By Stephen Dalton
A sublime symphony of electronic sound paintings and cinematic landscapes, experimental noises and serenely beautiful melodies, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album rewired the pop rulebook and changed music forever. First released 50 years ago, this landmark piece of audio-visual Pop Art became a seminal influence on David Bowie, Brian Eno, Joy Division, Afrika Bambaataa, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Depeche Mode, Orbital, Underworld and countless future generations of forward-thinking artists. Even today Autobahn still sounds historic and motorik, achingly nostalgic yet agelessly modern, still opening up fresh sonic horizons half a century later.
To mark the 50th anniversary of this game-changing musical milestone, Kraftwerk founder and electro pioneer Ralf Hütter is reissuing Autobahn in several meticulously remastered, lavishly repackaged formats. The supremely collectible vinyl picture disc features the 2009 remastered audio, while the deluxe Blu-ray audio disc features an all-new Dolby Atmos mix of the album created from the original 16-track master tapes. Hearing these pin-sharp new mixes through fresh ears, the sheer beauty, richness and depth of this magnificent album still shocks and delights. Kraftwerk’s eternal quest for immersive audio perfectionism continues. Autobahn still sounds like tomorrow.
Released in 1974, Autobahn was Kraftwerk’s first electronic concept album. Emerging in the late Sixties from the Düsseldorf visual art underground scene as an experimental duo, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider first established their Kling Klang studio in 1970, conceiving Kraftwerk as a multi-media project. Beginning in 1970, they began to work with drum machines, tape recorders, synthesizers and vocoders on their embryonic early releases.
In 1974, Hütter and Schneider still retained a few traces of their classically trained chamber-pop roots, blending synthetic sounds with electric guitar and acoustic instruments like flute, piano and violin. But this electro-acoustic reboot signified a major stylistic shift, and Autobahn was later canonised by critics as their first major album. Marking a clear departure from their more cosmically inclined peers on Germany’s underground rock scene, Autobahn kicked off an unbroken run of 8 classic Kraftwerk catalogue albums, each a self-contained masterpiece, each a great leap forward.
Hütter and Schneider composed the music and played all synthesizers and electronic drums for the Autobahn album over the summer of 1974 at their fabled Kling Klang sound laboratory on Mintropstrasse in central Düsseldorf. For the recording of the album at Kling Klang studio they engaged engineering help from Konrad “Conny” Plank and his mobile recording equipment. The final mix was done in his home studio in Wolperath together with Hütter and Schneider.
Opening with a clunking car door and a spluttering ignition sound, the full 22-minute album version of Autobahn is a glorious hymn to the serene banality of driving on Germany’s motorway system, layered with blaring horns, radio crackle, mechanical voices and traffic-noise effects. It slides along on a jazzy motorik rhythm played by Hütter and Schneider that accelerates and decelerates, changing gear at various points, whirring and revving, even pulling over to admire the view at times.
Kraftwerk painstakingly assembled Autobahn using studio sounds and primitive tape samples of field recordings. It makes extensive use of Hütter’s new Minimoog synthesizer plus an EMS Synthi, ARP Odyssey and other early analogue sound machines. To simulate the whoosh of passing vehicles, they used synthesized bursts of white noise. The song’s sinister-sounding vocal chants were made using a vocoder.
Sung in German by Hütter and Schneider, their first ever vocal composition has the infectious repetitive power of a nursery rhyme. Visual artist Emil Schult, a close friend since about 1972 around the time of the second Kraftwerk album (originally titled Kling Klang), co-wrote the lyrics together with Hütter and Schneider, each of them creating a personal verse. This poetic panorama describes the sensory spectacle of a motorway journey: a sunlit valley, a grey road with its green-edged white stripes, the crackle of a car radio feeding back the song’s main refrain. In the dawning age of electro-mechanical music, everything becomes an instrument, with voices and machines and ambient motorway noises all singing along in perfect harmony. Droll, deadpan and hypnotic, this was a very Kraftwerk brand of musique concrete.
