Kraftwerk — Minimum Maximum Live

In the 'Concert Hall' section, we present Minimum Maximum, a two-hour performance by Kraftwerk, compiled from the most successful shows that the band performed in Moscow, Budapest, London, Berlin, Tallinn, Warsaw, Tokyo, Paris and Ljubljana in spring and summer 2004. This isn’t the classic line-up. Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos left the quartet back in the late eighties. They were replaced on stage and in the studio by Fritz Hilpert (sound engineer on 1991’s The Mix album) and Henning Schmitz (sound engineer of the band since the late seventies). So, seasoned people.

At the same time, of course, we shouldn’t forget that the concert is made in the spirit of Kraftwerk—dry and restrained: four middle-aged people stand almost motionless behind electronic stands, constantly turning knobs, which has become a meme. Rock da house! The static picture is compensated for by a huge graphic screen.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to put robots on stage, like you used to do?” the interviewers asked. “We did it recently in Bonn, Cologne and Paris, at the Musée de la Musique for six months. The robots were a moving exhibit behind glass, but then we were touring in Japan and other places, and we missed them. I think they missed us too. And the audience missed them, so we had to reunite. But they’re only appropriate for use during The Robots. You can’t have them playing the other songs and, if we sent the robots out on the road, it would be a fully mechanised show, which is very different to what we’re doing now (mimes fingers playing instrument). It’s the man-machine after all. That would be the machine-machine,” explained one of the band’s founders, Ralf Hütter.

There were no smartphones yet, so the crowd only occasionally glowed with the screens of digital cameras and four-megapixel flip phones. The programme includes Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, Computer World, Radioactivity, Man-Machine and Tour de France, in short, all the classics of the strange band from Düsseldorf.