This just in today:
OFF THE RECORD OUT NOW!
THE ALBUM "OFF THE RECORD"
For Off the Record, Karl Bartos has opened up his music archive for the very first time. He rediscovered and analysed hundreds of tapes, piles of sheet music, and years of digital media. Inspired by his acoustic diary and adding his experience as a composer and producer, he has created twelve brand new songs, written and performed with masterly skill.
It took him two years to accomplish this original Bartos album: iron crystal music, vocoder newspeak, robot sounds, digital glitch, techno pop, catchy melodies, electronic avant-garde, roaring silence, futurism, and, of course, those rhythms! Rhythms of brutal minimalistic impact as found on the much-sampled "Numbers" recorded three decades ago and described by Mike Banks of Underground Resistance as "the secret code of electronic funk".
SECOND SINGLE "WITHOUT A TRACE OF EMOTION"
What must it be like for an artist to live with the image of being a legend? Surely not the worst thing that can happen. But is it always a comfortable experience? This single, lifted from his new album "Off The Record" sees Karl Bartos reflect upon the creative period as a member of the legendary group Kraftwerk for the first time. He meets the showroom dummy Herr Karl, his alter ego, and they strike up a conversation. Bartos reveals a sharp sense of humour and self-irony through the film which accompanies the single, referencing every conceivable cliché of pop stardom: dress code, interviews, champagne, mirror image, persecution complex. Yet Herr Karl, as one might suspect, remains unwaveringly cool, "without a trace of emotion".
The track composed as long ago as 1980 and now produced afresh by Karl Bartos, is THE pop song on the album, complete with lead vocals, intense power and irresistible joie de vivre. Electronic drums, sequencer bass, a signature Bartos melody on the Minimoog and impressionistic arpeggios, inimitable characteristics which amount to an aural history of electronic pop music, condensed into 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
Out now as download release and film premiere on Electronic Beats!