robot rock

Kraftwerk is one of this weekend's headliners at Coachella. Although I won't be making the treck out to Indio, I was lucky enought to catch one of 3 U.S. warm-up shows at the fillmore last night with GW.



There was a large curtain set up behind the soundboard effectively cutting the venue size in half (likely due to low ticket sales). And they also threw up some extra PA's in the back, but there weren'y really any surround-sound type effects that I was aware of. The set lasted an hour and 40 minutes and touched on all the classics. It should be noted that Stefan Pfaffe (their video guy) was subbing in for founding member Florian Schneider for unknown reasons. My favorite was when Ralf would sing vocals into his headset he also put his hand over his mouth like he was shouting something - classic. Their understated stage demeanor was augmented by classicly dated visuals. I highly recommend catching a kraftwerk show if you are a fan of any type of electronic based music, as their influence still permeates throughout the genre to this day.









Set:
Man Machine
Planet of Vision
Numbers > Computerworld
Homecomputer > It's More Fun to Compute
Prologue > Tour de France 2003 (Etape 1, 2 & 3)
Tour de France (original)
Vitamin
Autobahn
Computerlove
The Model
Neon Lights
Les Mannequins
Radioactivity
Trans-Europe Express
The Robots (with stand-in robots)
Elektro Kardiogramm
Aerodynamik
Music Non Stop