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More sad news from the world of music, there was a documentary about them on BBC4 not so long back, I've just tried to find it on iPlayer but it's not available, very interesting it was too, there are some on YouTube if anyone's interested. Game changers as said above. RIP.
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Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 19:44 - May 6 with 3059 views
Was in Dusseldorf a few years back on holiday and made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Kraftwerk's KlingKlang studio. Should be a listed building by now.
This song really gets under your skin after a few listens. Haunting stuff.
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Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:16 - May 6 with 2984 views
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:06 - May 6 by FieryJack
F*ck.
RIP Herr Schneider.
He was the scary-looking one.
Was in Dusseldorf a few years back on holiday and made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Kraftwerk's KlingKlang studio. Should be a listed building by now.
This song really gets under your skin after a few listens. Haunting stuff.
What a load of wánk.
The first ever recipient of a Planet Swans Lifetime Achievement Award.
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:19 - May 6 by Darran
What a load of wánk.
At the end of the day, let's say in a 100 years time, when someone comes to write some sort of definitive encyclopoedia of popular music, Kraftwerk will probably get a glowing paragraph or two.
Cheap Prick, on the other hand, won't even get a footnote.
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:19 - May 6 by Darran
What a load of wánk.
Love the way there is no holding back when it comes to your critique!
What about this one? Apparently this one was considered to be decades ahead of its time due to the incorporation of a combination syth-locomotive train effect with accompanying (0:40s) additional robotic voice. Something that the world, until that day had never seen or could never, ever, ever have predicted!
Will your opinion of this particular group mellow after hearing this, I wonder?
Argus!
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Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:39 - May 6 with 2942 views
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 21:30 - May 6 by FieryJack
At the end of the day, let's say in a 100 years time, when someone comes to write some sort of definitive encyclopoedia of popular music, Kraftwerk will probably get a glowing paragraph or two.
Cheap Prick, on the other hand, won't even get a footnote.
And you f*ckin know it, deep down.
I couldn’t care less that video you posted is utter wánk.
The first ever recipient of a Planet Swans Lifetime Achievement Award.
There are genres of music that just do not appeal to people....but it doesn't take away it's relevance. The documentary mentioned earlier was good and I got their contribution. Personally was not a fan of Gary Numan, Depeche Mode dished up over in our borders..
Arguing about the merits of one musical genre over another is a completely pointless exercise and always has been.
The fact remains that Kraftwerk, although not true pioneers in my view, took an new way of making pop records to a global market. The true pioneers were people like Ron Grainer and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who had been making sound effects for the BBC since 1958 and were physically making their own devices to do that electronically culminating in pieces like the Dr Who theme in 1963 and from there Robert Moog, EMS and others took that to another level in the late 60s by building and then marketing the first commercially available synthesizers in the early 70s which could be used with or without a keyboard. In the mid 60s home organs started to have crude rhythm machines built into them and it was taking those out of the organs and making stand alone drum machines that kicked off the all electronic way of making pop music. In 1972, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come (the "God of Hell Fire" Arthur Brown) were probably the first rock band to use a drum machine to replace conventional percussion when they recorded the album "Journey" using the Bentley Rhythm Ace to provide all percussion and actually used it live on tour (which I witnessed on my 21st birthday in April 73) while the in the UK, the EMS VCS3 (which KIngdom Come also used) was the machine that rocketed Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' to global success. Meanwhile, in Germany, the early Tangerine Dream had been making electronic soundscapes for a few years.
Enter Kraftwerk who pulled all these various things together and experimented in how to make pop records in a completely new way and achieved global success doing it inspiring countless others to work in a similar vein. Like it or not, the rest is history.
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Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 08:31 - May 7 with 2752 views
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 22:54 - May 7 by FieryJack
Always loved those lyrics, enhanced by deadpan German accents.
The electronic Beatles. I bet if you googled most influential musicians they would pop up pretty close to the top.
I watched a German gig they did shortly after Woodstock happened and this was prior to them going fully electronic. They had drums, bass, mellotron, flute, and guitar, then Ralph (or was it Florian) started playing this homemade instrument that was like a keytar but with buttons. The crowd's faces were in shock, sort of like Michael J Fox in Back to the Future where he plays Van Halen and Chuck Berry. They were playing techno in 1970, it was like they were telling the audience that this is what your kids will be listening to in 20 years' time.
5 years later they were using the first electronic drums and prototype sequencers which they had made themselves.
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 08:22 - May 7 by karnataka
Arguing about the merits of one musical genre over another is a completely pointless exercise and always has been.
The fact remains that Kraftwerk, although not true pioneers in my view, took an new way of making pop records to a global market. The true pioneers were people like Ron Grainer and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who had been making sound effects for the BBC since 1958 and were physically making their own devices to do that electronically culminating in pieces like the Dr Who theme in 1963 and from there Robert Moog, EMS and others took that to another level in the late 60s by building and then marketing the first commercially available synthesizers in the early 70s which could be used with or without a keyboard. In the mid 60s home organs started to have crude rhythm machines built into them and it was taking those out of the organs and making stand alone drum machines that kicked off the all electronic way of making pop music. In 1972, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come (the "God of Hell Fire" Arthur Brown) were probably the first rock band to use a drum machine to replace conventional percussion when they recorded the album "Journey" using the Bentley Rhythm Ace to provide all percussion and actually used it live on tour (which I witnessed on my 21st birthday in April 73) while the in the UK, the EMS VCS3 (which KIngdom Come also used) was the machine that rocketed Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' to global success. Meanwhile, in Germany, the early Tangerine Dream had been making electronic soundscapes for a few years.
Enter Kraftwerk who pulled all these various things together and experimented in how to make pop records in a completely new way and achieved global success doing it inspiring countless others to work in a similar vein. Like it or not, the rest is history.
Probably the first group to use drum pads live which would trigger a modified Maestro Rhythm King.
I kind of disagree with your comment of them not being pioneers, they were but in a different way from BBC RW. They created their own instruments for them to be played live.
Kraftwerk founder member dies at 73 on 18:34 - May 11 by Best_loser
Krautrock was a British thing, kraftwerk , can, cluster, neu, tangerine dream, popol by
To this day most germans don't know much about it
They are too busy listening to their David hasselhoff albums
To be honest, most Brits know very little, if anything, about Krautrock either which wasn't a musical genre, it was a word invented by Melody Maker to bracket a lot of diverse early 70s German acts together. Most of the acts you listed will never be heard on daytime radio in the UK or Germany so will only ever be familiar names to a small minority in both countries. Kraftwerk did at least achieve significant UK chart status on several occasions but of the others, I can only think of Can's 'I Want More' which achieved a minor chart placing in the mid-70s and some airplay at the time but almost certainly zero since. Similarly, Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra and Belgium's Telex also achieved minor UK chart placings but I don't imagine many Belgians know much about Telex today apart from those who remember that they were the Belgian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980. It's like any niche musical genre though, it won't get daytime radio exposure without backing from big labels. Kraftwerk made the big jump that transformed their status due to a huge money injection from Phonogram whose global financial clout assured them of the daytime radio exposure in Europe & USA which made 'Autobahn' the huge global success it became.