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Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk (, "power station") is a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely considered innovators and pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk were among the first successful acts to popularize the genre. The group began as part of West Germany's experimental krautrock scene in the early 1970s before fully embracing electronic instrumentation, including synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders. Wolfgang Flür joined the band in 1974 and Karl Bartos in 1975, expanding the band to a quartet. On commercially successful albums such as ''Autobahn'' (1974), '' Trans-Europe Express'' (1977), ''The Man-Machine'' (1978), and ''Computer World'' (1981), Kraftwerk developed a self-described "robot pop" style that combined electronic music with pop melodies, sparse arrangements, and repetitive rhythms, while adopting a stylized image including matching suits. Following the release of '' Electric Café'' (1986), Flür left the group in 1987, f ...
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Florian Schneider
Florian Schneider-Esleben (7 April 194721 April 2020) was a German musician. He is best known as one of the founding members and leaders of the electronic band Kraftwerk, performing his role with the band until his departure in 2008. Early life Schneider was born on 7 April 1947 in the French occupation zone in southern Germany, near the Bodensee, in what would become the state of Baden-Württemberg in 1952. His parents were Paul Schneider-Esleben, an architect, and his wife Evamaria (''née'' van Diemen-Meyerhof). Schneider was Jewish on his mother's side; Paul married the half-Jewish Evamaria in 1946 against the will of his father, who remained a loyal Nazi. Schneider's family moved to Düsseldorf when he was three years old. Career Schneider founded Kraftwerk with Ralf Hütter in 1970. They met in 1968 while studying at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid, then at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, playing improvisational music together in the ensemble Organisation ...
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Karl Bartos
Karl Bartos (born 31 May 1952) is a German musician and composer known for his contributions to the electronic band Kraftwerk. Career Karlheinz Bartos was born on 31 May 1952 in Marktschellenberg, Germany, named after his grandfathers Karl and Heinz. He was the drummer in a college band called The Jokers (later The Jolly Jokers in 1975) as Carlos Bartos, around 1965 to 1975. Between 1975 and 1991, he was, along with Wolfgang Flür, a member of the electronic music band Kraftwerk. This lineup of the group remains the most stable and productive yet assembled. He was originally recruited to play on Kraftwerk's US "Autobahn" tour where he changed his name to "Karl", as the band member's names were displayed on stage in neon lighting; "Karlheinz" was deemed too long and thus too expensive by Kraftwerk's front man Ralf Hütter. In addition to his percussion playing, Bartos was credited with songwriting on the ''Man-Machine'', ''Computer World'', and ''Electric Café'' albums and sang ...
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Klaus Dinger
Klaus Dinger (24 March 1946 – 21 March 2008) was a German musician and songwriter most famous for his contributions to the seminal krautrock band Neu!. He was also the guitarist and chief songwriter of new wave group La Düsseldorf and briefly the percussionist of Kraftwerk. 1946–1971: The No, The Smash, and Kraftwerk Klaus Dinger was born in Scherfede, Westphalia, Germany, to Heinz and Renate Dinger on 24 March, 1946. He was their first child. Before he was a year old, his parents moved from the town, which had been badly damaged by an Allied siege at the end of World War II, to Düsseldorf. In 1956 he attended Görres Gymnasium School for the first time. During his time there he was part of an a cappella choir, which he had to leave when his voice broke. He was part of the school swing band (as a drummer) despite having no prior musical experience. He left the school with a ''Mittlere Reife'' (German equivalent of leaving school at 16), later accusing the school of m ...
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Kling Klang Studio
Kling Klang (also spelled as Klingklang) is the private music studio of the band Kraftwerk. The name is taken from the first song on the ''Kraftwerk 2'' album. The studio was originally located at Mintropstraße 16 in Düsseldorf, Germany, adjacent to Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, but in mid-2009 moved to Meerbusch-Osterath, around 10 kilometers west of Düsseldorf. The band also operate a record label named Kling Klang, which they use to release their music. Background Kling Klang (an onomatopœia; in English: ''ding dong'') began as a studio in 1970; the band marked this as the real beginning of Kraftwerk.''Electronics & Music Maker'', September 1981 The studio began as an empty room in a workshop premises located in an industrial part of Düsseldorf. The building exterior was clad in yellow tiles with a large electric shuttered doorway leading to an enclosed courtyard. On the right was a loading stage used by an electrical installation company that used the upper floor. The st ...
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Organisation (band)
Organisation zur Verwirklichung gemeinsamer Musikkonzepte (German: "Organisation for the Realization of Shared Music Concepts") was an experimental krautrock band, that was the immediate predecessor of the band Kraftwerk. In addition to the founding members of Kraftwerk, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben, Organisation included Basil Hammoudi, Butch Hauf, and Fred Monicks. The band was assisted by Paul Lorenz, Peter Martini, and Charly Weiss during their career. History A video recording by German TV broadcaster WDR exists of the band performing "Ruckzuck", a piece that appeared on the first Kraftwerk album in 1970. The performance took place at the Grugahalle in Essen on 25 April 1970 as part of the Internationales Essener Pop & Blues Festival. This was their last performance as Organisation, Hütter and Schneider-Esleben (later just Schneider) went on to form Kraftwerk, leaving Hammoudi, Hauf and Monicks to go to university. Their only album, '' Tone Float'', produced a ...