Schult also painted the album’s iconic original cover image of an almost empty motorway sweeping upwards towards a radiant mountain sunset on the horizon. Hütter’s own grey Volkswagen even makes a cameo appearance. Both futuristic and nostalgic, this timeless tableau blends contemporary post-modern collage with the heroic landscape tradition of German Romanticism. The monochrome photo on the back of the sleeve was taken by Schneider’s then-girlfriend Barbara Niemöller.
“The white stripes on the road, I noticed them driving home every day from the studio,” Ralf Hütter explains. “Then the car sounds, the radio, it’s like a loop, a continuum, part of the endless music of Kraftwerk. In Autobahn we put car sounds, horn, basic melodies and tuning motors. Adjusting the suspension and tyre pressure, rolling on the asphalt, that gliding sound – pffft pffft – when the wheels go onto those painted stripes. It’s sound poetry.”
Spanning the entire first side of vinyl, Autobahn is undoubtedly the album’s centrepiece. But the four shorter electro-acoustic tracks covering the second side are also strikingly excellent stand-alone pieces, each mapping out new sonic terrain for Kraftwerk’s electronic rebirth. Inspired by the Kohoutek comet, which swung close to Earth in 1973, the sister tracks Kometenmelodie 1 and Kometenmelodie 2 are distinctly different in tone. The first is a mysterious inner-space journey awash with psychedelic clanks and cosmic whooshes, the latter a joyous synthesizer gallop of radiant melodic fanfares that builds and builds to an ecstatic sunburst finale.
Moving from dusk to dawn, the final two tracks on Autobahn confirm Kraftwerk’s virtuoso skill for conjuring up time, atmosphere and location purely with sound. The nocturnal gloom-scape of Mitternacht takes place at the witching hour in an electro- gothic shadow world of clanks, slithers and eerie darkness. But the album ends on a note of luminous beauty with Morgenspaziergang, a morning walk through fresh air and twittering birdsong, its fragrant mist-cloaked opening gathering momentum into a joyously tumbling refrain of intertwined flute, guitar and piano.
Paving the way for much of the ambient music of late 1970s, the sweet folk-tinged melody of Morgenspaziergang also reprises a phrase from the opening of Autobahn, bringing the album full circle. “All the tracks are like film loops, short films,” Ralf Hütter explains. “Morgenspaziergang is what we wrote when we came out of the studio. We were always working at night and then in the morning, everything seems fresh and our ears are open again.”
Initially planned by Hütter and Schneider, but rejected by their German record label, Autobahn was later packaged with another visually stunning image: the seminal blue-and-white motorway logo which became a brilliant piece of branding, an instant Pop Art symbol which was cool and minimal and hugely influential. While very few albums can boast even one design classic sleeve, Autobahn has two.
First released in Germany on the Phillips label in November 1974, Autobahn transformed Kraftwerk from art-rock cult act to unlikely left-field pop stars. In early 1975, a three-minute edit of the title song became a Top Ten single in Germany, hitting Number 11 in Britain and Number 25 in the US. The album was also a worldwide success, reaching Number 4 in Britain, Number 5 in the US and Canada, and Number 7 in Germany.
Fifty years since its engine first spluttered into life, Autobahn continues to resonate today. For five decades this monumental recording has stood as their signature anthem. Along the way it’s chief creators Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider have cooperated with many different technicians, musicians, engineers and programmers to create an electro-mechanical experiment that in turn, has grown into a majestic audio-visual multi-media spectacle. The journey continues, the future still lies ahead. This road goes on forever.
Further information
50th Anniversary of Autobahn, now presented in 3 new formats released on 7 March 2025: Blu-ray audio disc featuring a Dolby Atmos Mix reconstructed from the original 16-track tapes at Kling Klang Studio by Ralf Hütter, first ever 12” picture disc vinyl, full digital release of the Dolby Atmos Mix
Bonus Autobahn 7” vinyl & digital release available 14 February 2025
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