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Tour de France Soundtracks

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‘Tour De France Soundtracks’: Kraftwerk’s Gear-Changing Final Album

Recorded to mark the 100th year of the iconic cycling tournament, Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ remains an enduring swansong.

Finally inspired to record an album of all-new material for the first time in 17 years, Kraftwerk’s 11th studio outing, Tour De France Soundtracks , found the group in an entirely different musical landscape from when they released their previous album, 1986’s Electric Café . By this point, electronic dance music had swept the world to become a cultural phenomenon, largely thanks to the pioneering synthesiser work Kraftwerk had originally set in motion in the 70s.

Listen to ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ here .

Keen to keep the wheels moving despite the departures of long-term members Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, group founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider invited Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz into the fold and set to work on a new album that coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Tour De France. Spinning out ideas from his fondness for cycling, Hütter was keen to explore the feats of human endurance achieved by the likes of tournament winners Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet, and headed to Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang studio to engineer the group’s much-anticipated comeback.

“Forward – that’s what you do with your bicycle. You move forward”

Remarkably, the genesis of Tour De France Soundtracks stretched back 20 years earlier, when Kraftwerk released an EP celebrating Hütter’s love of cycling. “In 1983 we were working on a concept for a feature film on Tour De France,” Hütter said, “so I wrote some lyrics and conceptual ideas for our album Tour De France .” No strangers to exploring modes of transportation on records such as the motorway-centric Autobahn and the train-inspired Trans-Europe Express , the original 1983 Tour De France song hinted at a new Lycra-clad reinvention for the one-time robots, and reached No.22 in the UK in August that year. Following a bike accident which landed Hütter in hospital, however, the album idea was put on hold and Kraftwerk moved on to record Electric Café instead.

Then, in 2003, in a bid to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tour De France tournament, Kraftwerk decided to revisit the cycling concept. Updated for the 21st century, the group’s cycling song was just as innovative as anything they had done before, with Hütter’s breathless vocals being recorded after running up and down the stairs in Kling Klang. Propelled by a winding electro beat and the sound of spinning spokes, this new version of Tour De France peaked at No.20 in the UK in July 2003 and saw Hütter recite French lyrics evoking the arduous journey of cyclists traversing the Alps.

After the group successfully fleshed out the concept into a full album, Tour De France Soundtracks finally saw light of day on 4 August 2003 and proved Kraftwerk’s momentum had only accelerated in line with the new era of electronic dance music they had helped usher in. With pristine ambient soundscapes and the throb of trance-enamoured synths, the wheels are set in motion on Prologue before leading into the glorious Tour De France (Étape 1-3), a 15-minute trio of tracks acting as an odyssey of perpetual motion. “We are very interested in the dynamics and the energy and the movement,” Hütter said. “The German word is ‘vorwärts’, forward – that’s what you do with your bicycle. You move forward.”

“It’s percussive and dynamic. We never feel there’s nowhere left for us to go”

By aiming “to glorify the muscles of the human being” with a freewheeling sonic tone poem aided by Kraftwerk’s machine-like rhythms, Tour De France Soundtracks captured the trials of any hardened cyclist with their eyes on the prize. “The noise of the bicycle chain and pedal and gear mechanism,” Hütter said, “the breathing of the cyclist, we have incorporated all this in the Kraftwerk sound.” As an ode to sports endurance, the group even found room to explore health supplements, on the song Vitamin, as well as the metal that comprises the bicycle itself, on Titanium.

Seeing the human body as a machine, the album’s second single, Elektro Kardiogramm, continued to look at health and fitness by building a beat around Ralf Hütter’s pulse. “We took medical tests I did over a couple of years, heartbeat recordings, pulse frequencies, lung volume tests, and used those tests on the album,” Hütter said. “It’s percussive and dynamic. We never feel there’s nowhere left for us to go.” Released in October 2003, the song brilliantly reflects a cyclist’s commitment to reaching the peak physical performance necessary to complete the Tour De France’s various stages.

Given Kraftwerk’s role as sonic innovators who paved the way for dance music – particularly the rise of genres such as house and trance – it’s perhaps unsurprising that Tour De France Soundtracks shares much in common with contemporary EDM. Unlike most nightclub DJs, however, Kraftwerk saw an artistic opportunity to use the mesmeric quality of those styles of music to mirror the flow state of cyclists on the move. “The Tour is like life: a form of trance,” Hütter said. “Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life… in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything… so the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance.”

