Ralf und Florian is the third studio album by the German electronic bandKraftwerk. It was released in October 1973 on Philips. It saw the group moving toward its signature electronic sound. Along with Kraftwerk's first two albums, Ralf und Florian to date has never been officially re-issued on compact disc. However, the album remains an influential and sought-after work, and bootlegged CDs were widely distributed in the 1990s on the Germanofon label. In 2008, Fact named it among the 20 greatest ambient albums ever made.
Background
As indicated by the title, all the tracks were written, performed and produced by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, with the sessions engineered by the influential Konrad "Conny" Plank. The album has a fuller and more polished sound quality than previous efforts, and this is clearly due to the use of a number of commercial recording studios in addition to Kraftwerk's own yet-to-be-named Kling Klang. The colour photograph on the back of the cover gives a vivid impression of the bohemian state of Kraftwerk's own facilities at the time including egg-box trays pasted, nailed, or stuck on the walls as acoustic treatment. Fact stated that the album's sound "sits halfway between LSD-fried Kraut prog and the refined minimal art of classic Kraftwerk." The album is still almost entirely instrumental. Instrumentation begins to show more obvious use of synthesizers, but most melodic and harmonic keyboard parts are performed on Farfisa electronic piano/organ. Flute and guitar are still much in evidence. The band was still without a drummer, and several tracks, particularly "Tanzmusik", make use of a preset organ rhythm machine. "Kristallo" features a striking rhythmic electronic bassline, however, in general the album is much gentler and less rhythmically precise than Kraftwerk's later electronic work.
Release
The LP included a "musicomic" poster insert of cartoons by Emil Schult, who had been playing electric violin live with the band. Schult remained a collaborator of Kraftwerk's. The cartoons illustrated each track on the album, as well as the city ofDüsseldorf, with the caption "In Düsseldorf am Rhein, klingt es bald!", which translates literally in English as "In Düsseldorf on the Rhine, it will sound soon". This is a reference to Kraftwerk's Düsseldorf-based Kling Klang studio. The album was a modest success in Germany. Drummer Wolfgang Flür was recruited to play with Ralf and Florian for a subsequent promotional TV appearance in Berlin, for the German WDR TV arts show Aspekte. He became a member of the group thereafter. No material from this album has been performed in the band's live set since 1976. Though the electronic sound ofRalf und Florian is more stylistically similar to Autobahn than it is to Kraftwerk's first two albums, the band is seemingly reluctant to consider the album a part of its canon Schneider in later interviews referred to the first three Kraftwerk albums as "archaeology". The band hinted that the album may finally see a re-mastered CD release after issuing the boxed setThe Catalogue in the autumn of 2009.
Track listing
Note: The above English translations are taken from the US version of the album issued by Vertigo in 1975.
