When I first heard Kraftwerk in the 1970s they vaguely threatened my post-hippie ethos that only acoustically-created music was valid. I didn’t quite get it. Fortunately that phase didn’t last too long and by the 80s I had fallen in love with their classic “The Man-Machine” album. I was lucky to catch the group’s live act at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City in 1998, a brilliant synthesis of sound and vision that cemented them in my mind as the Retrofuture band of all-time.
Playing electronic instruments on a minimalistic set of blinking diodes straight out of the War Room scenes in “Dr. Strangelove,” the purposely anonymous musicians disappeared at the end of the set to be replaced by androids fashioned in their image. Now that’s what I call fun! Their pioneering music holds up not just in the field of electronic dance music but its influence on rap (Afrika Bambaattaa’s proto-rap hit “Planet Rock” sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”).
This week Pitchfork.tv is showing Kraftwerk’s live DVD “Minimum-Maximum” for free but it looks like the Y2K crisis has messed up the link. I found an excerpt on You Tube: Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine
