Ralf Hutter sounds pretty cheerful as he tinkers away in his studio in Dusseldorf on a chilly October morning, which he's been doing for the best part of four decades since co-founding pioneering German electronic outfit Kraftwerk.
Kraftwerk's Kling Klang studio is notoriously airtight, with fan mail sent back unopened and interview requests usually rejected. The studio phone is famous for never ringing and collaborators in the past have been given an exact time at which to call. One of the 'robot men' would then wait until that precise moment before picking up the phone to see if anyone was on the line.
However, an excited call came through the day Kraftwerk's concert in Hong Kong next Friday was announced, saying Hutter had agreed to an interview. On the first attempt to get through to Kling Klang, we were put on hold and waited through 20 minutes of telephone static combined with bleeping noises and sounds coming from an American earthquake monitoring station.
Since the interview subjects were the experimental geniuses who comprise Kraftwerk, it was hard to tell whether the noises meant the interview had begun. But trying again, we got through to a relaxed-sounding Hutter, the man who helped steer Kraftwerk from a late-1960s Krautrock outfit into the godfathers of electronic music forms including electro, techno, trance and even hip hop.
The obvious place to start was to ask why we had been granted an interview. 'We say something when there is something to be said in words,' Hutter says. 'Mostly our language is music - that and the visuals we create to go with the music. But over the past six years we have been more active around the world and communicating with words.'
When Hutter says 'we', he basically means himself since he's been operating as the sole original member of Kraftwerk since co-founder Florian Schneider left several years ago.