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 opening Act for the GemJam festival back in 1993:
DJ Ottic with the, back then, somewhat new DJing technique, of using two Commodore Amiga computers and the soundtracker, creating tracks completely loops from sampled loops.
The bloke without a baseball cap is me improvising some additional riffs on an old Roland Juno - sometimes it even works... :)
This is the first in a series of upcoming videos - I just captured the old tape on which we recorded this track here as well as the upcoming tunes, who are a mix of works by Stephan Riess, DJ Ottic and myself that we arranged and practised solely for this gig using my home studio Equippment.
There will be pretentiousness and material that, in hindsight, is a little embarassing - but some imo pretty cool tunes too.
