Musician

We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine. Sometimes we play the music, sometimes the music plays us, sometimes... it plays.

In Paris, the people go in the Metro, they move, they go to their offices, 8 a.m. in the morning - it's like remote control.

As for ourselves, we love our machines.

We always found that many people are robots without knowing it. The interpreters of classical music, Horowitz for example, they are like robots, making a reproduction of the music which is always the same. It's automatic, and they do it as if it were natural, which is not true.

Our studio is in the middle of an oil refinery. There's smoke and fire around it and when you emerge from the studio you hear this hissing sound all around you.

The image of the robot is very important to us, it's very stimulating to people's imaginations.

Our method of speaking is interrupted, hard-edged... a lot of consonants and noises.

There is no beginning and no end in music. Some people want it to end. But it goes on.

We don't make a distinction between an acoustic instrument as a source of sound and any sound in the air outside or on a manufactured tape. It's all electric energy, anyway.

We're just private people.

A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of the experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.

Emotion' is a strange word.

Kraftwerk isn't a band. It's a concept. We call it 'Die Menschmaschine,' which means 'the human machine.'

I found that the flute was too limiting. Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesiser. Much later I threw the flute away; it was a sort of process.

Kraftwerk has become historic and is now exposed in museums.

We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehicle for our ideas.