21 thoughts on “Kraftwerk Announces North American Tour Dates”

1. Kraftwerk in Nashville would be something.

   1. interesting location for sure

   2. I rather to see them playing in Memphis 😉

2. No montreal love 🙁

   1. No NYC love either. 🙁

3. Great to see four guys stood in front of ipads and crappy midi controllers with no hardware synths.

   1. No need for hardware synth when you got talent……..

      1. so true, i have seen allot of great talent that use limited hardware

   2. Because Kraftwerk up has always been about keeping it retro.

4. If this lineup included Florian Schneider, I might be able to still call it Kraftwerk.

   1. I’d strongly recommend seeing them, while you still can.

      Their show is excellent and is the purest distillation of the Kraftwerk sound and concept possible.

5. AUSTIN TX bebe!!

6. Nashville will obviously be hanging out for the country version Boing Boom Tschak lol. Ralf on the slide & Florian on the banjo – a slight departure:)

7. Detroit, here I come! (But I wish Movement, a.k.a. DEMF would just book them already)

8. There is no Florian in this “Kraftwerk.” It’s Ralf and three unknowns. These are not the legends.

   1. They’re not unknowns. Henning Schmitz has worked with Kraftwerk since the Man Machine album in 1978, and Fritz Hilpert replaced Wolfgang Flur immediately after Electric Cafe was released in 1987.

      1. Henning who? Fritz who? Yeah, they’re unknowns.

         Who is the guy standing in for Florian Schneider?

         1. The guy on the right is Falk Grieffenhagen. He stands in Florian’s position but he controls the visuals, so I wouldn’t exactly say he’s “standing in” for Florian.

            Fritz can be seen in live Kraftwerk videos on YouTube as far back as 1991, and Henning as far back as 1997. So … if you were touring and playing live in a band for 20-ish years, and credited on studio album(s), don’t you think you would deserve to be more than “an unknown”?

            As for Florian, well … He did play with Kraftwerk for 40 years. I think he earned his retirement, so not directly replacing him was perhaps the classiest way his departure could have been handled.

            I would rather see Kraftwerk without Florian than have no Kraftwerk at all. And I gotta tell you, their current live show is really, really cool.

            1. “And I gotta tell you, their current live show is really, really cool.” (depending, of course, on one’s definition of cool)
               Who’s to say if their 2015 show will be much different from 2014:
               https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQgwy2LmIQ

9. The truth is that you could take four guys off the street and put them up there and call it Kraftwerk and it would be the same music and visuals because everything is pre-recorded, except for Ralf’s occasional vocals (with his hand by his mouth).

   To charge huge bucks for a pre-recorded set just seems like a scam. They could at least move around a bit like Kraftwerk used to do. This is like watching four immobile librarians. They might as well have the robots out there for the whole show why they sit backstage and drink lattes.

   1. Last night I saw them two nights in a row. On the second night (Montreal) somebody goofed in one of the songs and somehow the melody went into a different section than the bassline. I don’t recall for sure but I think it was “The Man Machine”. Recordings don’t do that.

      They tweak many of the individual sounds live, and many melodies and bass lines are played on live keyboard.

      Recently Kraftwerk played in Barcelona and somebody managed to shoot some of the best “what-the-hell-are-they-doing” perspective videos I’ve seen – whether you enjoy it or not, these guys are making this style of music about as live as it can be done. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLncDMHGFJGwppRo7SweZj_8q5kibchkZq

      Would you be happier if they had a shirtless mic-spinning Dave Gahan-style front man?