Kraftwerk – 3-D: The Catalogue (2017) [Qobuz FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Released to coincide with Kraftwerk’s forthcoming June 2017 tour – their first UK dates since the breathtaking shows witnessed at the Tate Modern in 2013 – Kraftwerk “3-D The Catalogue”. This is the ground-breaking 3-D Kraftwerk Concert brought thrillingly to life, developed using high definition 3-D visuals, with Dolby Atmos surround sound and presented to the technological and audio standards one would associate and indeed come to expect from the pioneering Germans led by founder Ralf Hütter. For the very first time, every Kraftwerk fan can now experience a “Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art” in the comfort of their own home.

After remastering all of their full-lengths from Autobahn onward for the long-in-production 2009 box set The Catalogue, pioneering electronic group Kraftwerk began performing the albums in full during series of retrospective concerts, beginning at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. As with their concerts since 2009, the group designed special three-dimensional visuals for the performances, and equipped the audience members with 3-D glasses straight out of a 1950s movie theater. Box set 3-D The Catalogue is an audio document of the arrangements devised for these concerts. No crowd noise is audible, but there is somewhat of a rough quality to the vocals, so they sound like live takes rather than polished studio perfection. By no means are these arrangements carbon copies of the album versions – they’re arranged to flow as performances rather than home-listening experiences, which means that track orders are sometimes shifted, and several songs are shortened, sometimes drastically so. (The entire Trans-Europe Express album is perversely cut down to 24 minutes!) Additionally, as with all of Kraftwerk’s performances since the ’90s, the songs are often performed in the updated versions created for 1991’s The Mix rather than the originals, making “The Robots” and “Computer Love” (among others) sound stuck in the early ’90s when the originals sound timeless. The fact that Kraftwerk count The Mix as a proper album and include it as the seventh disc in this set just makes it overly redundant. However, they do include “Planet of Visions” (a rework of the 1999 “Expo 2000” single incorporating elements of Underground Resistance’s remix of the track) at the end of the disc, as it had become a staple of their live shows. In terms of sound quality, all of it sounds fantastic; the recordings are awash with details and production effects that simply would not have been possible when most of the pieces were originally composed. There are technological drawbacks to the set, however. The Mix is credited as being a Surround Sound 3-D mix…but specially mixed for standard headphones only, making it hard to tell the significance of the special mix. Plus, there’s the whole aspect of these arrangements being designed to accompany 3-D visuals. Obviously, the ideal way to experience this set (other than attending the actual concerts) is the Blu-ray edition; without the visuals, the music itself is certainly excellent, but doesn’t exactly replace the original albums.

Tracklist:

CD1 #01 – Autobahn
CD1 #02 – Kometenmelodie 1 / Kometenmelodie 2 / Mitternacht / Morgenspaziergang
CD2 #01 – Geiger Counter / Radioactivity
CD2 #02 – Radioland
CD2 #03 – Airwaves
CD2 #04 – Intermission / News / The Voice Of Energy
CD2 #05 – Antenna
CD2 #06 – Radio Stars / Uranium / Transistor / Ohm Sweet Ohm
CD3 #01 – Trans-Europe Express / Metal On Metal / Abzug
CD3 #02 – Franz Schubert / Europe Endless
CD3 #03 – The Hall Of Mirrors
CD3 #04 – Showroom Dummies
CD4 #01 – The Man Machine
CD4 #02 – Spacelab
CD4 #03 – The Model
CD4 #04 – Neon Lights
CD4 #05 – The Robots
CD4 #06 – Metropolis
CD5 #01 – Numbers / Computer World
CD5 #02 – It’s More Fun To Compute / Home Computer
CD5 #03 – Computer Love
CD5 #04 – Pocket Calculator / Dentaku
CD6 #01 – Electric Cafe
CD6 #02 – The Telephone Call / House Phone
CD6 #03 – Sex Object
CD6 #04 – Boing Boom Tschak
CD6 #05 – Techno Pop
CD6 #06 – Music Non Stop
CD7 #01 – The Robots (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #02 – Computer Love (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #03 – Pocket Calculator / Dentaku (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #04 – Autobahn (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #05 – Geiger Counter / Radioactivity (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #06 – Trans-Europe Express / Metal On Metal / Abzug (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #07 – It’s More Fun To Compute / Home Computer (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #08 – Boing Boom Tschak / Techno Pop / Music Non Stop (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD7 #09 – Planet Of Visions (Headphone Surround 3-D Mix)
CD8 #01 – Tour De France / Prologue / Etape 1 / Chrono / Etape 2
CD8 #02 – Vitamin
CD8 #03 – Aero Dynamik
CD8 #04 – Elektro Kardiogramm
CD8 #05 – La Forme / Régéneration