beast racing over great distances: “Leave Paris in the morning… In Vienna we sit… back to Düsseldorf City…”. Seen in this light, the imagery and overall design of the album cover may appear to be a failure of the imagination. Why illustrate such drama and power with an image of four soberly dressed bourgeois staring calmly into an undefined middle distance?

The key to the enigma of the group portrait on the front cover may ultimately elude conclusive analysis, but the lyrical and musical content of the album provide much evidence for an informed interpretation. Each of the seven compositions (Europe Endless, The Hall Of Mirrors, Showroom Dummies, Trans-Europe Express, Metal On Metal, Franz Schubert and Endless Endless) can be categorised as either an expression of the conscious or of the subconscious. The exception is the title track which unites the two. Europe Endless, Franz Schubert and Endless Endless serve as introduction to, and conclusion of, the album. These three songs express a sense of calm rationality, edged with a certain wistfulness. The music itself is characterised by echoing thematic vocals and gently soaring melodies wedded to patient tempi. Together these convey an impression of lucid progress and a feeling of over-arching timelessness. Allowing for the visual and textual context of the album as a whole, these pieces reflect the political and cultural uniting of a continent. They also act as a framing device for the title track which, at almost 13 minutes in length, is the album’s longest composition. The album’s drama occurs within this frame. Acting as counterbalance to what might otherwise become stultifying in its very rationality, The Hall Of Mirrors and Showroom Dummies together convey a keen sense of foreboding and dread. The feeling of disquiet which gradually increases in intensity over the course of the former track finds its ultimate expression in Showroom Dummies. Here, the nightmare intrudes into the light of day as the titular mannequins/servants literally break through the plate glass windows behind which they have been imprisoned. Clearly as much a lament about the tribulations of fame and its impact upon the group as its predecessor, the song ends with liberating humour, both typical of the group and remarkably prescient of their second life as progenitors of more than two decades of dance music:

We start to move
And we break the glass
(…)
We step out
And take a walk through the city
(…)
We go into a club
And there we start to dance

This irruption of the subconscious into the light of day is succeeded by the title track and its percussive coda, Metal On Metal. The  primary focus of the first section of the two-part composition is both the smooth efficiency of the journey and the railway’s integration of three European cities, Paris, Vienna and the group’s hometown of Düsseldorf. The lyrics refer to a journey from Paris to Vienna (1,200 km) followed by a return trip to Düsseldorf (930 km). The music communicates a sense of inexorable progress undertaken at a relatively stately pace. There is nothing of the accelerated, but disengaged experience of plane travel about the journey. As the lyrics state, the narrator meets his colleagues in Paris in the morning and only reach Vienna in time to “…sit in a late-night café”. Although the music and lyrics don’t directly state such a feeling, the experience is implicitly romantic. There is surely only a small minority of people (perhaps jaded by the privatisation of networks in certain countries) who would fail to feel a thrill at the prospect of a trans-continental train journey. Metal On Metal whisks the listener out of the comfort of the passenger carriage and thrusts her into the engine room of the locomotive or inches away from the tracks as the train races over points towards its destination. The sense of the harnessing of elemental power to enable the traversing of a continent, from one end to the other, is irresistible.

The Trans-Europe Express, now a defunct entity, was established in the same year as the European Economic Community. Contrary to the image of a single train travelling from A to B and back, the service was a luxury diesel network jointly operated by Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. As such it was a key element in the post-war unification of the continent and an expression of rational, industrialised democracy 12 years after the end of Germany’s National Socialist nightmare. However, as if to belie this sense of pragmatic realism, the experience of the music itself verges upon the monstrous, the percussive locked groove of Metal On Metal becomes tyrannical in its ceaseless repetition and the metallic storm and stress of points changing and buffer hurtling against buffer. Any new listener to this symphony of noise and rhythm would surely have expected to see its composers dressed in industrial clothes, not unlike the workers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Instead the aforementioned smartly dressed young men preside calmly over their creation. Their gaze doesn’t meet the viewer’s, their thoughts appear to be elsewhere:

