Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Lending an ear to sounds of Kraftwerk and Sven Vath

Friday, April 28, 2000 | 9:31 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@vegas.com

In one of the funniest moments of Joel and Ethan Coen's "The Big Lebowski," '60s burnout and accidental detective The Dude (Jeff Bridges) walks out of his favorite bowling alley to find his car set afire by a trio of German nihilists. The head of the group, part-time porno actor and onetime musician Ulee (Peter Stomare), addresses The Dude as "Lebooski," and menaces him with a baseball bat and boombox blasting technopop.

The audience laughs even before the fisticuffs begin ("They're nihilists, Donny; they're harmless") because movie Germans are funny as hell. They wear coordinated black leather, speak in malevolently twisted English ("You zink ve are joking, undt making vith ze funny shtuff?") and are utterly humorless.

I'm against the stereotyping of Germans in films and television, but only because it weakens our ongoing crusade to get a rise out of the French. Image-wise, the Germans have knitted their own chain mail. The look of "Lebowski's" nihilists was patterned after real-life snappy dressers Kraftwerk. And it's not too hard to imagine Ulee, in his idealistic youth, penning a 70-minute-plus concept record called "The Harlequin, The Robot, and the Ballet Dancer," just as trance-techno whiz Sven Vath did in 1995.

Kraftwerk and Vath both are sporting new releases these days, a single and album respectively. Seeing as "Expo 2000" is the first new music Kraftwerk has produced in 14 years -- a gap two years over that taken by Scritti Politti, and just six years shy of Steely Dan -- the pioneering techno group gets to strut the runway first.

Put succinctly, "Expo 2000" is good. It's the same kind of good work that Kraftwerk produced in their heyday. Almost exactly the same kind of good work, in fact: "Expo" would fit neatly on the group's last album, "Electric Cafe," which many fans found to be underlong at 36 minutes. Tack the 3 1/2-minute "Expo" to the end of "Electric Cafe," along with its three mixes -- 20 extra minutes of material, bringing the record almost to a respectable hour. Consumer crisis over.

"Expo 2000" was created for Germany's world exposition -- Expo 2000 Hannover, opening this summer -- and it is as faithful to its subject as "Tour de France" was to its namesake. Froggy computer voices intone the world-fairish phrases "Man, nature, technology" and "Planet of visions" over five repeating tones and a murmured beat; the resulting theme is stately, experimental in theme (if not in sound), and sufficiently futuristic.

A full album would have been better (and one may yet come out this year -- maybe), but "Expo 2000" feels enough like an event itself to push the theme out of Letdownland and into Pleasant Surprisedom. The return of Kraftwerk no doubt has every techno musician in der velt bowing towards Berlin, scratching themselves in giddy anticipation of sampling just one single, solitary note from "Expo 2000," and building some overblown trance track around it.

Everyone, that is, but Sven Vath. He's got pre-2K Kraftwerk nailed on "Contact," right down to the computerized frog. It's one happy mess of burps and bleats, and considering how little of it is new or original, surprisingly good. "Pathfinder," "Your Sweat (Dein Schweiss)" and "Smuggler" do more than recall "Man Machine" or "The Robots"; they bring New Wave into the Now. Call it Now Wave, and you must fear it, even as you dance to it.

The proof of evil is in "Apricot," the refrain of which goes "I've lost my senses," and is delivered through a Vocoder. Rinky-dink synthesizer voices circa 1979 keep the affair moving; at one point the beat speeds up and you're reminded, not uncomfortably, of the old arcade game "Dig Dug." It's fun, but is it healthy? There is, after all, a reason no one makes music like this anymore -- it's kind of, you know, stupid.

Thankfully, there is one short break in this assault on your senses. The lovely chimes of "Privado" feel like turning a corner and discovering a flower growing through the Berlin concrete. Even when the action shifts back to Vath's computer world -- about halfway through the song -- the mood remains intact. Why "Contact" didn't include a few more of these moments is a mystery that even the Big Lebooski couldn't hope to solve.