Karl Bartos

Karl Bartos, a former Kraftwerk participant, has sustained his output of electronic works that extend from synth pop into film scoring. He entered Kraftwerk during 1975 and exerted substantial influence over several landmark releases by the group. As Kraftwerk adopted an ever more exacting standard that slowed their pace of new material, Bartos grew dissatisfied and departed to begin independent projects. He launched Elektric Music, which shifted from synth pop toward guitar-centered pop, and supplied contributions to releases by Electronic and OMD. He later resumed Kraftwerk-style electropop with the albums Communication in 2003 and Off the Record in 2013, then produced a score for the silent-era landmark The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that surfaced in 2024.

Marktschellenberg, Germany, is Bartos’s birthplace; he trained at the Rhineland State Conservatory of Music, Robert Schumann Institute, in Düsseldorf and received an advanced performer’s degree in percussion. He joined Kraftwerk in 1975 as electronic percussionist and first toured with them behind Autobahn. He became a permanent member on the 1975 album Radio-Activity, supplied the distinctive and influential rhythm of “Trans-Europe Express” on the 1977 album of that title, and started composing for the band with the 1978 release The Man-Machine. He exited Kraftwerk in 1990, yet his playing remained on the group’s 1991 remix set The Mix.

Bartos inaugurated his own Elektric Music project in 1992 and introduced it with the single “Crosstalk.” An Elektric Music remix of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” also appeared that year, completing a circle because the 1982 hip-hop original by Bambaataa had interpolated Bartos’s beat from “Trans-Europe Express.” Elektric Music’s debut full-length, Esperanto, followed in 1993 and contained the singles “TV” and “Lifestyle.” Bartos worked with Johnny Marr of the Smiths and Bernard Sumner of New Order on the duo’s project Electronic and their 1996 album Raise the Pressure. Elektric Music issued its second album, Electric Music, in 1998, an unexpectedly guitar-driven effort that recalled Smiths-style alternative pop.

Bartos returned to synth pop in 2003 with the solo album Communication. Soundtracks, art projects, lectures, and a mobile-phone application titled Mini-composer occupied him until 2012, when the electronic and Krautrock label Bureau B approached him for archival material. He mined his archive yet chose to finish the tracks and add new pieces instead of issuing rough mixes or demos. Bureau B released the results as Off the Record in 2013. Bartos issued the memoir Der Klang der Maschine: Autobiografie in 2017, later published in English as The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond. In 2021 he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame alongside Kraftwerk, who received the honor in the early-influence category. Bartos composed the music for a digital restoration of the 1920 psychological thriller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; the soundtrack appeared in February 2024 ahead of the theatrical premiere in Frankfurt.