Radio-Activity

Recorded at Kling Klang and produced by Hütter and Schneider, with Emil Schult working on lyrics and artwork. It was the first album by the classic line-up of Hütter, Schneider, Bartos and Flür, with Bartos and Flür on electronic percussion. The title is a pun on its two themes: half the songs are about radioactivity and half about activity on the radio. Bartos said it was inspired by a Billboard chart column called Radio Activity. The cover shows a late-1930s German radio set. The overture, Geiger Counter, uses Geiger counter beats, the Vako Orchestron supplies the choir voices on the title track, Hütter played a Farfisa electronic piano on Transistor, and the vocoder is used extensively.

The album was released in November 1975 and was the first to appear on Kling Klang as an established label under a new licensing deal with EMI. For publicity the record company sent the band to a real nuclear power station to be photographed in white protective suits. It reached number 59 in Canada in February 1976, and the title track became a number 3 hit in France, selling 500,000 copies. Rolling Stone criticized the album for lacking the melodic sense of Autobahn. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing called it Kraftwerk at its most melancholy and oblique, wreathed in decaying fuzz and crackle and ghostly background tones.