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Klaus Röder
Klaus Röder (often spelled Roeder; born 7 April 1948) is a German musician and music teacher. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, he currently lives and teaches in Langenfeld, Rhineland, Germany. Röder is married and has three children. He studied violin and piano, then began a study of sound engineering in 1968, later switching to part-time studies in composition and guitar at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, ultimately graduating in 1980 with a diploma in electronic music composition. Interested in experimental and avant garde music he began creating custom-made instruments, also using synthesizers and tape recorders to manipulate recorded sounds. During this period he played guitar (used as a sound trigger device for synthesizer) in a free jazz group, Synthesis, and briefly, during 1974, with the electronic band Kraftwerk. Since 1975 he has worked from his own electronic music studio, latterly using personal computers entirely for composing and creating music. Röd ...
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Fritz Hilpert
Friedrich "Fritz" Hilpert (born 31 May 1956) is a member of the electropop group Kraftwerk. Background Fritz Hilpert studied trumpet and percussion at the Musisches Max-Reger-Gymnasium, Germany, until 1976. He also played drums in several live bands at that time. From 1978 he studied sound engineering at the Musikhochschule Rheinland and the FH Düsseldorf. In 1986 he received his Diplom-Ingenieur qualification (the German equivalent of a Master of Science degree) in sound and image technology. He worked as freelance sound engineer with several German acts as the new wave-band Din A Testbild before becoming associated with Kraftwerk in 1989. In addition to studio work, he replaced Wolfgang Flür in concert when Kraftwerk resumed their touring activities in 1990, and engineered the album '' The Mix'', released in 1991. He has made musical contributions to Kraftwerk's compositions since "Expo 2000" in 1999. He is credited as a co-composer on most of the tracks on the album ' ...
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Wolfgang Flür
Wolfgang Flür (born 17 July 1947) is a German musician, best known for playing percussion in the electronic group Kraftwerk from 1973 to 1987. Flür claims that he invented the electric drums the group used throughout the 1970s. However, patent records dispute this, citing Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter as the creators. Background In the 1960s, Flür played an acoustic drum kit in the Düsseldorf band The Spirits of Sound, along with guitarist Michael Rother, who would also go on to play in Kraftwerk, and who would later form Neu! with Kraftwerk drummer Klaus Dinger. Post-Kraftwerk In 1997, Flür founded the band Yamo and released the album ''Time Pie'', a collaboration with Mouse on Mars. Yamo's next release, the 12" ''I Was a Robot'', reached number 6 in the German club charts. Collaborations with Pizzicato Five and Der Plan founding member Pyrolator were announced, and the lyrics to a song called "Greed" appeared in Flür's autobiography, but this material remains ...
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Synth-pop
Synth-pop (short for synthesizer pop; also called techno-pop; ) is a subgenre of new wave music that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic, art rock, disco, and particularly the Krautrock of bands like Kraftwerk. It arose as a distinct genre in Japan and the United Kingdom in the post-punk era as part of the new wave movement of the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Electronic musical synthesizers that could be used practically in a recording studio became available in the mid-1960s, and the mid-1970s saw the rise of electronic art musicians. After the breakthrough of Gary Numan in the UK Singles Chart in 1979, large numbers of artists began to enjoy success with a synthesizer-based sound in the early 1980s. In Japan, Yellow Magic Orchestra introduced the TR-808 rhythm machine to popular music, and t ...
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Emil Schult
Emil Schult (born 10 October 1946) is a German painter, poet and audio-visual artist. Biography After studying Sinology in Münster, Schult joined the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf in 1969 to study Fine Arts in the printmaking class of Dieter Roth, and later in the painting classes of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. In 1973, he finished his studies with the title of 'Meisterschüler' of Gerhard Richter. Both Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth, as well as Roth's partner Dorothy Iannone, remained important for Schult's artistic development. In 1969, Schult lived in Reykjavik at Roth's studio-home. Schult has developed a vast body of work beginning with prints, drawings and artist's books that encompass philosophical writings, poems, comics, collages and drawings. Early on he included film in his repertoire as well as painting – later on he only worked with reverse glass painting. From 1970 to 1974, Schult collaborated with the Free International University, founded by Joseph Be ...
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Neu!
Neu! (; German for "New!"; styled in block capitals) were a West German krautrock band formed in Düsseldorf in 1971 by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother following their departure from Kraftwerk. The group's albums were produced by Conny Plank, who has been regarded as the group's "hidden member". They released three albums in their initial incarnation—''Neu!'' (1972), ''Neu! 2'' (1973), and ''Neu! 75'' (1975)—before disbanding in 1975. They briefly reunited in the mid-1980s. Though Neu! had minimal commercial success during their existence, the band are retrospectively considered a central act of West Germany's 1970s krautrock movement. They are known for pioneering the "motorik" beat, a minimalist 4/4 rhythm associated with krautrock artists. Their work has exerted a widespread influence on genres such as electronica and punk. History 1970–1971: Pre-formation Neu! was formed in 1971 in Düsseldorf as an offshoot from an early line-up of another seminal krautrock band, ...
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Falk Grieffenhagen
Falk Grieffenhagen (born 1969) is a German musician who is a member of the electronic/experimental pop band Kraftwerk. Background Grieffenhagen studied sound and video engineering in Düsseldorf, and later studied saxophone, flute, clarinet and jazz piano in Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ..., finishing in 2004. He joined Kraftwerk as the live video-operator in 2012, replacing Stefan Pfaffe. He has worked freelance as a musician, composer, and sound engineer since 1996. References External links * *Falk Grieffenhagenon the site of Robert Schumann Hochscule Düsseldorf Kraftwerk members 1969 births Living people {{Germany-musician-stub ...
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