53 years after his birth, Kraftwerk will come back to Argentina. The first week of March, advance tickets for the concert that the band will offer on May 23 in Movistar Arena. Electronic music fans in Argentina will have the opportunity to experience their “Gesamtkunstwerk”, german designation of “total work of art”, in the space located at Humboldt 450 in the city of Buenos Aires.
The musical project Kraftwerk was created in 1970 by the musicians Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider that, throughout their career, would add other members forming a quartet. In the city of Düsseldorf, they established their legendary experimental electronic music studio, which they called “Kling Klang”, where they conceived and produced all of the group’s albums. This new visit will not include the participation of Schneider, who parted ways with the band in 2009 and died in May 2020, at the age of 73.
In the mid 70’s, Kraftwerk he had achieved international recognition for his revolutionary electronic soundscapes and robotic musical experimentation. With their visions of the future, communication and the environment, the Germans produced the soundtrack for the digital age of the 21st century. All his compositions were carried out with synthetic voices and computerized rhythms and have had a significant worldwide influence on the entire range of musical genres: from the African-American electro sound of Afrika Bambaataa to the synth-pop of Depeche Mode.
The band started when two students from the Remscheid Academy of Arts, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, developed a musical group inspired by the genre “kraut rock”, which was fashionable in the early seventies in Germany. However, it was not until 1974 with the release of their fourth album, “Autobahn”, and abandoning the German pop style, that his music and aesthetics caught the attention of the public. In this way, they were consolidated as the classic quartet, when the musicians joined Karl Bartos and Wofgang Flur.
It was then that the image of the four machine men, dressed in suits, standing behind their music stations, playing on their modern synthesizers and sharing melodies inspired by objects of modern life, was created. A constant in Kraftwerk is that its line-up of members would vary as the years and records went by. Currently, Ralf Hütter, Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Falk Grieffenhagen They are the official members of the band.
In its history and in less than a decade, Kraftwerk had enough to compose four emblematic albums “Radio Activity”(1975), “Trans Europe Express”(1977), “The Man-Machine” (1978) and “Computer World” (1981) to develop his legacy. These albums, added to “Electric Cafe” and “Tour de France”positioned them as pioneers of electronic music, poets of the robotic age and avant-garde artists, at the same time that they were many years ahead of the digital age.
Cultural and global recognition was obtained in the last decade, with the retrospective of its catalog at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. Presentations at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (London), Akasaka Blitz (Tokyo), Opera House (Sydney), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Neue National Galerie (Berlin) and Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). In 2014, they were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. Kraftwerk is a band that has left a indelible mark on music and performing arts and his legacy remains relevant and influential today.
by RN
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