Tone Float
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This obscure LP by German band Organisation sold few copies on its UK-only release in August 1970, and might have been forgotten forever had two of the band members, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben, not gone on to change the face of 20th century music with their next group Kraftwerk. It was produced by Konrad "Conny" Plank.
Organisation were one of many radical new rock groups who sprang up in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a scene which has come to be known as Krautrock (although this was originally a derogatory term coined by the British music press). Image:Tone Float label.gif Krautrock groups generally pushed rock's format to new boundaries, making great use of improvisation and new electronic/studio techniques as a way of breaking away from the dominant Anglo-American pop music format. The Fluxus art movement and, specifically, a two week non-stop sound-art installation of sine wave oscillators by La Monte Young in Munich in 1969 were influential.
A video recording by German TV broadcaster WDR exists of the band performing Ruckzuck, a piece that was recorded by and appeared on Kraftwerk's first album in 1970. The performance took place in a TV studio and featured a back-projection of a festival/happening crowd typical of the post-Woodstock era.
The Tone Float record is by no means a classic of the Krautrock genre, being for the most part rather unfocussed. The track "Milk Rock" perhaps offers the best glimpse of the Kraftwerk to come, with its powerful riffing bass guitar, and Schneider already heavily manipulating his flute using an EMS pitch-to-CV converter to drive other electronics.
Hütter: "The studio was in the middle of an oil refinery. When we came out of the door we could hear the sound of those big flames burning off the fumes – all kinds of industrial noises." (Interview in Select magzine, 1991)
Sales were poor and RCA opted to drop the band, which then dissolved. The album has never been officially reissued, although bootleg CDs were distributed in the 1990s, often featuring an audio dub of an early Kraftwerk appearance on the Bremen Beat Club TV show as a bonus track.
Track listing
- (20:46) "Tone Float"
- (05:24) "Milk Rock"
- (03:19) "Silver Forest"
- (04:04) "Rhythm Salad"
- (07:46) "Noitasinagro"
Personnel
- Ralf Hütter - organ
- Florian Schneider - percussion, e-flute, alto flute, bell, triangle, tambourine, electroviolin
- Basil Hammoudi - percussion, conga gong, musical box, bangos, vocals
- Butch Hauf - percussion, bass, shaky tube, small bells, plastic hammer
- Fred Monicks (Alfred Mönicks) - percussion, drums, bongos, maracas, bell, tambourine