"Expo 2000" is a song by

Kraftwerk Kraftwerk (, ) is a Germany, German Electronic music, electronic band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely considered innovators and pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk was among the first successful a ...

. It was originally an a cappella jingle commissioned for the Hanover

Expo 2000 Expo 2000 was a World Expo held in Hanover, Germany from 1 June to 31 October 2000. It was located on the Hanover Fairground (Messegelände Hannover), which is the largest exhibition ground in the world. Initially, some 40 million people were ...

world's fair in Germany, which was subsequently developed into longer pieces with music and additional lyrics. It was the group's first commercial recording of new, original music since the release of the 1986 album '' Electric Café''. The "Expo 2000" single was first released on CD and twelve-inch vinyl in December 1999 by

EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At t ...

in Germany and in January 2000 elsewhere in Europe. It reached in the UK singles chart in March 2000. In November 2000, a collection of remixes was released, titled ''Expo Remix'', featuring contributions from various producers, including long-term collaborator

François Kevorkian François Kevorkian (; born 10 January 1954), also known by the stage name François K, is a French DJ, producer, remixer and label owner of Armenian descent and based in the United States of America, who started his career DJing in clubs such ...

, Orbital, and members of the Detroit techno collective

Underground Resistance Underground Resistance (commonly abbreviated to UR) are an American musical collective from Detroit, Michigan. Producing primarily Detroit techno since 1990 with a grungy four-track musical aesthetic, they are also renowned for their militant ...

. Both releases were combined and issued on one CD by

Astralwerks Records Astralwerks (or Astralwerks Records) is an American record label primarily focused on electronic music that is now owned by Universal Music Group. Its material is distributed via Capitol Music Group in the United States. The label was founded in ...

in the US and Canada in October 2001. "Expo 2000" was later reworked to remove all Expo references and subsequently titled "Planet of Visions" (). This reworked version has been played live extensively on all Kraftwerk tours since. It is featured on the live releases '' Minimum-Maximum'' and ''

3-D The Catalogue ''3-D The Catalogue'' () is the second official live album by German electronic music band Kraftwerk. It was released on 26 May 2017 on several format iterations, including a deluxe four-disc Blu-ray box set with Dolby Atmos multichannel audi ...

''. On the latter, it is featured as part of '' The Mix'' disc. The song can be heard in the 2001 Kollaboration 2001 viral video featuring Mike Song and David Elsewhere.

Jingle

The original Expo theme was a typically Kraftwerk

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''vo''ice and en''coder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder wa ...

-voice singing the phrase "Expo 2000" in six languages: German, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Japanese. In total, the piece lasted thirty seconds. This "Expo-Jingle" was only available for download from the Expo 2000 website for a limited period and on the limited edition official Expo 2000 souvenir CD. The jingle was used during the

world's fair, according to the official Expo 2000 website, "to announce Expo stops in buses, trains or planes, when prizes and awards are presented, at press conferences, during radio and television broadcasts, as a welcoming tune on the internet, as music on hold for the Expo Call Center, or when performances begin and as an intermission signal at Expo events." There was criticism in Germany at the time about the size of the fee paid400,000 DM (which would have been approximately €204,500 in 1999)for such a brief and simple piece of music.

Track listing

Charts

Weekly charts

References

{{authority control Kraftwerk songs Songs written by Florian Schneider Songs written by Ralf Hütter 1999 songs Expo 2000 World's fair music Songs based on jingles EMI Records singles Astralwerks singles