On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Craig Land wrote: Welcome back, Craig!

So, what is happening? What have I missed these past few years?

Well, Ralf and Florian decided to release their final album as a limited edition, available only to people on this mailing list at the time. I'm afraid you missed out. It was revealed that their "live" performance at Tribal Gathering '97 wasn't live at all; those were four new-edition robots on the stage, tele-operated from KlingKlang studio, and the flashy costumes were to help distract people from looking too closely. It worked so well that they intend Kraftwerk to live on for hundreds of years as the first all-robot group. They just have to make the robots completely autonomous and give them the ability to innovate new music. In other news, Wolfgang retracted everything he said in his book, saying it was just a publicity stunt and they're really decent blokes. Iggy Pop and David Bowie intend to film a parody/tribute music video where they ride the Orient Express, meet Ralf and Florian, and go to an opium den. Komputer lauched a lawsuit against Kraftwerk, accusing them of shamelessly ripping off "Oh, Synthesizer" in "Neon Lights", and various other excessive sampling and imitation. In case anyone didn't guess based on my first sentence, I'm just kidding. The combination of "release" and "album" in the same sentence should have been a dead giveaway. :) -- /* Soleil */