Kraftwerk Co-Founder Florian Schneider Dead at 73
Florian Schneider, co-founder and keyboardist of the influential German electronic music group Kraftwerk, has died at the age of 73.
“Kraftwerk co-founder and electro pioneer Ralf Hütter has sent us the very sad news that his friend and companion over many decades. Florian Schneider has passed away from a short cancer disease just a few days after his 73rd birthday,” the band said in a statement.
“In the year 1968 Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider started their artistic and musical collaboration. In 1970 they founded their electronic Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf and started the multi-media project Kraftwerk. All the Kraftwerk catalogue albums were conceived and produced there.”
Formed by Schneider and Ralf Hütter in the late Sixties, Kraftwerk’s pioneering use of keyboards and synthesizers would later inspire artists in all genres of the musical spectrum, from rock and electronic music to hip-hop and pop.
While undergoing numerous lineup changes over Seventies and Eighties, the partnership of Schneider and Hütter remained the group’s creative backbone. The duo recorded three albums alongside famed Krautrock producer Conny Plank — 1970’s Kraftwerk, 1971’s Kraftwerk 2 and 1973’s Ralf und Florian — but Kraftwerk considered their 1974 album Autobahn to be the true start of their famed catalogue, which earned the group a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
On Autobahn, Schneider and Hütter solidified the Kraftwerk sound: Hypnotically looping and repetitive beats and synths and vocoded vocals to create boundless soundscapes that, like in the case of the influential title track, could span the entire side of a record.
Kraftwerk Cofounder Florian Schneider Dies at 73
Now joined by Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur on electronic percussion, with their Kling Klang studio in Dusseldorf their official outpost, Kraftwerk next released 1975’s Radio-Activity and 1977’s Trans-Europe Express; the latter album – inspired by David Bowie’s 1976 LP Station to Station and lyrically reminisces about a Kling Kling visit by Bowie and Iggy Pop – would foster a mutual admiration between the two artists, with Bowie’s Heroes track “V-2 Schneider” an ode to the Kraftwerk keyboardist.
Prior to his forays into synthesizers, Schneider was a flautist. “Florian came from the flute, we were at the same school and he was in the classical orchestra, but at that time he was already manipulating sound with gadgets like equalizer, delay and fuzzbox. The results sounded electronic, but it was not anything near computers or synthesizers,” one-time Kraftwerk member and founding Neu! guitarist Michael Rother told Uncut in 2016.
While Hütter was the voice and mouthpiece of Kraftwerk, the notoriously press-shy Schneider — the son of the architect Paul Schneider-Esleben, who designed Germany’s Bonn Airport — is credited with navigating the band toward its boundary-pushing limits. “Florian is a sound fetishist. I am not so much, I’m maybe more a word fetishist,” Hütter told Mojo in 2005. “These roles are not an obligation, they have just developed over the years as our preferences.”
As the progenitors of electronic-pop, Kraftwerk lived up to their reputation with a pair of albums — 1978’s The Man-Machine and 1981’s Computer World — that leaned into their almost-robotic machinations; in 2005, Coldplay, with permission from Kraftwerk, retooled the latter album’s “Computer Love” for the band’s hit “Talk.” Schneider and Hütter’s joint love of cycling would next result in the 1983 single “Tour de France”; the duo would revisit the theme for their final studio album together, 2003’s Tour de France Soundtracks. Five years later, Schneider left Kraftwerk, leaving Hütter as the band’s only remaining member.
Ahead of their time musically, the band was not embraced and often misunderstood by American audiences upon touring the U.S. in the mid-Seventies. However, Kraftwerk’s impact traversed the musical spectrum: Afrika Bambaataa’s groundbreaking 1982 single “Planet Rock” was directly influenced by Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” and “Trans-Europe Express,” with the latter track also
employed by Dr. Dre on the Jay-Z collaboration “Under Pressure.” The group would frequently be sampled by hip-hop acts over the ensuing decades, leading to a landmark trademark lawsuit.