Sometimes he saw his real face
And sometimes a stranger at his place
(…)
He made up the person he wanted to be
And changed into a new personality
(…)
The artist is living in the mirror
With the echoes of himself
(…)

(The Hall Of Mirrors)

Thus, viewed from the conscious/subconscious perspective, Trans-Europe Express as a whole thematically alternates between each mode in an A-B-A-B-A structure. The album conveys the experience of multiple journeys: the overt one of continental travel, the movement between rational and irrational and the changing feelings of the group as they seek to negotiate the experience of new-found fame. Beginning and ending in the rational, the group seek to engage with their audience on their own terms from the broadcast studio and during their leisure time, but primarily – as on the front cover image – they look away to a place the viewer cannot see. Removed from engagement, they might each be seated in a train compartment, deep in their own thoughts and memories.

= SECONDARY THEME =

The album can also be understood as an exploration of the disjunction between image and reality. This theme is referred to first in The Hall Of Mirrors lyric and in Europe Endless, both quoted above:

Europe endless
Real life and postcard views
(…)

The album’s imagery also negotiates the line between artifice and realism, ultimately eluding reduction to one or the other. The front cover image, in particular, shows four men who look nothing like a group of popular musicians, let alone musicians whose instrumentation is exclusively electronic and therefore, at the time of recording, resolutely forward-looking. (compare with other performers of the time e.g. Cluster, but also ) On the other hand, the back cover image’s placement of the group in front of a full-length curtain, together with their muted smiles implies that the group are in fact performers, though in an unspecified medium perhaps.

The uncertain duality is also embodied in the music of the title track itself. Just as the synthesizer’s sweep on Autobahn simulated the passing of vehicles at high speed, so too does the overarching rhythmic motif of the title track here, effectively simulate the sound of metal wheels on metal tracks and the power of rail travel experienced at track side. This is music as transliteration, as trompe l’oeil effect that becomes something more in the experiencing. Trans-Europe Express begs the question: Are we listening to the sound of a railway train roaring by or a musical composition? The two previously distinct entities (e)merge into a third form, redolent of the musique concrete of Pierres Schaeffer and Henry, yet recast and made newly accessible via a syncretic melodicism that unifies experience of the industrial with that of the cultural.
The last but one composition, Franz Schubert, likewise reveals a certain dualism: the composer, a classical composer who died prematurely in the early part of the 19th century, is famous for his melodic, harmonious writing.

> EXPLORE FURTHER

The closing refrain ‘Endless’ with its single echo is intoned using a vocoder, a combination of speech encoder and synthesizer originally developed to optimise speech for narrow bandwidth radio communication. This statement utilises a technology that effectively mechanises speech, retaining meaning while removing most of the elements that make a particular human voice unique. Could there be a degree of horror encoded into this repeated word? There is certainly an overtly ambiguous tension that may either be interpreted as communicating a mechanical, ever-repeating future or, perhaps more optimistically, as something comforting in its continuation, tradition subjected to ever-modulating interpretation.
Explore relationship between the innovative, synthetic sound of the music as created on synthesizers and the focus upon themes located in the past as much as the future (Franz Schubert,

