Line Noise

If Kraftwerk are the electronic Beatles, then Karl Bartos is their George Harrison: an essential third voice and creative power in a band away from the formational duo, whose contributions are among the absolute highlights of the band’s stories career.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Bartos joined Kraftwerk in 1975 for their Autobahn American tour and stayed until 1990, contributing to an almost unparalleled run of albums, from 1975’s Radioactivity to 1986’s Electric Café. He’s credited with electronic percussion and software on those records, as well as picking up songwriting credits on classics like The Robots, The Model, Neon Lights, Computer World, Numbers, Computer Love, Tour de France and The Telephone Call, on which he also provides the lead vocal.

After quitting the band, he went on to a fascinating solo career, first with Elektric Music, then under his own name, his 2003 album Communication being particularly recommended.

I interviewed him recently for the Line Noise podcast - for the second time! - and we talked about leaving Kraftwerk, liberation, the power of a group and his love of The Beatles, getting away from computers, guitars, Johnny Marr, remixing Planet Rock, The Telephone Call and much more.

For lovers of the written word, the edited text is below. I hope you enjoy.

Ben Cardew: The last time we spoke, it was around the release of your autobiography, Sound of the Machine - so we talked a lot about the Kraftwerk years around that time. This time, we’re going to be talking more about your solo career, and specifically Communication, which was your debut solo album under your own name, which was released by Bureau B last year, and which initially came out in 2003. I wanted to know: how did we get to here? You left Kraftwerk in August 1990, right? And how did you feel? Was it like a liberation?

Karl Bartos: It’s like, you know, with technology, and it’s just the matter of: how would you focus? And at the time, it was a sort of liberation, because all through the 80s we were really locked away in Kling Klang Studio. After the world tour in ‘81, the world was coping with synthesisers, and so many bands were playing with synthesisers and we lost our definition. We were not alone anymore. And my two partners had to struggle with this situation. And Ralf was doing extreme sports and he was tired all the time - cycling, cycling all day - coming into the studio with a tired brain. And if you have a tired brain, you make the wrong decisions.

So we didn’t play live the whole 80s, where everybody was playing live, everybody was discovering the video for promoting bands and music and we didn’t. We stayed at home, really. And so I had to struggle almost all the 80s, whether I’m going to leave or stay. And in the end, I left.

Ben Cardew: And when you left, you formed Elektric Music with Lothar Manteuffel from Rheingold. Why did you decide to form a group rather than go solo? I mean, particularly with what you’ve just been describing - your frustrations in a group, why did you want to get into another group?

Karl Bartos: I was thrown into music by a group called The Beatles from Liverpool and they invented that cultural personality, which includes four people and I really liked it. I like them and they were not anonymous like The Shadows. Nobody knew the names of The Shadows - they were beautiful and Cliff Richard was a nice singer - but they [The Beatles] seemed to be really friends, musical friends, and they had a lot of humour and that hit me right between the eyes. All my life, I wanted to be in a group and I thought Kraftwerk would be this group, but then it was more like a capitalism thing.

Ben Cardew: Am I right that the very first thing you did as Elektric Music was to remix Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock [which famously sampled the beat from Kraftwerk’s Numbers]?

Karl Bartos: Yeah, this was a kind of liberation. Well, everybody plays my beat nowadays, which I came up with, and there was no possibility [to claim it] - you don’t get copyright on a beat. So I said, I’ll reverse this and I’ll do a remix. I don’t like remixes at all. But this was coming up from the NME; I had the chance to play a song for a charity record, and I chose Baby Come Back. And then a remix came in. I said, “Okay, take it three days, four days.” And I got the 24-track recordings and I had real fun in doing it. I haven’t heard it since then, actually.

Ben Cardew: With Elektric Music your first album, Esperanto, came out in 1993. You worked with Andy McCluskey of OMD and Emil Schult again. How did those collaborations come about?

Karl Bartos: Lothar was a student of Emil. I knew him when he was really little, so he just came from school and so he is still around. So he has a studio in Hamburg and we are going to work on something together because I am re-recording this Esperanto record.

I still like the track TV [which opens Esperanto] a lot and it works very well still today. It didn’t take so [long], although I composed the track in ‘87 when I was still in Kraftwerk. So it was my pop version of Kraftwerk, maybe. And I’m really [re-]recording it now, still on the computer where we talk now, and it’s going to be released - the whole record.

