The work of Kraftwerk will be the subject of a retrospective and a series of 8 concerts at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art in April.

Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA will present a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk, with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium.

Each evening will consist of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums:

• Tuesday, April 10, 8:30 p.m. – Autobahn (1974)
• Wednesday, April 11, 8:30 p.m. – Radio-Activity (1975)
• Thursday, April 12, 8:30 p.m. – Trans Europe Express (1977)
• Friday, April 13, 10:00 p.m. – The Man-Machine (1978)
• Saturday April 14, 8:30 p.m. – Computer World (1981)
• Sunday, April 15, 8:30 p.m. – Techno Pop (1986)
• Monday, April 16, 8:30 p.m. – The Mix (1991)
• Tuesday, April 17, 10:00 p.m. – Tour de France (2003)

Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition.

Tickets are $25 at the MoMA site. In other words – it could be the best week ever – at least for Kraftwerk fans.

Here’s what MoMA has to say about the Kraftwerk Retrospective:

Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider began the Kraftwerk project in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1970, setting up the pioneering Kling Klang studio, where all of Kraftwerk’s albums were conceived and composed. By the mid-1970s the group had achieved international recognition for their revolutionary electro “sound paintings” and their musical experimentation with tapes and synthesizers. Their compositions, which feature distant melodies, multilingual vocals, robotic rhythms, and custom-made vocoders and computer-speech technology, almost single-handedly created the soundtrack for our digital future. Kraftwerk anticipated the impact of technology on art and everyday life, creating sounds and visuals that capture the human condition in the age of mobility and telecommunication. Their innovative looping techniques and computerized rhythms, which had a major influence on the early development of hip-hop and electronic dance music, remain among the most commonly sampled sounds across a wide range of music genres. Furthermore, the use of robotics and other technical innovations in their live performances illustrates Kraftwerk’s belief in the respective contributions of both people and machines in creating art.

In recent years, starting with their performance at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kraftwerk has been invited into the visual arts context, festivals, and museums, most recently performing at Lenbachhaus Kunstbau in Munich. In contrast to all former presentations, where Kraftwerk videos, visuals, or the “robots” were presented in a museum context but performances were staged as concerts, MoMA is realizing a groundbreaking new display: the first synthetic retrospective to present, simultaneously and in one location, Kraftwerk’s complex layers of music, sound, videos, sets, and performance as a total work of art.

A presentation of Kraftwerk’s historical audio and visual material will be on view at MoMA PS1, April 10–May 14, 2012.

via NYT