Kraftwerk - "Man Machine"
In 1978 I was given a cassette copy of "Man Machine" by my friend Geir Jenssen, who would later rise to electronic ambient fame under the name Biosphere.
Geir had presented the album to me on his portable cassette player during a weekend trip to a cabin in the mountains near our hometown Tromsø a few weeks before, and had left me with a copy when we returned to civilization.
Of course Ralf & Florian would never see a penny in royalties for this copy, although I later bought the record on vinyl and thereby proved a point in early filesharing politics.
I was 12 years old at the time, and heavily into hobby electronics.
My grand Kraftwerk moment came as I was sitting at my desk in my room, soldering the components of my first simple FM radio kit onto a readymade PCB.
I had just put on the tape Geir gave me, and returned to my work. Seconds later, a power failure hit our neighborhood, and straight after the intro of "We are the robots" - just as the first beat set in - the lights in my room started flickering wildly to the analogue synth beat emanating from my small battery-powered tape-deck.
This, combined with the toxic fumes rising from my soldering iron, made me realize that I'd hit on something BIG - something very important.
It was a sign.
It was as if I, in this very instant, instinctively knew that this was the future. My future. Not only in music, but all across society in the world that I would grow up into.
My mate down the road picked up "Never mind the bollocks" by the Sex Pistols around the same time.
He tried to convince me that punk was the future.
I thought that was rather silly and a contradiction in terms, as I associated the slogan "No future" with punk.
Now, as Kraftwerk's visions of their beloved Computerworld have mostly become reality, and even punk bands record their three chord eruptions onto computers, I realize that without the punk attitude my generation inherited, and the DIY ethics that rose from the ashes, the Computerworld would have been a very dull and scary world to live in.
And I guess so do Ralf, Florian, Karl and Wolfgang, too.
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