I met Andy in the 70s and we really got along very well. And I visited him in Liverpool, in Dublin, in Los Angeles. He came to Düsseldorf. So we are what you call musician friends, really.

Ben Cardew: You mentioned you wrote the song “TV” in 1987. Did you present it to Kraftwerk? Or did you think, “No, I’m keeping this one for myself”?

Karl Bartos: No, not this one, not this one. I didn’t present it to Florian. At the time of building my home studio in my own house, Florian came to visit me and actually, I played the track on a new synthesiser which I really bought. He bought the synthesiser as well.

A lot of things in technology happen through technology itself. It takes all our attention to get it to work and this is another reason why Kraftwerk lost the way of melding our creativity together. Because when the computer arrived in the studio, I had the first music computer - an IBM, IBM XT - and I had the first music program called Creator [likely C-Lab Creator or Notator]. And everybody stood behind me; I was programming the music, and we didn’t play, we didn’t equalise. It was when one thing started in Kraftwerk, that was content management and the whole rest of our life is content management.

Ben Cardew: You once said in an interview, “The computer tidies up art.” I wonder how you avoid that in your solo music - is it just not using computers? Or do you have a way that uses computers that doesn’t tidy it up?

Karl Bartos: I play the guitar. I have a piano upstairs. And with this record - I’m just working on a new record, which is the mirror of the time we live in - so during the Caligari project [Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari] these four years, I composed the new record on the piano upstairs, right on the piano, on the guitar. And I came up with the lyrics, writing them down and I wrote the melodies down and the chord structures and I avoided recording it on the computer. Which I did now in January - I started with recording the tracks from paper. I transfer it from paper and from my brain into the computer, into data, big data, which takes my breath away.

Ben Cardew: Talking about the guitar, in the 90s, you worked with Johnny Marr, who’s one of the greatest guitarists of all time, on Electronic’s 1996 album Raise the Pressure. What was that experience like? Did you learn a lot from him and Bernard Sumner?

Karl Bartos: I learned again how it is to play with people. When I came into the studio in Manchester, Johnny had a D-28 Martin guitar. I took it and I played Alice’s Restaurant [Massacree] from Arlo Guthrie and his finger-picking. And that took their breath away.

So I was not just a computer person. I studied music and before I studied music, I played in the orchestra. I played the pop songs from the 60s in cover bands. And it was really great to work with Johnny, because he was playing the computer, he was playing computer guitars.

Ben Cardew: As well as guitar, I think you have a lovely voice. You sang The Telephone Call, which is probably my favourite Kraftwerk song, in fact.

Karl Bartos: Yeah, I don’t like the melody…

Ben Cardew: Really?

Karl Bartos: No, I like the melody! I composed the melody on the piano, you know. [Plays The Telephone Call synth melody on a nearby synth]. So it’s done on the piano, and then I had the voice not singing this melody. And Ralf said to me, “Okay, if you sing a song, it has to be different from my articulation.”

So he would not sing that. [Plays The Telephone Call synth melody again, singing along]. He would say [sings deep, Kraftwerk-ian melody]. So I understand it but at the time, it was too early for me and I needed one or two years more [of experience] singing songs. It was the first song I recorded, actually - my vocals. And Ralf and Florian did the producing job and they really gave me a hard time doing it. I wish I had the chance to sing it again now.

Ben Cardew: Communication is a concept album about electronic media. What interested you in that theme?

Karl Bartos: Well, it was in the days of 9/11 - the World Trade Center came down. I was here sitting in the studio, this chair, watching the television. And of course, the towers came down. And it was just a cut in our society. And these pictures of the burning Twin Towers in New York changed... probably it was the first time that our world has changed. This is maybe the start. And I thought, life will never be the same again after this attempt. And I said, these images shape our lives and our mindset.

And I think I wanted to come up with something which could [address] the core of visual communication. And I came again with these pictograms, because it’s a speech of pictograms. It’s the development of the Esperanto idea because our language is what we see and music is the way to communicate with the world. And this is my visual communication record.

Ben Cardew: There’s no guitar on Communication, right?

