Schneider revolutionized pop music with Kraftwerk
Florian Schneider, one of the founders of Kraftwerk, the German band that revolutionized pop music through its embrace of synthesizers and electronic beats, leading to a broad influence over rock, dance music and hip-hop, has died. He was 73.
In a statement, the group said Schneider had died from cancer “just a few days” after his birthday, which was April 7.
Founded in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Schneider and Ralf Hütter, Kraftwerk emerged as part of the so-called krautrock genre — a German branch of experimental rock that explored extended, repetitive rhythms.
But by the time of Kraftwerk released its album “Autobahn” in 1974, it had become clear that the group had developed something even more elemental and extreme. The 22-minute title track, which took up the entire first side of the LP, began with a robotic voice intoning “autobahn,” German for “highway.” It continued with buoyant, hypnotic synthesizers that gave the listener a sense of gliding through a futuristic landscape, and lyrics that repeated, “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn” (“We’re driving, driving, driving on the highway”).
An abbreviated version of the song became an international radio hit, reaching No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1975.
On later albums, such as “Trans-Europe Express” (1977) and “The Man-Machine” (1978), Schneider and Hütter — joined by other musicians, among them Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür — developed their ideas further. They created a catchy and provocative version of electronic pop and toyed with concepts of the role of humans in a mechanized society.
On “Computer World” (1981), they set dystopian lyrics to the chirpy sounds of early personal computers, lumping together “Interpol and Deutsche Bank/ FBI and Scotland Yard,” offering suggestions of a surveillance state that still resonate today.
Schneider and Hütter variously described their work as industrial folk and techno pop. Rather than seeing Kraftwerk as simply a musical group, they characterized it as a “multimedia project” or even a hybrid of humanity and machine.
“Kraftwerk is not a band,” Schneider told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It’s a concept. We call it ‘Die Menschmaschine,’ which means ‘the human machine.’ We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehicle for our ideas.”
Hütter usually spoke for the group in interviews, with Schneider sitting by quietly. “Florian is a sound fetishist,” Hütter told the British music magazine Mojo in 2005. “I am not so much; I’m maybe more a word fetishist.”
But like his partner, Schneider had a knack for expressing provocative ideas that were catnip to curious journalists.
When critic Lester Bangs interviewed Kraftwerk, also in 1975, he skeptically remarked that he found their music unemotional.
“Florian quietly and patiently explained that ‘emotion’ is a strange word,” Bangs wrote, and he proceeded to quote Schneider: “There is a cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid. It’s not body emotion; it’s mental emotion. We like to ignore the audience while we play, and take all our concentration into the music.
“We are very much interested in origin of music. The source of music. The pure sound is something we would very much like to achieve.”
Florian Schneider-Esleben was born April 7, 1947, in Öhningen, then part of West Germany. His father, Paul Schneider-Esleben, was a prominent modernist architect whose projects included the Cologne-Bonn Airport.
Florian Schneider met Hütter in 1968 in an improvisation class at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a music school in Düsseldorf, Germany. In 1970, the men started Kraftwerk — the word means “power station” — and established Kling Klang, the Düsseldorf studio that would be their home base for decades. That year, Schneider also purchased a synthesizer and became interested in manipulating acoustic sounds through electronics.
“I found that the flute was too limiting,” he was quoted as saying in “Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music,” a 1993 book by Pascal Bussy. “Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesizer. Much later I threw the flute away; it was a sort of process.”
Schneider and Hütter have described being influenced by both avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Beach Boys.