Electronic music has lost one of its pioneers. The German Florian Schneider-Esleben, co-founder of the Kraftwerk group, died of cancer at 73, one of his managers announced on Wednesday 6 May.
"Florian Schneider died of dazzling cancer just days after his 73rd birthday," Alexandra Greenberg told AFP, quoting Kraftwerk founder Ralf Hütter as saying.
The collaboration between the two musicians began in 1968 before they founded two years later in Düsseldorf, a city in western Germany, Kraftwerk.
Born in the industrial Ruhr area, this group intended to develop a typically German music, marrying their mother tongue with the sounds of big cities, against the Anglo-Saxon pop brought by the occupying troops.
His music, combining haunting bass, synthesizer pads and drum machine, has won over audiences and many artists, from David Bowie to Daft Punk. The distortion of voices to the "vocoder", trademark of the group, has become a classic.
Their words, in German then in Spanish, Russian, Polish or Japanese, also made them pioneers: from the 1970s, they revolved around the omnipresence of machines and the growing role of technology in everyday life.
Avant-garde group and influential actor of contemporary art, Kraftwerk will chain world successes with its titles Autobahn (1974), Radio-Aktivität (1975), Trans Europa Express (1977), Die Mensch-Maschine (1978) or even Tour From France (2003).
Florian Schneider had left the group at the end of 2008. In 2014, he received a Grammy Award, an award given annually in the United States to honor the best artists in the field of music, for all of his work.
With AFP
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