If you happen to find yourself riding, say, the Tour de Flanders or huffing and puffing your way up an Alpine mountain pass in Europe, you would probably not be too surprised if two mild-mannered Germans were following close on your wheel. They would be quiet, evasive even, and if pressed would introduce themselves as Ralf and Florian and inform you that they cycle these parts as often as they can. What might surprise you is that the Ralf and Florian in question (Hutter and Schneider, respectively) are musical luminaries who very literally altered the direction of popular music history in the Seventies and Eighties. They are the legendary krautrock trailblazers Kraftwerk. They change gears, and, in glorious harmony with their machines, power past you upward toward a perfect Alpine sky. Just like robots, you marvel to yourself.

Indeed, it is to robots that Hutter and Schneider have most often been compared. Their spare, perfectly measured electronic music has always used the confluence of Man and machine as its driving impetus. Kraftwerk revel in, and ever so subtly parody, German precision and humourlessness, and have written odes to such seemingly mundane items as pocket calculators, personal computers, and multi-vitamins. For all this, their influence on pop music is impossible to overstate. Dubbed “the Electronic Beatles,” no less than U2, Madonna, David Bowie, REM, and Kylie (and a great many others besides) cite them as seminal influences. Their sound, transported to Detroit and Chicago, helped develop dance music as we know it today. And in Brooklyn N.Y., Afrika Bambaataa and their acolytes married this “industrial folk music” (as Hutter calls it) with black funk and soul, creating the early foundations of hip-hop. Kraftwerk’s music was, in many ways, our introduction to the digital age, rendered in a series of blips, bleeps, and German-accented robot voices intoning the coming “Computer World.” Their music showed us that the future would be both terrifying and nothing to fear at all. They told us that Man and machines could be harmonious, better even than the sum of their parts.

nyone who has ever mounted a well-made bicycle, clicked into the pedals, and made for the hills can relate to this Kraftwerkian ethos. It is fitting, perhaps, that Hutter and Schneider are as obsessive cyclists as they are musicians, and even more fitting that they took it upon themselves to compose the theme music, if you will, to the greatest show on earth: the Tour de France. Originally conceived as a single on their ill-fated “Technopop” album (slated to come out in ’83, but, like so much to do with the band, it dissipated into the ether of legend without seeing the light of day), fans had to wait almost 17 years before the single was released and another three before the eventual album made it onto the shelves. “Tour De France Soundtracks” was meant to coincide with the Tour’s centenary in ’03, but Kraftwerk are no less perfectionists than the notoriously finicky champion that year, Lance Armstrong. They delayed the release until the album was just right, timing be damned.

Kraftwerk’s secretive Kling Klang studios (a bunker with no phones, no fax, jammed with stacks of analog and digital equipment, and, presumably, a fortune in bike gear) are located in Dusseldorf, Germany, a town Hutter refers to as “the epicentre of cycling culture.” That the band are cycling nuts is clear “” during their tours (musical, that is) in the Eighties, they would get off the bus so they could cycle the final 100 miles to their destination. While other contemporaneous icons were guzzling intoxicants and enjoying the company of countless groupies, Hutter and Schneider were training.

So much time on the bike was bound to influence their other obsession “” music “” and it did. Cycling, Hutter has said in an exceedingly rare interview, “sounds like nothing silence, silence because when you’re cycling well and your bike is functioning well . . . [it] leaves space for concentration and imagination.” Scoring movement is nothing new for Kraftwerk. “Autobahn” (1975) and “Trans Europe Express” (1977) are both testaments in blips and bleeps to the thrill and danger of Man and machine hurtling forward at immense rates of speed. “Tour De France Soundtracks” is more meditative, more in keeping with the “nothing silence” Hutter describes. The album is less tinged with their signature dystopian edge, which is ironic as in 1983 cycling almost brought Kraftwerk to a premature end.

Around the time the original “Tour De France” single was to be released on the “Technopop” album, one of modern music’s greatest brains met the tarmac. Hard. Hutter was involved in a collision on a cycling tour near the Rhine Dam, and a weeklong stay in hospital (Hutter admits that he was not wearing a helmet that day, and is lucky to be alive) followed by a lengthy convalescence were contributing factors in what would become an almost 20-year sabbatical. Hutter bears no ill-will to his sport of choice, and the extended break did their music no harm, if “Tour De France Soundtracks” is any evidence at all.

Fans clamouring for more music after a two-decade drought were not disappointed. “Tour De France Soundtracks” and the subsequent world tour were a triumphant return to Kraftwerk’s rightful place on the pop-music chart, and that’s at the top. Headlines around the world were ecstatic and the dazzling visual presentation that backed the band on stage was enhanced by incredibly beautiful archival Tour de France footage (often tinted the shades of the Tricolour). Ancient images of Thirties-era tours rushing through the Pyrenees were cut together with a relaxed Eddie Merkx leaning against his bike, while past champions stared back through time, their faces betraying an exhaustion beyond words, almost beaten by the great Tour, yet never willing to give up. The music and its visual accompaniment embodied a real sense of history, a sense that cycling, a quintessentially modern sport, is ineffably linked to elemental concerns such as wind, speed, power, and silence. This is what gives “Tour De France Soundtracks” its particular power “” it accesses both the cerebral and visceral aspects of the great sport.

Knowing this, if you do come across Ralf and Florian on a European jaunt or following close behind a tour bus in a town near you, don’t bother asking them about their “Tour De France Soundtracks.” Their notorious secrecy bears no prying. Just listen to the hum of your wheels, the wind in your ears, and your own rhythmic breathing, and you’ll understand it perfectly.