Organisation: Tone Float (1970)
Kraftwerk is a well-known pioneering music act who helped influence (for good and for bad) many electronic, dance, synth pop, and techno acts to appear in their wake. That’s very well-documented. In 1974, Autobahn found the band reaching an international audience, with the edited version of the title track becoming a hit. Life with Kraftwerk did indeed exist prior to that album with three more albums, Ralf & Florian (1973), Kraftwerk 2 (1971), and Kraftwerk (1970), often known as Kraftwerk 1. These early albums show little of what they would later become, there are much more experimental Krautrock albums, fans of more adventurous Krautrock would certainly be at home with those albums, those who like their more dancy electronic albums of later, such as Trans-Europe Express (1977), Man Machine (1978), or Computer World (1981), would simply have to exercise caution.
Prior to Kraftwerk, both Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, along with percussionist Basil Hammoudi, bassist Butch Hauf, and drummer Alfred Mönicks (credited as Fred Mönicks), were in a group called Organisation, who released an album in 1970 called Tone Float. Strangely this album never received a German release, it was only released in the UK on RCA. Anyways, much of this album tends to have a minimalist feel to it, such as the side-length title track, which starts off with lots of percussion, but eventually the organ kicks in. I really found the organ work nice and pleasant, while Florian Schneider gives some flute work (yes, it’s hard to believe anything to do with Kraftwerk would include flute, but even all the Kraftwerk albums up to Autobahn did use flute). “Milk Rock” features some more nice percussion, strange electronic sounds (I presume off a sound generator, as Kraftwerk themselves didn’t use synthesizers until the Ralf und Florian album), and bass, and I like the organ that closes the piece. “Silver Forest” is a more calm piece dominated by organ and slow percussion. “Rhythm Salad” is completely percussion, dominated by congas and bongos, while the closing track, “Noitasinagro” is a rather calm, with organ and percussion, and even violin. As you noticed, the album is quite percussion-dominated, thanks to the presence of Basil Hammoudi who used all sorts of percussion at his disposal.
Unsurprisingly the original British RCA LP is very hard to come by. The German scene was getting highly experimental (look at what Tangerine Dream was beginning to do, which would culminate with Zeit in 1972), and since Tone Float was selling to the British market, I’m sure it baffled the few UK listeners who heard this (the British music scene at the time was dominated by more conventional progressive rock). The album never got a proper CD reissue (a bootleg has been floating about), as Kraftwerk pretty much repudiated everything they did before Autobahn, pretty much wanting to forget those early works, making it difficult to acquire these early albums. That’s too bad Kraftwerk thinks that way of their early works, because if they didn’t, their early material would be more readily available as a CD reissue (I have also seen early Kraftwerk albums on CD, but then those were likely bootlegs too). But the bootleg reissue of Tone Float includes both the “Organisation” and “Kraftwerk” title on the cover, feeling it would sell better if it was filed under “Kraftwerk” (of course the original LP never featured the “Kraftwerk” banner, since that group had yet to exist, but the back cover did feature the same road construction cone that was to be featured on those early Kraftwerk albums).
Tone Float frequently gets slagged (same for all of Kraftwerk’s pre-Autobahn albums), understood if you’re more comfortable with an album like Computer World. It has none of that techno sound that Kraftwerk fans associate the group with. Fans of the more adventurous and experimental side of Krautrock certainly should try this album (as well as the pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk).