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 which was a paean to Fritz Lang’s movie of the same name).
