There is an open question at the heart of Kraftwerk’s music. It is alternately obvious and maddening for anyone familiar with the group, or with electronic music in general. Consider their origins in Dusseldorf, hub of Germany’s auto and telecommunications industries. Now consider their deliberate, at the time unconventional choice to embrace the synthesizer and electronic drum machine, to manipulate the sounds of “traditional” instruments and even the human voice through vocoders and other machinic filters. What, Kraftwerk seemed to ask, is the nature of the relationship between human and machine, particularly as we are increasingly reliant on them?
If that question seems mundane by today’s standards, that may be because attempts to answer it have been repeatedly frustrated. Few need reminding of just how hopelessly intertwined our neuroses are with our phones, our social media profiles, and the algorithms that increasingly condition everything from our job options to our dating prospects. It’s easily forgotten that this is only the latest iteration of an entanglement between people and technology.
You could argue that Kraftwerk anticipated this tension, but it’s both more prosaic and insightful than that. It wasn’t precognition that spurred them to release albums like Computer World or Electric Cafe during the height of the personal computer boom. Nor was it mere serendipity for them to experiment with the sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno (they had, after all, been a direct inspiration for the rise of electronic dance music). It was an honesty about changes already underway: noting the contradictions and oversights inevitable in technological innovation, and exploring – not predicting – what might come of our lives and ideas as a result. That the group’s members have remained resolutely ambivalent in what they think as human beings about this dialectic — rarely granting interviews, even going so far as to render themselves an extension of the electronics in their performances — has only made their engagement more interesting, more influential, more fecund with possibility.
That is, in short, what I was hoping for during Kraftwerk’s residency at LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. The announcement of the residency commingled with headlines about artificial intelligence – evenly divided between an near-evangelical enthusiasm and sincere dread about what AI might do to people’s ability to earn a living – made an interpretation like Kraftwerk’s seem particularly timely.
It was this same matter of timing that influenced my choice of which night to attend. Kraftwerk had designed their nine-night residency at Disney Concert Hall with each night intended to showcase the work of one of their albums. Given all of the above, the most apt choice was and could only be 1978’s The Man-Machine.
Still, it would be wrong to characterize the instinct to rush into the Walt Disney Concert Hall as motivated only by sheer joy and excitement. There was, admittedly, a bit of morbid curiosity at play. The Disney Concert Hall is typical of most postmodern performance venues. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2003, it sits in the center of Downtown LA with all the pomp of a place pretending it isn’t surrounded by some of the most desperate social decay imaginable. Its swooping silver facade is indifferent to the surrounding encampments of unhoused Angelenos. The heat and light generated by the mirrored stainless steel have been known to warm nearby apartments so badly that air conditioners blow fuses. Passing motorists have been blinded by the glare, causing occasional traffic accidents.
In other words, this is a building oblivious to events unfolding around it. The prospect of a Kraftwerk performance in such a space raised the possibility of their insights being dulled. It brought to mind what Nick Cardew wrote about watching their July 2023 performance in the Spanish city of Sitges: “The criticism frequently voiced of Kraftwerk in 2023 is that under the direction of Ralf Hütter - the only original member still in the band - they have become a parody of their former, progressive selves, a touring dinosaur content to pump out the old hits for anyone who’s paying them.”
Keep in mind, this is a show that Cardew ranked on the whole as a positive experience. His hope was that Kraftwerk would transcend the fate of so many bands who have been around as long as they have: becoming their own tribute act, shunning relevancy in favor of a comfortable pedestal.
Kraftwerk falling into this trap would hardly make them unique. The passage of time isn’t their fault. Nor is it the way in which all the glitz and self-importance of the culture industry seems to have trapped culture at large in a cul-de-sac. That they would fall victim, when their sound and catalog seemed to refute it for so long, would simply hit home the frustrating irony. Mark Fisher’s observation in Ghosts of My Life that Kraftwerk still sounds like the future, “even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s” is as depressing as when Fisher wrote it in 2014.
None of this is to say that the experience was without any wonder. It was impishly entertaining watching so many aging scenesters invade the pomp of the Disney Concert Hall. Ushers more used to seeing clientele in more formal dress greeted us with a delightful mixture of amusement and confusion as they guided ripped skinny jeans and Cocteau Twins t-shirts to our seats.
Whatever might be unnecessary about the outside of the Disney Concert Hall, its inside acoustics served the sound of Kraftwerk’s music – its thumps and beats, its synthesized notes skipping and punctuating their way through their songs – quite well. Listening to a group like Kraftwerk on headphones or on your computer can, even with full knowledge of what the music accomplishes, often leave one wanting, the dimensionality of their music flattened. That wasn’t the case at this performance which allowed the audience to fully experience the scope of the constructed sound and space and to feel the gaps between the beats and notes.
