Kraftwerk - Electric Café / Techno Pop [1986] [Album]

English Tracklisting:
1 Boing Boom Tschak (2:58)
2 Techno Pop (7:41)
3 Musique Non Stop (5:44)
4 The Telephone Call (8:03)
5 Sex Object (6:51)
6 Electric Cafe (4:17)

Mildly infamous for taking the band almost half a decade to produce; work is said to have begun on the album as early as 1982 (with the working titles of Technicolor and then Techno Pop), but the project was delayed due to band member Ralf Hütter suffering a near-fatal cycling accident, and then due to concerns within the band that the production quality of the album was not sufficiently cutting-edge, necessitating much re-work. The album, mastered by Bob Ludwig, finally saw release in 1986.

The album was initially released in English and German, including a limited "Edicion Española" release which featured the songs, Techno Pop and Sex Object in Spanish language versions.

It was the first Kraftwerk LP to be created using predominantly digital musical instruments, although the finished product was still recorded onto analog master tapes. The song, The Telephone Call (German version: Der Telefon Anruf) was the first and only Kraftwerk song to feature Karl Bartos on lead vocals.

Audiences generally appeared to find the music somewhat more sterile and less engaging than that of its conceptually more cohesive predecessor, Computer World. Compared to the band's four preceding albums, some critics have pointed to the lack of a strong and sufficiently intriguing theme to tie the Electric Café material together. Furthermore the near half-decade hiatus in the band's record releases and performance activity lost them crucial momentum in their career. Whatever the possible influence of these factors, Electric Café did not meet with any great commercial success.

Two singles were released from the album, Musique Non-Stop and The Telephone Call. Both were accompanied by promotional videos. Though both singles went to #1 on the Billboard dance chart in 1987, neither of the singles performed well in the general pop charts. However, Musique Non-Stop has been the closing piece of Kraftwerk's concerts ever since. In the early 1990s, a completely different version of Musique Non-Stop “slower and more melodic“ was used extensively as a jingle on the MTV Europe channel. Earlier, MTV Europe had already included elements from the original song and the video in the title graphics for MTV's Greatest Hits.

The video for Musique Non-Stop, created in 1984, is notable in itself for showcasing a computer animated representation of the band. The animation, which was complex for its time, was created by Rebecca Allen, using state-of-the-art facial animation software developed by the Institute of Technology in New York. The slow rate of the album's progress, combined with rapid changes in software animation, meant that Allen had to archive the animation program developed at the Institute of Technology until Hütter and Schneider were ready in 1986, to travel to New York to edit the images to the final version of Musique Non-Stop".

In the proposed remastered album collection The Catalogue, the Electric Café album has been renamed Techno Pop.