Florian Schneider died of cancer last week, apparently. As a member of Kraftwerk he worked on all of their albums, but left the group in 2008 to concentrate on other things.
Given Kraftwerk’s influence on so many distinct genres of popular music, I think film director Edgar Wright’s statement that Schneider “changed the very sound of music” is no overstatement.
Oh, damn! What a contribution to humanity he made.
Probably my 1st Kraftwerk LP was ‘Autobahn’, my 2nd one was “Man Machine” which I bought aged 16 in 1978. Luckily I had bought a decent direct drive record player by then ( which I still have, and it is still in working order! ) which treated the vinyl kindly, so both still sound very good. The deep bass sounds of some of the tracks on Man Machine and later on Computer World are absolutely astounding. I bought Computer World in 1981 (it was the year I did my exams in secondary school) and wrote that on the inside of the LP’s cover, just so that I can tell you about it now.
Funny how music can stay with you through so many years.
It’s such bad news. I only discovered kraftwerk through Computer World about 6 months ago, and it’s changed my life. Florian has gone too soon. 
Well put it this way: Kraftwerk’s last album was in 2003, although they’ve toured since then. They were together and productive for about four times as long as Lennon and McCartney. I don’t think popular music of the eighties and nineties would have blossomed in quite the direction it did without Florian and Ralf.
Yeah, Rolf has been the only original member carrying the band forward. That sucks. I did just hear a nouveau synthwave cover of “Metropolis” that I didn’t mind at all.
This is very sad. I’m afraid that I’ve reached an age where I expect every musician I ever idolized will get called up soon though.
I am at the age when so many influential people are passing on… over the last few years i’s been so many from all sorts of cultural influences…
last year was particularly sad when Keith Flint took his life… derided by many, their music was part of my life…
Lemmy, George Michale, Bowie…
As sad as it is, it’s life, and we have lots of new talent… We just have to keep being creative and diverse.
Rob
I no longer feel extremely sad when someone has died in such circumstances. I think there is a perspective that comes with experience and, to some extent, acceptance of one’s own mortality.
These are people who, in public at least, have effected a large change for the better in our lives. To go back to Lennon and McCartney, by contrast, John was still young, just 40 when he was murdered. In terms of public influence, Florian lived a highly productive life, as did John. Florian wasn’t cut down in his prime, so I find it far easier to just celebrate his life rather than mourn what we lost. Herr Schneider’s family and friends have good reason to mourn, because they knew him personally. I will celebrate his public life, because that is the only way I knew him.
A very sad day, but as people have said… the pioneers are getting to that age now. I used to listen to a lot of Kraftwerk and LFO in the early 90s when I was building kilowatt car stereos, to better listen to electronic music with. The bass was really cutting edge, proper good!
In somewhat happier news (even if it is a darkly humorous shibboleth and an insult to the current members in very poor taste of its own right) I note that Justin Bieber turns 27 next year…
LFO - LFO would be the track to test bass response with 
. I remember fondly an event I held with a friend in the early nineties, where the sound guy was running around looking very confused for a few minutes until we told him that that was how it was supposed to sound.
I remember being on Twitter and thinking I was really on top of this new thing. Then I read an article in which the most popular person on Twitter at the time was named, and it turns out to be a Canadian kid barely out of high school, and I’ve never heard of him.
And, you know, that was okay. I lived through the seventies when pop music songs longer than 2 minutes abruptly became very unpopular in certain UK youth subcultures I identified with. And it was deeply uncool to enjoy Abba (my gay TG side is blushing with shame.) Not to mention how ghastly the works of Giorgio Moroder were perceived to be.
Things change. We don’t all like the same things. David Bowie was mainly known as a rather naff Antony Newley impersonator until he found his footing in The Man Who Sold The World.
we my not like Bieber the person or his music but his is actually a real musician. he plays several interments well and has spent a better part of his life devoted to music , just saying … by the way I did laugh when I read that , but then I do like dark humor .
Well, the great thing about him is how much fun it is to piss off someone who substitutes ink for personality by saying “Wow… you have almost as many tattoos as Justin Bieber!”
Coincidentally this lockdown cover of “The Model” was just released last week.
You know, I’ve always considered myself a fan of surrealist art. Beksinski, Dali, Delvaux, Tanning-none of them ever made me uncomfortable, but some of the expression that has come forth as a result of the lockdown is starting to make me feel very outside of the species I was born into…
That’s Fab on so many levels.
That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. I think I laughed like a drain at the airlock scene in Avenue 5 when I first saw it a week or two ago, but this performance rivals that.
That’s hilarious!, I did indeed torture test all the bass drivers / amps with that, it soon found any weak spots or rattles. I’d set everything up so it didn’t distort with LFO, and then all the other music I’d like to play didn’t distort either. 
