Reviews
Kraftwerk used to be about the future, so it’s strange to think of them as a nostalgia act. But as I watched the Dusseldorf group headlining the final night of the inaugural Longitude festival, I realised this is what they have become. A decade since their last album, they concentrated overwhelmingly on their iconic ’70s output, a body of work that pioneered synthesizers in popular music and blazed a trail for hip-hop, electronica, techno and every other genre steeped in chiming synths and nagging beats.
Rather than toiling over a new record, for the past several years the quartet (de facto frontman, Ralf Hutter, the sole original member) have been upgrading their live visuals into 3-D. It sounds a silly conceit — gimmicky almost. However, it can’t be argued that the zooming trains and dancing robots add to the performance. When a satellite whooshes towards the audience during Spacelab, your first instinct is to duck.
