“Ralf und Florian is a 1973 album created and produced by the German music group Kraftwerk. It was also released under the English name of Ralf and Florian. Unlike Kraftwerk’s later albums, which featured language-specific lyrics, only the titles differ between the English and German editions.
Along with Kraftwerk’s first two albums, Ralf und Florian has, as of 2008, never been officially re-issued on compact disc. However, the album remains an influential and sought after work, and bootlegged CD’s were widely distributed in the 1990s on the Germanofon label. The band has hinted that the album may finally see a re-mastered CD release after their Der Katalog box set.
As indicated by the title (and like their previous album), all the tracks were written, performed and produced by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, with the sessions engineered by the influential Konrad “Conny” Plank. The album has a fuller and more polished sound quality than previous efforts, and this is clearly due to the use of a number of commercial recording studios in addition to Kraftwerk’s own yet-to-be-named Kling Klang. The colour photograph on the back of the cover gives a vivid impression of the bohemian state of Kraftwerk’s own facilities at the time – including egg-box trays pasted, nailed, or stuck on the walls for soundproofing.”
“The album is still almost entirely instrumental (some wordless yodelling appears in “Tanzmusik”, and “Ananas Symphonie” features the band’s first use of a machine voice created by an early prototype vocoder, a sound which would later become a Kraftwerk trademark). Instrumentation begins to show more obvious use of synthesizers (Minimoog and EMS AKS), however most melodic and harmonic keyboard parts are performed on Farfisa electronic piano/organ. Flute and guitar are still much in evidence. The band were still without a drummer, and several tracks, particularly “Tanzmusik”, make use of a preset organ rhythm machine. “Kristallo” features a striking rhythmic electronic bassline (actually created on the EMS synthesizer with the aid of the vocoder), however in general the album is much gentler and less rhythmically precise than Kraftwerk’s later electronic work.
The LP included a “musicomic” poster insert of cartoons by Emil Schult, who had been playing electric violin live with the band (although he does not feature on the album recordings). Schult remains a collaborator of Kraftwerk’s to the present day. The cartoons illustrated each track on the album, as well as the city of Düsseldorf, with the caption “In Düsseldorf am Rhein, klingt es bald!”, which translates literally in English as “In Düsseldorf on the Rhine, it will sound soon” (perhaps the phrase “the sound gets around” captures the snappy feel of the maxim better). Also note that this is kind of a reference to Kraftwerk’s Düsseldorf based Kling Klang studio.
The album was a modest success in Germany. Drummer Wolfgang Flür was recruited to play with Ralf and Florian for a subsequent promotional TV appearance in Berlin, for the German WDR TV arts show Aspekte. He became a member of the group thereafter.
This particular piece of equipment was sold at auction in July 2006 (Ebay Item 300001522431). According to the sales description, Kraftwerk’s machine was “the mother of all transistorized vocoders, an early 70s prototype custom-built for the German electronic duo.
The device was used for two studio productions, Ananas Symphonie (for synthetic vocals and the rhythm track created in conjunction with lapsteel guitar and rhythm machine) and Kristallo (with rhythm machine and EMS synthesizer). It was also later used to create the sound of the spoken intro for Autobahn. The vocoder contained 12 analysis and synthesis filter channels, 2 compressors for speech or carrier signal and excitation signal inputs, voiced /unvoiced detector and switch board for filter-matrix. It was conceived, built and constructed by electronics engineers P. Leunig (Dipl. Ing.) and K. Obermayer (Dipl. Ing.) from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Braunschweig. Later, the well known German music studio engineering and supplier company R. Barth K.G. of Hamburg, Germany, boiled down the know-how gained from this project into the so-called “Musicoder”, which was produced in small quantities.”
Listen here: http://rapidshare.com/files/74175075/KRF-RuF.rar