Karl Bartos: No guitar, no. I normally don’t use guitar because I found out that I made a really big mistake with this guitar record [he means Electric Music, Elektric Music’s second record, released in 1998]. I had only to produce in a big studio. And so some songs are really good, like Together We Can Do It All and some other songs.

But people don’t see me playing this music, right? There I have this place in history, with my life being part of the electronic development of German-based electronic culture, maybe based in the 20s of Germany with all the fantastic music and lyrics and making a jump in the 60s and the 70s.

Nobody cares if there is a Minimoog or any Moog on a Beatles record. People don’t care; they don’t hear it. It sounds like a flute on Here Comes the Sun. Yeah, it’s wonderful. And I wouldn’t change - I don’t want to change it. It’s perfect. But it’s not a harm for The Beatles that they have used the Minimoog. The same with Pink Floyd on On the Run. Nobody talks about that they came up with [electronic sounds]... Autobahn was released [around then]. So they were the first really, but Gilmour was a blues guitarist. But if somebody from the electronic background plays the guitar, there are so many fans who don’t like it.

Ben Cardew: The sonics on Communication are quite familiar to Kraftwerk. Was that a conscious decision or was that just kind of what came out when you made music?

Karl Bartos: In the time we’re talking - from 2003 - I wanted to play live, right? So I played in London, live, this program at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art in the centre of London. I played there to the press and I played Communication and some Kraftwerk songs.

I think it would be good to have a contrast. And I was finding out if people like it or not. But from the first gig, people loved it if I played Pocket Calculator and then Life [from Communication] - they worked well, very well. And sometimes people pointed out in their reviews that they love my own records better than the Kraftwerk songs. Kraftwerk songs belong, really- that’s what I thought - to the people who created it. Sure. So it was Florian, it was Emil [Schult], it was Ralf Hütter and Karl Bartos. And we were on stage, we were in the studio. We wrote the lyrics. We had the good times in the world and this was our cultural subject.

Ben Cardew: I was looking back at some of the set lists from your gigs, for example, in 2014. As you say, it’s a mixture of Kraftwerk songs and a mixture of your solo songs. How do you decide which Kraftwerk songs to do?

Karl Bartos: I use the strongest songs and which were good for the setup. So that you have a running order which would work. Nowadays I would drop probably The Robots or The Man-Machine because I feel the “retro-future” is not the right thing to do.

Future is no strategy; nostalgia is not. I would change it in a way. I will change it in the video. I think the future has changed. What our future is, is the present which we have now. And these two philosophies, the views of the world, they crash. And the funny thing is, to me, in the 70s, when I was part of writing the song We Are the Robots, it felt like a comic. Like R2-D2 from Star Wars. [sings]“We are programmed just to do anything…” And now it’s the AI saying the lyrics. It’s completely what your AI agent tells you if you go to the prompt: “Yeah, I love you so.”

Ben Cardew: What can you tell us about the new record you’re recording?

Karl Bartos: Not too much. It’s a mirror of what where we live in. And I’ve been working since 1986 with computers. So I have the first computer with music software which I can get my hands on. I love the idea and I’m not against computers but I’m against this data capitalism which we face now from America.

And unfortunately, this hippie technology, which was supposed to combine all people in the world becoming brothers - like Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony said, with the lyrics of Schiller. So people don’t want to be brothers all over the world and now we are targets. Everyone is the target for these cybernetic loops.

And so technology has taken on a different meaning than what we thought would be technology. “I’m alone, another lonely night... there at my TV screen…” and so: Computer Love. But you know, it’s just the beginning of an idea. The computer within Kraftwerk is neither good or bad, but now, through the attention of the people, it’s rather bad than good.

People make a change, right? We make the change. And Pocket Calculator is the song I would still play. I’m the operator of my pocket calculator and I play music with machines - use talking machines but the old ones from the past which are analogue. But I’m not a retro specialist or something. I think we have to keep in mind where we go. And now, in a way, we have to fight not against technology, but fight how people use it.

Ben Cardew: One final question: who is better for you - The Beatles or Kraftwerk?

Karl Bartos: The thing with music is it depends on what you hear in your puberty, right? So puberty makes us human beings like an antenna for emotions. You know the emotions of your mother and your family, of course, but not from the other world. And if you hear music while you are in your puberty and your manhood in yourself awakes in yourself - and you [experience] these two feelings: you see girls or boys and you feel for them and then you hear music - they seem to fit together.

