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Here’s what we said when we reviewed this excellent album in Electronic Sound:
Fred und Luna are a pair of mannequins in a shop window in the town of Karlsruhe, Germany, where they serve as the motionless muses for one Rainer Büchmuller, a musician/poet and photo/video maker. If this is all sounding a bit Eurotrash, don’t worry, because the end result is a fun and finely wrought homage to German electronic music of the 1970s.
It all comes across like a crackers thought experiment, to replicate the contents a cassette tape of lost Kling Klang demos in which Ralf & Co had been exploring the pop potential of their machine music. From the organic sweetness of side two of ‘Autobahn’ to the clinical perfection of ‘Computer World’, with a bit of Cluster thrown in, channelled through the impassive showroom dummies themselves.
And so ’Nur ein viertelsstündchen’ and ‘Aventüre 1’ float around the early pastoral beauty of early Kraftwerk, while also echoing with the gentle side of Neu! and Cluster’s magical appeal. ‘Tanz mit mir’ moves towards the regimented and robotic, ‘The Man-Machine’ and ’Schaufensterpuppen’ neck of the laboratory.
By the time ‘Eins null eins eins null’ rolls up, (numbers!) you get the impression that Fred und Luna are almost willing a new Kraftwerk album into existence. It’s only amplified by ‘Wir atmen digital’ with its 8-bit intonations and electro-clave rhythms dancing across the stereo field.
It strays from its Kraftwerk brief enough to keep it varied and not too monomaniacal with ‘Es ist so schön’ with its schlager girl/boy vocals, while the piano piece ‘Sommer’ has Roedelius all over it. ’Morgen’, another pastoral moment, is like an electronic U2 doing ‘With Or Without You’ with the advantage of not being U2.
Büchmuller has coined a couple of new sub-genres to describe his work: elektrokraut and krautelektro, and this is the fourth Fred und Luna album. By taking Kraftwerk and their 1970s underground contemporaries as the blueprint, he’s been able to parlay it into an extended aesthetic output with its own appeal. He’s taken Kraftwerk’s titanium frame and dressed it in different fashions. It might need a metal pole up its arse to stay upright, but it does stand up on its own and looks great, too.
