Electric Café

A tentative image from Rebecca Allen's site, which displays the original Techno Pop title

The album is somewhat infamous for taking the band almost half a decade to produce. Work is said to have begun as early as 1982 (with the working titles of Technicolor and then Techno Pop), but the project was delayed for several reasons: Ralf Hütter suffered a cycling accident in May or June 1982,[1] there were concerns within the band that the production quality of the album was not sufficiently cutting-edge, and more generally Hütter had become more focused on cycling than on the band's activities. The album, mastered by Bob Ludwig, finally saw release in 1986. It is the last Kraftwerk album to feature percussionist Wolfgang Flür – and as with 1981's Computer World he only appears on the cover design, not on the recordings. He left the group in 1987.

The album was recorded in Düsseldorf with various contemporary devices including the E-mu Emulator sampler (notably used previously on "Tour de France"), MIDI instruments like Yamaha FM-engines, the Sequential Circuits Drumtracks and digital effect processors. The Synclavier system (credited on the single "The Telephone Call") was used at the final mixing stage of the album done at Right Track Studios in New York together with DJ François Kevorkian and Ron St. Germain.

The first side of the album is divided into three tracks, which form a suite of three variations with recurring elements. (For instance, a few bars of melody from "Musique Non-Stop" can be heard as a few bars of bass melody in "Techno Pop".) It is primarily instrumental, utilizing the track titles and other phrases in a spoken manner, as opposed to sung, narrative lyrics. The songs "Techno Pop" and "Sex Object" feature partial Spanish-language lyrics. The second side also contains three songs, following a somewhat more conventional pop format. The song "The Telephone Call" (German version: "Der Telefon-Anruf") is notable for being the first and only Kraftwerk song to feature Karl Bartos on lead vocals. The album closes with the title track "Electric Café", which features French-language lyrics. The track gained some exposure in the United States when it was used slightly sped up as the theme song for "Sprockets", the German television spoof by Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live.

In 1982, Kraftwerk began work on a follow-up album to its successful and influential Computer World. This new album initially had the working title Technicolor but that name had to be abandoned because it was a trademark. The proposed new title was Techno Pop. The initial track listing consisted of four tracks. The first track, "Techno Pop", would take up one side of the LP and was an original one-track mix of "Boing Boom Tschak", "Techno Pop" and "Musique Non-Stop", as they appeared on the final album. On the other side were the tracks "The Telephone Call", "Sex Object" and "Tour de France".

Recordings were progressing and one song from these sessions, "Tour de France", was released as a single in 1983, achieving moderate commercial success. However, shortly after this, Ralf Hütter suffered a cycling accident on the Rhine Dam and was apparently unable to work with the band for some time.

EMI Records announced a release date for the Techno Pop album. Promotional advertisements were released and official catalog numbers were assigned to the project. "We were working on an album concept, Technopop, but the composition was developed and we just changed the titles", Hütter explained. "It became Electric Café. But somebody within the record company went out and did a pre-order, we were working on the sleeve and some marketing idiot did this".[2] To bide time while the band continued work on the new album, Autobahn was reissued in 1985 with a slightly updated cover art. Indeed, by this time, Hütter & Schneider had regained the rights to the recording following the expiration of the group's original contract with Philips Records.

When work did recommence on the sessions, the band was reportedly concerned that the album's production was not of a sufficiently ground-breaking quality to match its reputation as sonic innovators. The final mix of the album was completely redone from scratch at least once, with Hütter eventually travelling to New York with the master tapes to work on them with producer François Kevorkian. The recordings were not released until 1986, under the new name Electric Café. The band had decided not to include the song "Tour de France" but instead to leave it as a stand-alone single: it had already been reissued in 1984, when Kevorkian had auditioned his production skills with a largely instrumental remix of the song.

Much speculation has taken place over the years as to whether a lost Kraftwerk album (i.e. unreleased songs/recordings) exists from the four-year period between 1982 and 1986. Kraftwerk are notoriously secretive about their activities, but a fairly reliable and consistent picture can be gleaned from interviews given by the various band members. Bootleg recordings of the songs "Techno Pop" and "Sex Object" that claim to be demos from the early Technicolor/Techno Pop sessions have been circulated over the years, each with a noticeably different production sound from the final album.

At various times, Hütter, Bartos, Flür and Schneider have each stated in interviews that there are no unreleased songs from this period, and that all of the original Technicolor and Techno Pop material was eventually reworked into what can be heard on the finished Electric Café album. Hütter commented "We don't spend our time on making 20 versions of a song only to leave 19 in the closet. We work target related. What we are starting we release. Our storage is empty."[3]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Mojo	[5]
Uncut	[6]
Drowned in Sound	(6/10)[7]
Smash Hits	[8]

Audiences generally appeared to find the music somewhat more sterile and less engaging than that of its conceptually more cohesive predecessor, Computer World. Compared to the band's four preceding albums, some critics have pointed to the lack of a strong and sufficiently intriguing theme to tie the Electric Café material together. Furthermore, the near half-decade hiatus in the band's record releases and performance activity lost them crucial momentum in their career. While recognising Kraftwerk's influence on groups such as Depeche Mode and The Human League, journalist Ian Cranna writing in Smash Hits described the album as "frankly rather dull" adding "one can only assume it's an exercise for their own amusement".[8] Whatever the possible influence of the group, Electric Café did not meet with any great commercial success and reached only the No. 58 position in the UK charts.

A newly remastered edition of Electric Café was released by EMI Records, Mute Records and Astralwerks Records on CD, digital download and heavyweight vinyl in October–November 2009. The release was changed back to the original title of Techno Pop. Due to licensing restrictions imposed by Warner Music Group, this version has only been made available in the US and Canada as a part of The Catalogue box set.[9][10] However, when EMI was acquired by Universal Music in 2013, all of Kraftwerk's oeuvre went to Warner with its subsequent purchase of Parlophone.

This edition is the only album in The Catalogue that has been given a bonus track: the original "The Telephone Call" was replaced by the shorter and subtly different 7-inch single mix, and as a replacement for the latter part of the original album track (which contained telephone sounds and operator voices), the remix "House Phone" was inserted. However, the CD version included within the earlier promotional copies of The Catalogue, issued in 2004, features a remaster of the 6-track album as originally released, with the full 8-minute version of "The Telephone Call" and no bonuses.

The original 1986 sleeve notes are, like those in Computer World, unspecific regarding the specific roles of personnel. The 2009 remaster credits provide the following information:

• Ralf Hütter – voice, vocoder, keyboards, electronics, mixing engineer
• Florian Schneider – vocoder, speech synthesis, sound design
• Karl Bartos – electronic percussion (and voice on "The Telephone Call")[11]
• Henning Schmitz – sound engineer (Kling Klang Studio)
• Joachim Dehmann – sound engineer (Kling Klang Studio)
• Fred Maher – music data transfer (Axis Studio, NYC)
• Bill Miranda – music data transfer
• François Kevorkian – mix (Right Track, NYC)
• Ron St. Germain – mix (Right Track, NYC)
• Bob Ludwig – mastering
• Hubert Kretzschmar - graphic design
• Rebecca Allen - all album artwork

Band member Wolfgang Flür is included in a subsequent general list of personnel, but is not credited with a musical or production role in these recordings. [12]

• Electric Café at Discogs (list of releases)