Six Degrees of Sauerkraut--Part LI: The Glimmerlight's National Anthem

Word recently reached us that our brethren Kraftwerk would be teleporting down from the Offworld Colony to play "all" eight of their albums at New York's Museum of Modern Kunst (for some reason they continue to ignore their first two records and their brilliant third LP Ralf und Florian). Tickets went on sale at Wednesday at noon. Humans yelled "action stations!" and hit their laptops and other portable electronic devices. The primitive human electronic system could not handle it and crashed. Some humans even took to the antiquated device of the telephone. "What was this!?" I asked myself. "An ELO concert?"

The true synthesists, the mensche maschines who once dwelled in the Glimmerlight, simply had to download the tickets through our subroutines. Sadly, MoMA's two ticket policy also applied to those of us powered by the blue crystals. So I'll see you on Man Machine night, the magnum opus of Kraftwerk. The album that provided the Glimmerlight with its national anthem. To hear the icy national anthem of the Glimmerlight - "Die Mensche Maschine" - click on the title of this post.

I must say that I find it highly ironic that the ticket buying experience for Kraftwerk, those great paragons of technology, could result in such technical difficulties - computers freezing up from Manhattan to Berlin - humans throwing up their pocket calculators in despair, frantically reaching for their telephones - disappointed hipsters taking to the human blog Brooklyn Vegan to vent their angst. And all the while, I glided through the night on my light cycle, holding my Man Machine tickets in the air, laughing.

Rauf und runter!

Six Degrees of Sauerkraut--Part L: Beyond The Wall... Pond

Me and my brothers would often journey to Berlin, to the Wall, to look beyond the edge of the world. In the Glimmerlight, we often heard rumors of the denizens beyond the Wall. However, due to the folly of human politics, East German androids were forbidden to journey to their ancestral homeland among the blue crystals under Düsseldorf. Despite these restrictions, one time in the early-80s, we decided to go beyond the Wall to check out the greatest of the East German synthesists, the synth duo Pond.

Pond was founded by Wolfgang Fuchs and Manfred Henning in 1979 in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. They journeyed from the hinterlands to East Berlin and soon started creating beautiful synth textures for the other cybernetic synthesists exiled beyond the Wall. When we finally found them in a cellar in East Berlin and heard them play, it was one of the highlights of my early sub-routines. We purchased a couple of their LPs and tried to smuggle them back to the Glimmerlight, but the border patrol found them in the trunk of our light cycle and confiscated them. But they couldn't take our memory chips.

By the time the Wall finally fell, the the blue crystals had dimmed and we had all departed the Glimmerlight for the Offworld Colony. These days, Manfred and Wolfgang do what most of the androids that remain among the humans do, they make music for Planetariums.

Check out one of Pond's synth masterpieces "Cassiopeia" by clicking on the title of this post. It's from their album Planetenwind. . . my copy is probably still spinning in the apartment of that former East German border guard.

Rauf und runter!

Six Degrees of Sauerkraut -- Part XXIII: How New Age Killed the Glimmerlight

The onslaught of New Age caught us all by surprise. Imagine, The Nothing which destroyed fantasia despite Atreyu's best efforts. Well, they had told us this had all happened before, and that it would all happen again, but we didn't believe them. We lounged by the deep blue pools in the glimmerlight, or drove our Light Cycles around on lazy Sunday afternoons, never knowing the darkness that was coming.

When, in the mid-80s, Sky Records began to advertise our musik as New Age, we knew this was the beginning of the end. Android synthesists were actually passing the Voight-Kampff test, leaving the glimmerlight, and touring with Yanni! Former replicants such as Ralf Tohde, Bernd Scholl and, to our great dismay, Dieter Schütz, were leaving us. The musik was still ghostly, mechanized, and blue, but it was packaged in a manner that we knew would dry up all the electric streams within the decade.

No one grieved the destruction more than Roedelius. He brought his synth down to the river and wrote the great lament of the glimmerlight, "Schöner Abend." This track reflected on the evening of the glimmerlight; the beautiful evening.

Soon, we would all depart for Silberland, where we would recreate the glimmerlight with the aid of Wolfgang's ghost. But Roedelius' melody is a testament to those Düsseldorf nights. Check it out by clicking on the title of this post.