2. Kraftwerk—Radio-Activity (1975)
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[SOS SOS SOS SOS]
—"Radio-Activity" Kraftwerk
Half a billion miles from the imminent collision between the Earth and Moon, another moon, Callisto, orbits Jupiter peacefully. It's been circling this way for several aeons and it will continue doing so for many more. Its skin is grooved and craggy and cratered—evidence of ancient collisions and assorted tumult—and yet it persists in its steady revolutions, millennia after millennia after millennia, around and around and around. There are no days here, as its orbit is tidally locked to Jupiter, with one side always facing the planet and the other always facing away. There's no real weather either. Callisto has only the feeblest of atmospheres barely clinging to the surface, and even the levels of radiation descending from space are minimal. It's a world of cold, gray rock and glittering frost, beautiful in the starkest of ways, but like most of the universe, harsh and completely unaffected by the life-centric drama taking place just two planets away.
Despite its nerdiness and occasional deadpan humor,
Radio-Activity is really quite cold and remote as well. That's not a criticism by the way, it's one of the album's strengths. Before laptops—before even popularly available sequencers—four guys from Düsseldorf managed to force their own playing to sound so completely, utterly ordered that it defies belief. Though their music is often associated with machinery, I think it goes far beyond that. This is the perfect sound of electrons circling nuclei—or of comets returning to the same star every century. This is music with the patience of non-life. And yet, just like in the radioactive depths of the universe, there is incredible beauty here. The austere pop hooks of "Radioactivity", "Radioland", "Airwaves" and "Antenna" shimmer with appealing precision. The experimental minimalism of "Intermission", "News", "The Voice of Energy" and "Radio Stars" wrap you in a surprisingly cozy cocoon that feels like the warmest inner decks of some distant space station. The elegant, classically informed "Transistor" and "Uranium" parade the abstract allure of pure physics before you. And the album closer "Ohm Sweet Ohm" somehow manages to combine all of it into one glorious warm, cold, innocent, bleak, minimal, awe-inspiring vision of the universe as a place of both action and stasis, where death and destruction are but exquisite equations of matter and energy transference.
Not only does
Radio-Activity manage to achieve such stunning levels of aural expression but it does so in such an isolated way. Maybe that's part of the appeal. This album sounds like virtually nothing that was being released at the time when it came out. It contains custom-built instruments. It was the first album Kraftwerk released on their own label, Kling Klang. It was self-produced. The artwork was designed by one of the band members. It's like the band's own little satellite, circling some distant planet, far removed from the 1970s musical mainstream, sensors picking up distant radiation of dying stars and the final radio transmissions of doomed civilizations.