Ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos tells Hamish Mackintosh the not-so-horrifying backstory to his new Dr Caligari soundtrack
FM last spoke with Karl Bartos some 10 years ago for the release of his wonderful trawl through his own musical archives, Off The Record. For those of us of a certain age, Kraftwerk were arguably the gateway drug when it came to all of the electronic music that followed. Bartos was a pivotal member of the ground-breaking German band for 15 years, contributing to what are considered all of their classic albums until leaving in 1990, frustrated at the band’s prolonged creative stasis. His recent autobiography The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond is essential reading.
Post-Kraftwerk, Bartos formed Elektric Music, releasing two albums before collaborating with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr on their Electronic project as well as also working with OMD’s Andy McCluskey. In 2021, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of Kraftwerk’s classic line-up.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari has been a long-time labour of love for Bartos and the soundtrack itself is a product of a two-year-long creative flow between his Hamburg studio and the Düsseldorf studio of his friend and engineer, Mathias Black. According to Black, the pair “used FaceTime, screen sharing and, for file share, a cloud server. It cannot substitute working together in one studio, but it helps”. The resultant album is an intoxicating fusion of the orchestral and the electronic; it beggars belief that this is Karl Bartos’ first foray proper into soundtrack work (having previously contributed to Kraftwerk’s track Metropolis, which was a paean to Fritz Lang’s movie of the same name).
FM relished the opportunity to excitedly chat music and philosophy with the delightful Mr Bartos, over at his minimalist studio in Hamburg (as well as hearing more about his surprisingly cautious attitude to computers).
Incredible to discover that this is your first-ever soundtrack project. How did composing this music for Dr Caligari differ from putting together a new album of songs?
“The difference in creating a soundtrack is that, like dance music, it’s functional music… it’s made for a reason that people on a dancefloor move their bodies to it. The same applies to film music. Some music, for instance, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was composed for a ballet. During the process of composing for this movie, I considered the movement of the actors as a ballet so, of course, the music has to fit their movements. It’s a reverse process of choreography. The process of writing a film score is very stressful; you don’t have much time, and someone will tell you to make it a certain way, but I chose to do this for Dr Caligari as I needed this movie in my autobiography.”
When we last spoke for the release of your solo album, Off T
