Communication

Communication is the debut solo album by ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos. Originally released by Sony Music in 2003, 13 years after Bartos left the legendary electronic group, it has now been fully remastered for this reissue, complete with the bonus track Camera Obscura - a song that transcends the term bonus and in the context of this edition becomes essential. The album is a concept record that deals with communication at the pivotal time in electronic media and digital culture shortly after the turn of the millennium. As Bartos put it in 2003, Communication is about the way images shape our view of the world and how electronic media is going to change the contents of our culture. The world of media that Bartos described and envisioned has since become a day-to-day reality. This continued thematic resonance fully justifies the re-release of this definitive work, but there is another reason - Bartos's former Kraftwerk colleagues also released an album in 2003, their first after a ten-year break and their first since Bartos left the band, and the media focused it's attention on Kraftwerk's Tour de France Soundtracks, drawing interest away from Communication. Communication was so overshadowed that it is often referred to as Bartos's lost album. Bartos produced the album with sound engineer Mathias Black at his home studio in Hamburg between August 2002 and January 2003, but he had been developing it's concept since the turn of the millennium. Communication captures his reaction to the all-encompassing influence of digital media on society, cultural awareness, and communication, the very basis of contemporary human existence, focusing this theme through multiple aspects of what Bartos calls new media reality. It's a conceptual framework that makes this overlooked electropop classic arguably more relevant in 2016 than when it was first released. It's remains without any loss of musical power, and Bartos's sense of joy in making the music as palpable as ever, vividly rendered in remastered sound by Michael Schwabe at Monoposto, Dusseldorf. Communication documents and proves that Bartos created his own musical language ahead of, and independent from, the cultural zeitgeist or anything resembling a fleeting fashion, and connects seamlessly to Bartos's critically acclaimed 2013 follow-up, Off the Record (BB 079CD/LP). Simply put, Communication is the reintroduction of a timeless statement. It is not the business of music to be fashionable. The meaning of music is to bring people together. - Karl Bartos, 2016