Kraftwerk Opens US Tour In DC Tonight, 5/30

Setlist?

'Splain me my Kraftwerk opinion so I can decide whether to see them in June!

Their appearance up through the first encore was amusing...graying men in gray suits, who could have gotten lost from a World Bank annual meeting...until they lit up the LCD displays on their ties.

The Man-Machine
Tour De France Etape
Tour De France
Autobahn
The Model
Neon Lights
Radioactivity
Trans-Europe Express/Metal on Metal
Vitamin

Home Computer
Numbers
Computer World
Pocket Calculator

The Robots

Aero Dynamik
Elektro Kardiogramm
Boing Boom Tschak

The show went a little over 2 hours. The staging and sound were fantastic, and the crowd response was unbelievable.

Florian notwithstanding, a top evening!

j.lu, you must have been right near me - did you see the guys on the railing who looked they they were part of Rolling Thunder but started dancing like it was Night at the Roxbury!?!

His crankiness didn't detract from my enjoyment. I am still thrilled that I managed to see them.

Re: the crowd

It was quite diverse, wans't it? Downstairs where I was I could see some Rolling Thunderers, some guys with the Who thirtieth anniversary t-shirts, some late-middle-aged women getting down in a very stiff manner and some crazy guy who was shouting enthusiastic obscenities whenever the video projection displayed some new image, in addition the usual Franz Ferdinand dolls and industrial types.

Last night's show was scheduled to start at 8:30pm, but weather delayed one member's flight to DC and they went on at 9:30pm. The main set went for about 80 minutes, followed by the three encores.

Will post again tomorrow.

Kraftwerk! Meiner Damen und Herren!
Muzique Non-Stop!

Washington Post
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; C03

Having released little new material in the past 20 years, the members of Kraftwerk are now essentially the curators of a museum of their own work.

But group founders Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider don't just periodically dust the exhibits. They've undertaken massive renovations, beginning with 1991's "The Mix," an album of remade classics, and including a painstaking conversion from analog to digital technology. Monday night at a packed 9:30 club, the influential Duesseldorf quartet brought new sounds and images to such futuristic oldies as "The Man-Machine."

As at most techno-pop performances, most of the music was pre-programmed. Some of the vocals were live, but significant deviations from the script would have derailed the tightly coordinated revue. Such songs as "Tour de France" were linked with pertinent video footage, and the elementary lyrics (in German, English and a smattering of French and Russian) to tunes such as the anti-nuke "Radioactivity" flashed on the screen behind the laptop-punching performers.

Kraftwerk has added harder, more metallic beats to many of its songs, updating its bleeps and swooshes to fit mid-'90s styles such as Berlin tekno and London drum-'n'-bass. Yet the group's machine-mad vision seemed largely nostalgic: Abstract videos suggested early-20th-century artists such as Mondrian and the Soviet Constructivists, while "Autobahn" and "Trans Europe Express" were illustrated by images of gleaming but antiquated cars and trains. By the time the band unveiled its trademark performing robots -- for the second of the two-hour show's three encores -- it seemed that Hutter and Schneider might be well advised to hire outside consultants for their modernization program. Kraftwerk is still lively and stylish but seemed a little quaint.

-- Mark Jenkins

Using the word "techno-pop" after 1989 is also quite quaint.

It's always cooler to dislike what the masses accept, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure he has, Ned.

Anyone who thinks that Kraftwerk hasn't always been about nostalgia doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.

It would be interesting to go back to the source material and see what the live show was like in the late 70s.

Kraftwerk are certainly less improvisational than they were in the mid-late 70's, that's for sure. But by the time of the "Computer World" tour, their set lists and set times were rigidly standardized.

That definitely wasn't the case with their 70's live shows ... "Autobahn" used to turn out differently every time (for instance, I have a 40-minute version of it from 1974).

I'm glad to hear that they're still doing that. Hearing that version at coachella was so uplifting to me. Just the nod of recognition to the folks who have followed them seemed so cool to me.

ooh, does this exist in any kind of shareable electronic form? (he said, hopefully.)

The videos were captivating. A good thing, because the band members barely move all night long. You could sometimes tell that they messed up, and Ralf did not need to cup his microphone with his hand all night, but you could still tell they were enjoying the show, and were delivering that "austere fantasy" of mechanicism.

You folks in Detroit are gonna go NUTS! They have a song early in the show which calls you muthas out BY NAME!!! DEEEEE TROIT! DEUTSCHLAND!!! DEEEEEE TROIT!!!

Have fun, Midwest and Cali! Kraftwerk is ROCKING!

The Man-Machine
Expo 2000
Tour De France Etape
Tour De France
Vitamin
Autobahn
The Model
Neon Lights
Radioactivity
Trans-Europe Express/Metal on Metal

(1st Encore)
Numbers
Computer World
More Fun to Compute
Pocket Calculator

(2nd Encore)
The Robots

(3rd Encore)
Elektro Kardiogramm
Aero Dynamik
Boing Boom Tschak

NYC tix said "6:30pm doors".

Kraftwerk did not go on until 8pm.

Go figure.

The robot?

Ooooh, Rolf...

http://www.uri.edu/personal2/amellion/ROLF.jpg

Dropped my friends off at the State just after 7, and went to find parking. The Tigers were playing across the street, and had a good crowd, so the usual parking spots were taken, and construction made traffic more gruesome. So I got into the State just to hear the start of the third song (same set-list as above), so I missed Man Machine (a personal fave), and Expo2000 (so I missed the mention of Deeetroit, and the subsequant audience response).

The show was perfect, even though there were no surprises, apart from my feeling that they played more "live" this time around. Radioactivity is a massive political statement. The sound was flawless. I am so glad that I went.

Ralf danced a lot more than I expected

I don't know what you consider "dancing," but during "Pocket Calculator" he subtlely mimed pressing calculator buttons! He also kept putting his hand up to his mouth every time he sang, which I didn't really understand. Maybe it was to alert the crowd that he was singing, but I wouldn't have expected him to want to draw attention to himself.

A number of times during the show I realized how similar it was to seeing the concert presentation of Koyaanisqatsi last year, in that both were revivals of work mostly created 25 years ago with similar themes of technology and dehumanization, both helped to define "futuristic" in the 1980s in the way that something like The Jetsons did in the 1960s and were pleasurably retro, and both felt kind of like a concert and kind of like an Imax movie.

It might have reminded you of that, but I think the gesture was only deliberate in the sense that Ralf felt it made the mic pick up his voice better.

Also, the bald guy looked like Nosferatu in sillouette.

I surmised that, too, but the couple times when he didn't do it, it sounded fine.