Die Krupps was started up by Jurgen Engler, who during the mid to late 70's had been in the punk band Male. The first Die Krupps release was "Steelworksymphony" in 1981. Original member Ralf Dorper went on to be part of Propaganda and later returned to Die Krupps when that group disbanded. In 1989, Die Krupps reached #25 in the U.S. Billboard Dance Charts with "Machineries of Joy," a collaboration with Nitzer Ebb.
Die Krupps are planning to tour America in August 1995. They have been invited to go on the road with Nitzer Ebb, but conflicts with their European tour may prevent that from happening. The following is an interview with Engler.
"Basically because that material wasn't out in the States and we just thought that something needs to be put out in the States before we put out a new album. Basically what the people know in the States is the tribute to Metallica. We've released records here since 1981 and most of it was never released in the States, besides a compilation on Mute in 1990 or 1991. A lot of people didn't really know what the band was all about when the Metallica album came out. And as I told people then, that was not supposed to be a Die Krupps record. Basically, I wanted to meet the Metallica guys and give them a cassette with their music. And the record company, Rough Trade, they decided to put it out as a CD. It was ok, but it wasn't really what Die Krupps were doing at that time, because it didn't have any guitars. I didn't want to present Metallica a tape with guitars, it should have been all keyboards, so that's why it sounded different from what we were doing at that time. The "Rings Of Steel" album, which is a compilation of "The Final Option" and "The Final Remixes," which came out in Europe last year and the year before, is more what we're doing."
Why hasn't most of your past material been released in America?
"To be honest, it might have different reasons. For one thing, I think we never really tried hard to get something out in the States. Brian from Cleopatra was interested in our releases, and we're getting more and more popular here in Europe. We sell a decent amount of records and people just became aware of us I think. It's weird because here, we've been around for so long and people know the band from the early days. It's a totally different thing, in the States we're not very well known at all. We're starting where Die Krupps were years ago. No record company was really interested in releasing it because we weren't trying. They didn't really know about it."
"That was kind of hard. The thing is, "The Final Remixes" was basically a remix album of 16 of our songs. It was all the songs off "The Final Option" plus five songs off the album "I," which was released before 'The Final Option." I chose the songs that were representative of both albums, which means the songs that were remixed in a totally different way on the remix album I chose to put on "Rings Of Steel" and the original versions that in my opinion represented the band the best. Some remixes are so different that we decided to put both mixes on there, as it's not really the same song. Some of those bands brought in so much of their own identity that it was like a new song."
"The idea was to have some remixes done for a song that was pretty popular here, "To The Hilt." We decided to have people from all different genres do remixes, like for example people from the industrial field, from the metal field, from the techno field. Since we've been around for a long time we know people in every genre and are friends with a lot of people. We wanted to show people the whole spectrum of our music. "To The Hilt" had a little bit of a hip-hop influence, a little EBM or industrial. We just wanted to have it presented in different ways. We just called up a couple of friends of ours, and we just approached a couple of people that we thought would be good for the single remix. And in the end, it became word of mouth thing, and we had a lot of people together and we decided to switch from doing a CD single to do a whole LP. It was a very pleasing thing to me to have all my colleagues and friends doing stuff with our songs. I thought it was really interesting, especially since they brought in their own identities. It just widened our horizons."
"Most of the bands approached it in the way they would probably write their own music. And that's what I liked. I would have been disappointed if someone had just tried to fiddle around with the knobs a little bit. All of them did a really good job and added keyboards or added guitars or added vocals. None of them just did a sloppy job. I really like that. It's kind of hard, I wouldn't say that particular person did a particularly good job because I wouldn't want to hurt anyones feelings. I think they were all very, very cool about it. We didn't pay everybody large sums of money because we were friends and that was what the remix album was about. We couldn't have approached someone and given them $20,000 and at the same time it wouldn't have been the same spirit behind it. I wouldn't have liked that and I would have just dropped the idea."
"In the past, up to "The Final Option" I would sit down in my own studio, just fiddle around with my old analog keyboards and try to find cool sounds. Then I'd start writing on the keyboard, putting together some sequences and stuff. That was the old way of approaching it, and then when I started to bring in the influence of my old rock back ground into our music, I had our guitarist Lee come in and we just sat down together. He was playing the guitar and I sat down behind the drum kit and that's how we were writing songs. He plays guitar riffs and I play drum patterns and we just try to work it out on a very basic level. Then I would sample his guitar and he would go home to San Francisco and I would just sit home in my studio and arrange the songs around the guitar riffs on keyboard, with samples and all that, and later he would come in when we put it down on tape and we would drop the sampled guitars and he would put the real guitars on tape. And that's how out music is done."
"It's kind of hard to say. I really like old analog equipment because it has a very unique feel to it. Most of the stuff I use is old, but on the other side, when it comes to mixing I prefer the Capricorn desk, which is a totally digital desk, and it just has a totally different sound. It sounds very hard, very direct. It's kind of hard to explain, you hear a difference, it's digital sounding but in combination with the analog equipment it just sounds fantastic. When it comes to music, I would just hope that people widen their horizons and get a little bit more open to other kinds of music. There is so much you can still create by combining different musical styles and people, especially kids, tend to be very narrow minded. I think it should just go in the other direction."
"I like the sounds, and the control over the sounds, you can achieve a cool sound much easier. Ok, you can press a preset button, but that's not the same thing. You've got to create the song yourself, and you've got be a proud of the sound you created, rather than have someone provide you with the preset. For me, it's fascinating to still be able to get a sound out of a machine that I've had for years. It's always exciting to come up with something new. The way you can play with those instruments, it's a totally different thing. I get really bored with new digital equipment easily, because they all have the same presets. It's not my thing. I have a huge collection of old analog keyboards, 30 to 40 from the end of the 60's to the beginning of the 80's. A lot of keyboard companies just go back to creating keyboards that have a lot of knobs and stuff. They look like old analog keyboards, and they want them to sound like them too because a lot of people picked up on the old stuff and get bored with the new stuff."
"We're a band on stage, we have a guitarist, we have a bassist, we have a drummer, we have a keyboard player. I sing and I have my metal live percussion and we have some stuff coming from the tape but we're basically a live band. We don't have a lot of stuff on tape. We went on tour here with Nine Inch Nails and it was pretty intense. It's kind of funny because we were asked by their booking agency in Germany if we would support NIN or appear as their 'special guests.' At first we weren't sure about it because we sell lots more albums here than they do, but then I thought I like the band, so why not. The first two nights we didn't have a barrier in front of the stage and people when we started playing went totally crazy. They just went up on stage, and in the end like 50 people on stage just going totally bananas. The whole monitor system was wrecked and the stage manager was pretty pissed off about it. In the end, NIN put up fences every night because it was getting a little bit wild."
"We mix it up, we go back to the last five years. 'Metal Machine Music' is an important song for us, and that's a song we did in '90. We're still playing that, and sometimes we're playing "Germaniac" which is a song about the German re-unification and the fear of an upcoming right-wing terror that we wanted to warn the people about. We sometimes play that one too, especially when something happens. But in general, we go back to songs that are like 5 years old at the most, which means basically from the past 3 albums."
"Hopefully, this year. We're working on it."
"That's difficult to say. With "Final Option," it took us 5 months. The writing process was done really fast, maybe 10 songs in 2 days, but getting the whole thing on tape took a while. That was the first time I'd worked together with Lee on all the songs. Because I've never written with anyone else, then I had to find a new strategy to work it out. It took us a little longer to sample the guitars, work the keyboards out and all that. With the new album, I think it's going much faster. Probably 8 weeks to do the whole thing."
