Organisation
Tone Float

Only God knows what went through Hutter and Schneider's minds when they decided to record "Tone Float." Perhaps not even Mr. Conny Plank, the producer of it all as usual, was aware of it. They weren't yet Kraftwerk; don't be fooled by the clever reissues, they were Organisation. A quintet that, besides them, included Butch Hauf (bassist), Basil Hammoudi, and Fred Monicks (percussionists). For a long time, too long, this album was a fugitive from the Kraut stage, marginalized, as if disowned, overshadowed by the subsequent "Autobahn," "The Man Machine," and so on.

That's electronic music, truly great music no doubt, but this is Kraut, the real one, the most extreme and experimental one, with a capital K.

This is magnificently demonstrated by the over twenty minutes of the Title-Track that opens everything with incredibly primitive and enveloping Aboriginal percussion. Then, halfway through the piece, everything stops, slows down, and a synthesizer appears, when it was still a luxury for the few, to then continue, changing tone, as if it was a natural thing, as if it wasn't August of a distant 1970. Twenty minutes and more of pure experimentation, with a past in black music, a present in the experimentalism so fashionable in that Germany, and a future yet to be defined. Then it moves on to "Milk Rock," much shorter but equally astounding: it seems that Brian Eno & David Byrne, and his Talking Heads from Remain In Light, have been catapulted ten years earlier for a first version of My Life In The Bush Of Ghost. This track flies in its sonic splintering and in its sound crafting so abstract yet at the same time concrete: and Conny Plank hones his skills before Neu!. And then, church bells, from those abandoned churches in the mystical forests of ancient populations believed extinct for centuries, but which instead send impulses straight from the center of the earth. It's "Silver Forest" and with its chimes guided by a crazy synthesizer, they accompany us into this sound forest, as narrow as it is fascinating. Percussion, pure percussion in the next track. "Rythm Salad" is this, four minutes of energy in the form of rhythm, and nothing more. To conclude is "Noitasinagro," a balanced line between violins and percussion, offspring of American experimentalism (Velvet Underground), with an increasingly dilated and distorted progression that closes the album in a rhythmic crescendo as it began.

The original edition is this one here, while later in a late '90s reissue, a long track was added, "Vor dem blauen Bock", of notable craftsmanship that does not spoil the context, on the contrary, even if it is too structured around feedback and guitar distortions not really abundant in the album. Yet it is erroneous because it does not belong to Organisation but to the early Kraftwerk, and the original title was Rückstoss Gondoliere.

This, in short, is the beginning of the Kraftwerk adventure, but above all the only episode of the Organisation comet which, if it had lived longer, would surely have anticipated contemporary music by a few years. But the history (of rock) is not built with ifs and buts, but only from the flow of events, occasionally marked by masterpieces worth highlighting and going back to. This is certainly one of those. So do not hesitate to let yourself be taken to that enchanted forest with that timeless sound. And remember: they are not Kraftwerk, they are Organisation.