Ben Cardew: I know what you mean. I’ve got two kids myself just approaching that age, and I’m thinking of how to, you know…

Karl Bartos: Watch out what music you play them! So, I’m not ready with this explanation. I have many, many sons and daughters - more sons of my friends - so they have kids and they grew up in the 90s with techno music. They do have a serious problem, because some of them went on to be DJs and they didn’t learn an instrument, right? They don’t know what music is all about.

They think music is [tied] to life and they think they create a new record by inserting on the track one special sound which is growing and growing and growing and then fades away. So they really have a problem and I’m talking about serious problems. They are in their 30s now and they don’t know what they’re going to do with their life.

So your question: Beatles or Kraftwerk? My puberty, I spent with The Beatles, Rolling Stones, with Bob Dylan, The Kinks, with all the Black musicians from America, and so I’m pleased with that. And people who grew up with Kraftwerk, you have to ask them. I’m with The Beatles and with the music from the 60s and with real folk music, because of the thing I talked about: this music is able to voyage, to make a voyage through the generations.

Some listening

Sofia Kourtesis with Novalima - Los Poemas No Siempre Riman (DJ-Kicks)

I’ve never been to Peru - more’s the pity - and I only know a handful of Peruvian musicians. And yet, in my undoubted ignorance, Los Poemas No Siempre Riman feels like the most Peruvian track that Sofia Kourtesis has produced to date, no doubt thanks to the input of Novalima, an Afro-Peruvian group band who mix Latin rhythms with electronic production.

The track sprawls and circles around warm chords and a stuttering synth riff, in a way that could happily continue for hours, until a beautiful voice enters, singing of the fact that in life poems don’t always rhyme, which is the kind of truth I seem to intuit more than understand. Los Poemas No Siempre Riman is dance music for the heart, feet and brain, which is a rare combination to achieve.

femtanyl - HEAD UP

femtanyl’s new record MAN BITES DOG feels like a - perhaps ill-judged - attempt for the duo (as they now apparently are) to streamline their sound, adopting fairly traditional drum patterns and vocals with actual hooks, structure and stuff. (The title track, for example, has the distinct air of California pop punk lying underneath the madness, which is never a good look.)

That said, it’s still a femtanyl record, with all the dystopian hardcore madness that entails and HEAD UP is the one moment where the giddy excitement of the rave pushed its ugly head to the surface, like dayglo pimple pus in an arresting zit, creating three and a half minutes of pure chaos.

The Beach Boys - Brian’s Jam (Ding Dang’ Full 13 Minute version)

The new Beach Boys box set We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years is an epic work with some astounding unreleased material, including a Carl Wilson take on Dennis’ Holy Man that came almost totally out of the blue (see Pitchfork review below). Sadly, though, the set doesn’t have space for this 13-minute, stop-start version of Ding Dang, presumably recorded roughly around the same time, on which The Beach Boys sound like a California Can - in all their might - covering Shortenin’ Bread.

A mysterious new rash of Beach Boys bootlegs have been circulating online over the past few weeks and no one quite knows why or where they come from. But if the upshot is songs like these, sprawling funkily all over my speakers, then I am IN.

Anjimile - Waits For Me

Anjimile’s new album promises uncomplicated pleasure, as opposed to the thorny musical ideas of The King. And this is what Waits for Me delivers: over a simple four four beat and strummed acoustic guitar, the artist delivers a melody of exquisite poise and emotion, in the kind of song that seems to write itself, somehow.

Things I’ve done

The Beach Boys - We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years

I reviewed the new Beach Boys box set for Pitchfork, which made me very happy indeed. “You’d have to be in a particularly loose frame of mind to listen to it top to tail; but there is enough of the Beach Boys’ singular genius - perhaps the expression in pop of a musical mind pulled to and fro by the heavy weathers of psychological torment - to deliver. This is the Beach Boys at their best, their worst, and most frustratingly human - just like we want them to be.” Amen

The playlists

It’s 2026 and that means A NEW PLAYLIST, cataloguing the best new music of this year: you can follow that on Apple Music here: The newest and bestest 2026.

And on Spotify here: the newest and bestest 2026.

The old classics remain in place, too:

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.

Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.