Ralf and Florian - Kraftwerk

Ralf und Florian (English title: Ralf and Florian) is the third studio album by the German electronic band Kraftwerk. It was released in October 1973 on Philips. It saw the group moving toward their signature electronic sound.
Along with Kraftwerk's first two albums, Ralf und Florian to date has never been officially re-issued on compact disc. However, the album remains an influential and sought-after work, and bootlegged CDs were widely distributed in the 1990s on the Germanofon label. In 2008, Fact named it among the 20 greatest ambient albums ever made.
As indicated by the title (and like their previous album), all the tracks were written, performed and produced by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, with the sessions engineered by the influential Konrad "Conny" Plank. The album has a fuller and more polished sound quality than previous efforts, and this is clearly due to the use of a number of commercial recording studios in addition to Kraftwerk's own yet-to-be-named Kling Klang. The colour photograph on the back of the cover gives a vivid impression of the bohemian state of Kraftwerk's own facilities at the time – including egg-box trays pasted, nailed, or stuck on the walls as acoustic treatment.
Fact stated that the album's sound "sits halfway between LSD-fried Kraut prog and the refined minimal art of classic Kraftwerk." The album is still almost entirely instrumental (some wordless vocalising appears in "Tanzmusik", and "Ananas Symphonie" features the band's first use of a machine voice created by an early prototype vocoder, a sound which would later become a Kraftwerk trademark). Instrumentation begins to show more obvious use of synthesizers (Minimoog and EMS Synthi AKS), but most melodic and harmonic keyboard parts are performed on Farfisa electronic piano/organ. Flute and guitar are still much in evidence. The band was still without a drummer, and several tracks, particularly "Tanzmusik", make use of a preset organ rhythm machine. "Kristallo" features a striking rhythmic electronic bassline (actually created on the EMS synthesizer with the aid of the vocoder), however, in general the album is much gentler and less rhythmically precise than Kraftwerk's later electronic work.
All music is composed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider.
No. Title
1. "Elektrisches Roulette" ("Electric Roulette") 00:00
2. "Tongebirge" ("Mountain of Sound") 04:23
3. "Kristallo" ("Crystals") 07:15
4. "Heimatklänge" ("The Bells of Home") 13:34
5. "Tanzmusik" ("Dance Music") 17:18
6. "Ananas Symphonie" ("Pineapple Symphony") 23:55

Note: The above English translations are taken from the US version of the album issued by Vertigo in 1975.