Karl Bartos

Who is Karl Bartos?

Karl Bartos is a German musician and composer. He was, between 1975 and 1990, along with Wolfgang Flür, an electronic percussionist in the electronic-music group Kraftwerk. He was originally recruited to play on its US "Autobahn" tour. In addition to his percussion playing, Bartos was credited with songwriting on the Man-Machine, Computer World, and Electric Café albums and sang one lead vocal on the latter.

Bartos, who was born in Berchtesgaden, Germany, left the group in 1990, reportedly frustrated at the slow progress in the group's activities because of the increasingly perfectionist attitude of founding members Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider.

In 1992 Bartos founded Elektric Music. This new project released the Kraftwerk-style Esperanto in 1993, and then the more guitar-based Electric Music in 1998. In between the two albums, Bartos collaborated with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr on Electronic's 1996 album Raise the Pressure, and co-wrote material with Andy McCluskey of OMD, which appeared on both Esperanto and OMD's Universal album. In 1998, he also produced an album by Swedish synthpop band the Mobile Homes, much in the style of his work with Electronic: guitar-pop with very slight synthetic references. It was received as a great disappointment to synthpop fans, but it sold more than any of their previous albums and was used in TV advertisements for an airline to moderate success.