Radioland: Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity Revisited- 'Radioland' Live from sounduk on Vimeo.

Radioland: Radio-Activity Revisited is available on vinyl, limited to just 1,000 copies for the world in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with a CD included. The CD release is limited to 2,000 copies and is packaged in a hardback 20-page book. Both include liner notes by David Stubbs, author of Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany and photographs and visuals from the project.

“For me, there is a great nostalgia and melancholy about this album,” says Franck Vigroux, the composer and sound artist who, along with Perrier Jazz award-winning pianist and composer Matthew Bourne and installation artist Antoine Schmitt, is responsible for the Radioland project. Earlier in 2015, they reimagined Kraftwerk’s 1975 masterpiece Radio-Activity live on the 40th anniversary of its release, using a formidable barrage of analogue equipment and live visual imagery. “I first heard the record when I was a kid in the 70s - it provided the jingle for a really famous radio show in France - the track ‘Radio-Activity’ was a big hit. But only later did I realise that this album was more than that - it’s a great pop concept album about this idea of “radio-aktivität” - not just the atomic power but the idea of communication.”

Radio-Activity was a hit in France but elsewhere was less immediately well received than its predecessor Autobahn or its successor, 1977’s Trans-Europe Express. Perhaps its provocative title, mistakenly thought to celebrate nuclear power, alienated 1970s audiences. It nestles undeservedly in the shadows of Kraftwerk’s other towering achievements. The advantage of that is that today it sounds pristine, relatively unfamiliar. Its unearthly sound and signal pulses evoke the historical dawn of electro-pop lighting up the horizon, as an increasingly moribund guitar-dominated era drew to a close, supplanted by something brighter, hoving in like a metal craft from a n.......
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