Cofounder of pioneering electronic-music band Kraftwerk has died
German musician Florian Schneider, best known as the cofounder of cult electronic-music band Kraftwerk has died. He had previously been diagnosed with cancer.
Schneider founded the band with fellow German Ralph Hütter in Düsseldorf in 1970, after the pair had met two-years earlier at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid, and went on to work on every one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums, producing some of the most influential electronic music of the past century from the band’s Kling Klang studio. He left the band in 2008.
Originally a flautist, Schneider’s output evolved to encompass the violin, electric guitar, synthesizers and instruments he created himself. Speaking in 1991 Schneider said, “I had studied seriously up to a certain level, then I found it boring; I looked for other things, I found that the flute was too limiting… 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.” From hip-hop to electronic dance, Schneider’s work shaped much of the music that followed in Kraftwerk’s wake, including David Bowie’s track ‘V-2 Schneider’ from the 1977 album Heroes, which was a tribute to the German.
Kraftwerk’s visual aesthetics, fuelled by their explorations of technology and robotics, were no less influential. Following performances at the Lenbachhaus Kunstbau in Munich and at the Venice Biennale in 2005, the band’s work was the subject of an eight-night ‘retrospective’ at New York’s MoMA PS1 in 2012, which then travelled to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and London’s Tate Modern the following year. Kraftwerk are represented by the art gallery Sprüth Magers.