“Cycling is the man machine. It’s me, the man machine on the bicycle”

Tour De France Soundtracks’ third single, Aerodynamik, was released in March 2004. A shimmering five-minute minimal techno song about battling headwinds, it peaked at No.33 in the UK, its synth blips, pulsing rhythms and bubbling vocoder vocal offering a reminder of the divine synchronicity between man and machine, cyclist and bicycle. “Cycling is the man-machine,” Ralf Hütter once said, explaining elsewhere: “It’s me, the man machine on the bicycle.” With this in mind, it’s clear that Tour De France Soundtracks fits perfectly among Kraftwerk’s work, chiming with their commitment to opening our eyes to how humanity can be enhanced by technology.

Another of Tour De France Soundtracks ’ notable moments, La Forme – later to be remixed by Hot Chip in 2007 – can also be seen through this prism. One of the best Kraftwerk songs, it praises physical fitness and celebrates the fusion of a cyclist’s muscle movement with the mechanics of cycling itself. “When we worked on this album,” Hütter explained, “we tried to incorporate the idea of very smooth, rolling, gliding.” As a whole, Tour De France Soundtracks is best seen as a breezy soundscape that perfectly captures the process of cycling through challenging terrains better than any TV sports commentator can express. “Watch a ride through the mountains, switch off the sound and play our CD: you will be amazed,” Hütter said.

To this day, Tour De France Soundtracks is the last album of new studio material released by Kraftwerk. Not only did it peak at No.1 in Germany – the group’s highest chart placement in their homeland – but it also made an impression in the UK, reaching No.21 and proving that Kraftwerk’s decades-long standing as the godfathers of electro-pop was beyond doubt. Finding the group as forward-thinking as ever, Tour De France Soundtracks released the breaks and gifted us with yet another tour de force.

“We are still here,” Ralf Hütter said a year later, when asked what he was most proud of. “And we are still moving forward.”

Find out more about Kraftwerk’s pioneering electro legacy .

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Tour de France Soundtracks

By Dominique Leone

Electronic / Rock

Astralwerks

August 11, 2003

After 1981's Computer World , Kraftwerk were anxious to begin work on their next LP. Perhaps spurred on by the warm reception (after a short of period of inactivity), Ralf Hutter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur set out working on a forthcoming album, to be titled Technopop . Technopop was to feature songs including its title track and "Sex Object", which would later surface on 1986's Electric Café . Its first single was to have been "Tour de France", and that track was in fact released in 1983. However, Technopop was not to be: due to a series of circumstances-- not least of which, Hutter's bicycle accident, which kept him out of serious action for the better part of a year-- the band decided to stretch their deadline, incorporate a few more state-of-1986 recording techniques (including, gasp, sampling) and concentrate their full length ideas on Electric Café . "Tour de France"-- not a particularly classic entry in their singles catalog in the first place-- was left to drift into nothingness, and all was tidily swept under the mouse pad.

But you know Kraftwerk have never been ones to let perfectly customizable data lay unaltered. From the time Hutter and Schneider hooked up in Düsseldorf in the late 60s to their heyday of the late 70s/early 80s and on through their complete catalog reworking (1991's The Mix ), Kraftwerk have been a model of efficiently planned obsolescence. Taking a page from fellow tech-freak George Lucas (and Bill Gates for that matter), they don't even want to make their earliest releases available, making sure all client-side installations have been successfully updated to the most recent Kraftwerk sound.

To their credit, Kraftwerk have a knack for emphasizing their best ideas, as almost all of their records from Autobahn until Computer World are dazzling specimens of the single-minded desire to progress, and the synergy of four pretty distinct individuals. What's more, they're pop. Unlike virtually any other band from the first wave of Krautrock, Kraftwerk produced music that worked as both experimental museum piece and a dancefloor (or living room) beacon. They are like the Beatles of electronic music: inspirations to NPR coffee talkers, crusty academic types and regular folks who just want to get robotic every now and again.

