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"It's more fun to compute," or so the old Kraftwerk adage goes. Perhaps the German electronic pioneers didn't get out much; maybe Kraftwerk masterminds Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were simply having fun with their robotic reputations. Either way, the music world should be thankful that the duo found it so enjoyable to devote their days to crunching numbers and processing data in their Kling Klang lab - influencing everyone from David Bowie to New Order, Donna Summer to Fergie (yes, Fergie), few groups have had as monumental and memorable an impact on popular music as Kraftwerk.
The 15 artists collected on "8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk," on the other hand, seem to have decided that it's more fun to button-mash - each has recast a favorite Kraftwerk song in the form of "bitpop" - music played on ancient video game consoles with 8-bit processors, particularly the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600 and, naturally, the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System.
As a result, "8-Bit Operators" fares far better than most gimmicky tribute albums (See: "Fade to Bluegrass: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica"; "Anthem: The String Quartet Tribute to Good Charlotte") because its gimmick actually makes sense. Not only does 8-bit video game music owe its entire style to the innovations made by Kraftwerk in the mid-to-late 1970s, the compilation goes one further and has the group's once cutting-edge sound reimagined through intentionally retro tools. There are an awful lot of layers to chew on here, folks.
Not surprisingly, the most successful tracks here are the ones where the artists ("chippers," for those keeping score at home) most vigorously embrace the NES vibe. Covox's "Computer Love" is pure gray-cartridge nostalgia with buzzing low tones and chirping highs, its classic Nintendo percussion swooshing and sizzling underneath processed vocals. Oliver Wittchow's take on "Kristallo" and Herbert Weixelbaum's "Tanzmusik," both culled from Kraftwerk's earliest days, are so repetitious and cyclical in structure that they naturally lend themselves to 8-bit reconstruction - these tracks could have been video game music from the beginning. And Kraftwerk staple "The Model," performed here as a chugging synth stomper by Nullsleep, could be a lost boss stage from Double Dragon were it not for the vocoder vocals.
There's a lot to like in the songs that diverge from this formula, too. "Pocket Calculator," from 1981's "Computer World," becomes spiraling, schizoid new wave in the hands of Glomag - think "Video Killed The Radio Star" trapped in the world of Bubble Bobble. "Showroom Dummies" gets made over by Sweden's Role Model and loses none of its majestically cold detachment, its ominous electro pulse made all the more potent by the addition of icy female vocals. 8-Bit Weapon's amped-up "Spacelab" features a winding, sine-wave synth melody far blurrier than the original's and a tick-tock rhythm cranked to disco odyssey levels. The minds behind Kraftwerk always thought of it as a pop band; in bitpop form, the music comes closer than ever to reaching that vision.
It's all the more frustrating, then, when "8-Bit Operators" stumbles and loses sight of its strengths. Some criticism must be reserved for the album's inclusion of weaker Kraftwerk tracks, such as "Antenna," transformed from its initial electro-dub into Bit Shifter's awkwardly campy glam-pop version heard here, or Neotericz's "Electric Cafe," a late-period Kraftwerk dud that sounds too much like the classic "Trans-Europe Express" - the song that actually immediately follows "Café" and, courtesy of Receptors, proceeds to blow it out of the digital water with dark shockwaves of pixilated, primitive electronica. But there's also "Radioactivity," another Kraftwerkian favorite, which gets reassembled by David E. Sugar as some sort of bizarre "Miami Vice" backing track (even going so far as to employ a guitar part, more or less a bitpop heresy), and "Die Mensch-Maschine (The Man-Machine)," arguably Kraftwerk's finest moment and all-around mission statement, has some unfortunate soul named gwEM rapping over the top about how listeners "can't ignore [his] sonic force." For Kraftwerk purists, it's an unqualified disaster, the kind of virtual nightmare that keeps androids up at night.
Still, the compilation's good material far outweighs the bad. Like any tribute album, "8-Bit Operators" is doomed to fall short of the source material - it's just the nature of the game - but it succeeds in being an interesting, intriguing, experimental piece of music, both as a bitpop sampler and an ode to the electronic marvel that is Kraftwerk's legacy. It's still more fun to compute, but as "8-Bit Operators" demonstrates, kids today are doing it their own way - with the help of gamepads and gray cartridges.
Now that you've read about it, listen to it. Visit www.myspace.com/8bitoperators.
3 / 5 STARS
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