The same can be said visually. Kraftwerk’s performances are legendarily accompanied by computer animations that both capture and accentuate their songs’ subjects and themes. A concert hall of this size naturally allowed for a massive screen.
All of which is to say that, in terms of reading and interpretation, Kraftwerk’s performance was vivid. Meaning and intent were unmistakable without being overstated. The wonderful, terrible dichotomies of human life in a mechanized world were abundant and apparent. So were all of the contradictions of temporality that make Kraftwerk nostalgic and futuristic all at the same time.
The wonder of how modern travel collapses space into time is on display in the jaunty bounce of “Autobahn,” with its retro computer animations of automobiles gliding down Germany’s iconic highway. Conversely, there is an unmistakable coldness in the sounds and animations of “Trans-Europe Express.” There’s a certain irony here, given that the latter was the centerpiece of an album which Kraftwerk composed in order to shed their more explicitly German associations, partly solidified by the album Autobahn. Meanwhile, the clipped muscularity of “Tour de France,” accompanied by footage of that famed cycling event, turns the toned and trained cyclist into the nexus of this ambiguity, the slip between human and automaton.
Naturally, songs from The Man-Machine anchored this shifting, ambiguous dynamic throughout the night. No surprise there; it’s what we came to hear. And if these are themes that run through Kraftwerk’s entire catalog, then this album seems to distill them down to their most elemental. There is something very unsettling in “The Robots,” in the films of dancing Kraftwerk mannequins that have come to accompany performances of the song (“We are programmed just to do / Anything you want us to / We are the robots / We are the robots”). The steely melancholy of “Metropolis” inevitably brings to mind Fritz Lang’s iconic film of the same name, with all its themes of robotic replacement.
By contrast, the concept of “Spacelab” is fun, and even transcendent. Its gliding harmonies and floating percussion reflect a view of space exploration that is decidedly utopian and exceedingly rare. “Neon Lights” can sound downright elegiac, both songs reiterating the undeniable promise and pleasure that can exist in the relationship between human and machine. Meanwhile, the story of “The Model” explores the blurred lines between good and bad, making uncomfortably clear how easy it is to mistake manufactured desire for the real thing.
If there was any moment that shed this ambiguity, a song that came across as less like dangerous play and more like an explicit warning, it was in the form of one of Kraftwerk’s best-known songs, though not from The Man-Machine. The group has been playing an updated version of the title track from 1974’s Radioactivity for some time now, one that adds explicit mention of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the nuclear accidents at Windscale and Three Mile Island.
There is little room for mistake here. Like most of us, the members of Kraftwerk have been jarred by the disasters of leaping into the future without looking first. It was a chilling performance, and a moving one, difficult to watch without feeling like we were being stalked by something hostile not just to humans but life itself.
And yet, inevitably, there was an unavoidable limit surrounding it all, a straightjacket around these songs that are ideally supposed to prompt exploration. One can’t help but be reminded of the debates that have always surrounded technology, now amplified and polarized with AI. Are these algorithms and learning machines springing up around us and building our lives more predictive or coercive? Or is it a bit more insidious than that? What is the difference between predicting and simply manipulating our behaviors?
“I want to dance,” my partner said to me. Though not particularly familiar with Kraftwerk, she’s been to her share of raves. “The music and visuals are incredible but I’m just kind of sitting here.”
She had a point. The thumping and hypnotic beats, the curving-sloping melodies, punctuated by the reworked noise of industry; if arranged perfectly, these prompt you to move in instinctive ways. It’s not dancing exactly, nothing so choreographed. Whether we are talking about London drum & bass or Brooklyn IDM or Detroit techno, there is a specific-but-ambiguous relationship between sound and movement. Are you being moved by it? Are you making the decision to move along with it? Does it matter? Without the space to explore these questions, time and context are muddled. Meaning and consequence miss each other.
It’s even evident in the pictures you’ve seen of this same performance. Being unable to move, all of them were necessarily from the same angle. The visuals of a Kraftwerk performance are stunning, but being forced to watch them from only one vantage renders them inert. There was nothing to be done about that. Our assigned seats had been assigned, and neither of us – nor anyone else in the audience – thought that moving from these assignments would be welcomed by concert hall staff.
So we sat. After being advertised this show by an algorithm constantly studying our needs, after purchasing tickets that will only ever physically exist on our smartphones, after obediently making our way to the precise seat allotted us by the ticketing system, we sat exactly where we needed to be. Or at least where someone needed us to be. So did everyone else. Maybe the grand question at the heart of Kraftwerk has been answered after all, and by forces well beyond their control. If so, then it’s a very dismal answer indeed.
All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.