Interview With Karl Bartos
- Danz
- May 24, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: May 3
Got a chance to catch up with synth legend, Karl Bartos.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Karl helped propel the use of the synthesizer with Kraftwerk on albums like The Man-Machine and Computer World. Along with Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider and Wolfgang Flür, Karl would inspire an entire generation of electronic musicians..
In the 1990s, Karl would leave Kraftwerk and embark a solo career, continuing to collaborate with a number of musicians, like Bernard Sumner of New Order and Andy McCluskey of OMD. His discography is vast and spans decades.
Below, we talk about his latest release, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and more.
If you’re curious to read more about Karl after this interview, check out The Sound of the Machine – My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Omnibus Press.
Without further ado...
Synth History: What music were you listening to in your teenage years?
Karl Bartos: Like in every family, it was my mother who sang me my first songs. That’s the way it’s always been, and presumably it’ll always stay that way.
The medium of those days was still radio, to start with. But I didn’t regard the radio as a transmitter of music or news; it just stood on the sideboard and made sound, somehow. What the content of that sound was, didn’t really seem important to me. It was more a question of ‘radio on – radio off’. The device didn’t make much of an impression on me. Then came the day when my father surprised us with a black-and-white television set. American series flickered across the screen: Lassie, Fury and 77 Sunset Strip. Or the German children’s programmes, crime shows and kitschy films. It all started 1964 when I heard the Beatles. They changed my life! They came from space totally unexpected and hit my Kinderzimmer! A revelation. I wanted to feel how they sounded. And the wheel started turning...