= GRAPHICALLY, WITHIN THE GROUP’S OEUVRE =

If the historical revisionism of the boxed set of eight remastered albums – ‘Der Katalog’, wherein Autobahn constitutes Kraftwerk’s debut release – is accepted, Trans-Europe Express’s cover is the third of seven group images. More importantly, it’s the first album on which the group choose to appear as the primary focus of attention. Each release from this point onwards depicts the group on the front cover. The only exception is The Mix (1991) on which a robot version of Ralf Hutter appears on its own. The decision to remake themselves as visual products is of course a common practice in popular music, but as with much of the rest of the group’s practice, the sense of consistency, refinement and gradual change is remarkable.
Each album’s image of the group is a different point on an arc that originates in the purely human and ends, at the time of writing, in the union of man and (ecologically sustainable) machine in the image of the Tour de France athlete. As well as a visual reflection upon the increasing technologisation of the individual, a theme implicit in every recording from Autobahn onwards, this may also be interpreted psychologically as a slow-motion mapping of the group’s reaction to, and recoiling from, fame. This narrative sees Kraftwerk debut as a quartet of long-haired hippies crammed into the back seat of a car (perhaps one of Florian Schneider’s beloved Mercedes). This image, which filled the back cover of the Autobahn LP (1974), is striking both for its informality and for its failure to reflect the singular electronic music that it presages. However, two elements link it to the cover design of Trans-Europe Express. First, the nature of the group portrait itself, four men each looking in different directions; and secondly the image’s sense of artifice: visible through the windows of the car is Emil Schult’s graphic of an idealised country landscape, a variation of the album’s front cover image.

Autobahn’s successor, the punningly titled Radio-Activity saw the group banished from the outer sleeve to the inner by the portrayal of the front and rear of a 1930s Deutscher Kleinempfänger radio. On the inner sleeve, the group stand before a curtain dressed in smart suits. The photo is a clear precursor to the front cover of Trans-Europe Express. 1978’s The Man Machine saw the robotic theme of the album’s opening and closing tracks acted out by the group dressed in red shirts, black ties and red lipstick. Videos recorded at the time saw the group replaced by mannequins that, somewhat confusingly, substituted for actual robots. Only with the cover of 1991’s The Mix did the group use actual robots.

as humans acting as robots (Man Machine), virtual images on a computer screen (Computer World), semi-articulated automata (The Mix), and finally as men harmoniously integrated with their machines (Tour De France Soundtracks).

= Through to the traumatic dismemberments of the group’s robotic familiars =

… also the similarities to the Beatles… =

= WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF OTHER MUSIC =

= The afterlife of the album, rediscovered and sampled by Afrika Bambaata and the Soulsonic Force on Planet Rock, leading onto the group’s second life as an inspiration to a planet’s worth of dance and electronic musicians…

=== CONCLUSION ===

= The group itself has retroactively refitted only the title track for its remix album, The Mix (1991). In doing so, the album’s other five tracks were discarded. Only in the occasional concerts of late 2006 has Showroom Dummies been resurrected. For all that, the conceptual complexity of the album remains only in the issue of its original form.

= Mention that the cover of the album in The Catalogue has been reduced to a graphic symbol… In the simplifying, something is inevitably lost…

= Remains an enigma…

Footnotes:

It’s a similar scenario to the love that some of us feel for secondhand, dog-eared books. However, I wonder whether there’s more love ultimately for music than there is for literature. Unprovable for sure, but at least in this day and age, there’s surely more adoration for the almost instantly consumable than the continuous application that the reading of books requires. Whether or not that’s the case, music always eludes us, staying a step ahead at the very moment that we’re abreast of it, Xeno’s paradox-like. I can’t help but feel that this experience is best embodied in the vinyl record with its near two-dimensionality: look along its edge and it almost winks out of existence.

On impulse I bought a newly repressed copy of Computer World on transparent yellow vinyl, but because it lacks the sense of age and use of an  original copy, it just doesn’t seem the same.

This photograph was enlarged and used as the front cover on  the German release of the album.

The psychological meditation of The Hall Of Mirrors on the distorting nature of fame makes it prime evidence for arguing with Kraftwerk neophytes about the so-called solely machinic aspects of the group’s oeuvre.

At time of writing (December 2006), Der Katalog was still described on the group’s official website as “Kling Klang studio digital master 2004”.

I’m aware that certain albums were issued in differently configured sleeves in different territories, but the purpose of this piece I’m focusing upon the most widely issued sleeve designs as reference points.

The group’s invisible fifth member, sometime lyricist, art director and non-musician.