Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk 2

"Kraftwerk 2", the middle album of this period of apprenticeship, was recorded in just six days at the end of 1971 and released in January of the following year. In the studio, alongside the duo Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, is the Krautrock guru, producer and sound engineer Conny Plank.

Six tracks, the first titled "Kling Klang" and important if only because a few years later the band's legendary, mysterious, and inaccessible private recording studio will be renamed with the same name. In the 17 minutes of this track, you hear a bit of everything: an introduction entrusted to the metallic sound of percussion that then gives way to three distinct episodes in which flute, keyboards, drum-box, and magnetic tape manipulations coexist in accelerando and ritardando.

A strongly eclectic approach is found throughout the album: just listen to "Atem", an anguished breath similar to the white noise of sophisticated electronic music, or the distorted electric guitar timbre whose strings resonate open at the beginning of "Strom". And the lysergic sounds of "Spule 4" and "Wellenlänge", tracks stylistically very similar to each other, or even the tape manipulation of a harmonica in the concluding "Harmonika".

In short, you hear everything and its opposite in this album, which despite being far from the stylistic and formal achievements of the subsequent works, is not unpleasant to listen to at all. There's no need to recommend it to the band's fans, who already know it, for everyone else, the advice is to turn to the band's better-known works.

Unless one of you likes to spy through the keyhole: it's the sensation you get listening to "Kraftwerk 2", that is, peeking into the rehearsal room of a pioneering band that had not yet become great.