So what a disappointment it must seem to witness the band rework "Tour de France" and slap a few new tracks down for their "new" LP, a soundtrack to the annual cycling event. I mean, in this fertile era for electronic music, when so many sounds seem ripe for the next revolution, you would think the godfathers of the genre would be serving up more than leftovers for our digital consumption. In fact, when the three-part "Tour de France" single was released earlier this year, many fans were disappointed: it would take more than modern tweaking to turn its thin melody and almost non-existent lyrical concerns (even for Kraftwerk) into something interesting. Bet step back-- perhaps surprisingly, Kraftwerk still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Their latest LP may not pack the same fortune-telling punch of their classic records, but it is nevertheless a distinctly engaging, sophisticated experience. And I think "sophisticated" is ultimately the perfect word for Kraftwerk, able to forge beautiful, instinctively appealing sounds out of mercilessly mechanical processes.

After the short synth-driven "Prologue", the album begins with the title track, divided into three parts. "Tour de France Etape 1" starts as a fairly quick, light splash of microhouse featuring patented vocoder vocalizations stating the title, and various stages of the actual race. There really isn't a melody per se, except for a recurring synth line sounding not unlike one of the perky jingles used as the soundtrack for your computer booting up. "Etape 2" modifies the texture slightly, with flanged effects panning across the mix and subtle harmony vocals, but otherwise proceeds unchanged; "Etape 3" drops a glittery, arpeggiated synth figure to start, but soon returns to the main theme of the first section. All three pieces are clearly part of one large "Tour de France" mega-mix, and probably work best when you opt to appreciate the small details instead of looking for epiphanies in the beats or hooks.

Things get a lot more active on the second half of the record, as tunes like "Vitamin" and "Aero Dynamik"/"Titanium" sparkle from the ever-pristine Kraftwerk polish. The latter tunes are practically perfect realizations of the power of a minimal, uncluttered mix of activity when you know how to highlight a beat (hint: they do). The calculated resonance of each percussive ping probably deserves its own article in a journal for electronic music, but we're free to just let them go by and by and by. "Vitamin" begins with an extroverted, constantly modulated synth line and fluttery, reverb-drenched chord cluster over which a patented Kraftwerk bot-beat runs its course. Similar to the title suite, the song works its magic via a repetitive power of persuasion, and also similarly features an optimistic, recurring melody.

Perhaps the only really disappointing aspect of Tour de France -- beyond the still-not-that-great version of the title song (which ends the album)-- is that it emits a muted, comfortable aura rather than the immediately striking tone of their classic releases. In the end, that probably won't make much difference in your enjoyment of this music, but if first impressions are very important, it could be a potential turn-off for those expecting a return to Kraftwerk's trailblazing status. Sure, they might not ever be heads of the class again, but when you own the school, smart students will probably listen to what you have to say anyway.

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Tour de France (Remastered)

19 August 2003 12 Songs, 55 minutes ℗ 2009 Ralf Hütter/Kraftwerk under exclusive licence to Parlophone Records Ltd, a Warner Music Group Company

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Tour de France Soundtracks

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Tour de France Soundtracks (re-released in 2009 as Tour de France ) is the tenth studio album by Kraftwerk , released in August 2003. themed around the annual French Tour de France bicycle race, and bicycling in general.

The album was recorded for the 100th anniversary of the first Tour de France bicycle race, although it missed its intended release date for the actual tour. It includes a new recording of their 1983 single of the same name, the cover artwork of both releases being nearly identical. The announcement of the release caused much anticipation, as it had been 17 years since the group had put out a full album of new studio material (1986's Electric Café , also known as Techno Pop ).

Unusually for a Kraftwerk album it did not have separate German and international vocal mixes, but was released only in one version, with a mix of French, German and English. The lyrics were co-written by Ralf Hütter and Maxime Schmitt , who had previously been manager of the Capitol label at Pathé-Marconi (part of the EMI group, the company that distributed Kraftwerk's music in France) and had been involved with the band since the mid-1970s.

A short jingle was supplied to the television broadcaster Eurosport for use in their coverage of the 2003 Tour de France.

Track listing [ ]

• " Prologue " - 0:31
• " Tour de France Étape 1 " - 4:27
• " Tour de France Étape 2 " - 6:41
• " Tour de France Étape 3 " - 3:56
• " Chrono " - 3:19
• " Vitamin " - 8:09
• " Aerodynamik " - 5:04
• " Titanium " - 3:21
• " Elektro Kardiogramm " - 5:16
• " La Forme " - 8:41
• " Régéneration " - 1:16
• " Tour de France " - 5:12
• 1 Ralf Hütter
• 2 The Man-Machine
• 3 Radioactivity

Tour De France Soundtracks

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