Kraftwerk's first American tour footage
1975
Video, 00:21:48.
Materials: 8mm film
Collection: Courtesy of Wolfgang Flür.
Kraftwerk are the godfathers of electronic pop music. Founded in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, Kraftwerk revolutionised popular music through their clinical use of electronics in a way that was at once minimalistic yet emotional, using repetitive rhythms and melodies together with computer or vocoder processed vocals. Their line-up in what is seen as their classic period from 1974 until the late-1980s was Florian Schneider, Ralf Hütter, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, who together produced albums such as Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, The Man Machine and Computer World. Kraftwerk were highly influential on the formation of techno music in Detroit and house in Chicago during the mid-1980s, as well as on new wave genres in Europe like electronic body music in Belgium and Germany. Adopting the persona of robots, Kraftwerk can also be seen to have pioneered the idea of foregrounding the music over the artist persona, which subsequently became prevalent in electronic music, through for example, avoiding images of artists on record sleeves.
