Kraftwerk co-founder Florian SchneiderEsleben dies aged 73

BERLIN » Florian SchneiderEsleben, who helped pioneer electronic music as the cofounder of Kraftwerk and influenced genres ranging from disco to synth pop, has died at age 73.

Citing fellow group founder Ralf Huetter, Sony announced that SchneiderEsleben had been suffering from cancer, German news agency dpa reported. Schneider-Esleben and Huetter met while both were students at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid. They started working together in 1968, and two years later founded the KlingKlang-Studio in Duesseldorf and launched Kraftwerk.

“From the beginning, we had a concept of electronic folk music. It’s a kind of anticipatory music, looking ahead to the age of the computer,” Huetter told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in 2014.

They rarely spoke to reporters and their individual names were largely unknown to the general public, but few groups were as important in shaping the sounds of popular music over the past half century. Just as their sensibility anticipated the computer age, their immersion in drum machines, synthesizers and other electronic instruments would be echoed in countless songs, whether in pop hits like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.”