Born on April 7: Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk's brilliant architect

The founder of the avant-garde German electronic group was born in Düsseldorf in 1947 and passed away there on April 21, 2020, due to cancer.

With Ralf Hütter, still active in 2025, he was one of the two founding members of Kraftwerk at the dawn of the 1970s. The name of their group can be translated as craftwork. For these two electronic music pioneers, defined by the emergence of new devices (a term preferred over instruments) they manipulate and alter. Alongside Amon Düül II, Can, and Popol Vuh, they belong, with a certain detachment, to this fertile and elusive German musical burgeoning known as krautrock. For more than anyone else, Florian and Ralf champion minimalist repetitions as much as cutting-edge techniques. In this sense, they always followed in the footsteps of their compatriot Karlheinz Stockhausen born two decades before them.

Like Ralf, Florian studied music and musicology for about a decade. Passionate about jazz improvisation, he skilfully played various classical instruments such as the flute and violin. But the advent of the first portable (or more precisely simply transportable) synthesisers, the birth of the vocoder, and the first video experiments quickly captured all his attention. First with "Autobahn" (1974), then with "Radio-Activity" (1975) and "Trans-Europe Express" (1977), retaining their social and even sociological value, these simple words of everyday life serve as a receptacle and a pretext for their sound experiments. While occasionally emphasising our fears linked, for example, to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb. Always published in two versions, in their native language and in English, "The Man Machine" (1978) and "Computer World" (1981) continue to question a world already grappling with potentially questionable uses of new technologies. All this is present in the first five Kraftwerk albums decades before the rise of social media networks, the appearance of cryptocurrencies without even mentioning the tsunami caused by Artificial Intelligence.

With "Techno Pop" (1986) then "Tour de France" (2003) after a long period of inactivity, Kraftwerk seems to favour an approach flirting with a certain second degree and a sophistication in which the group loses some of its originality. Having become a professor at the Institute of Arts and Communication in Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1998, Florian Schneider gradually distanced himself from Kraftwerk and eventually officially left in 2008.

Currently touring in the United States and Canada, now led by Ralf Hütter who is slowly approaching his 80th birthday, Kraftwerk still places a strong emphasis on 3D and stunning visual creations. Kraftwerk will return to the old continent in June. Below are some selected dates:

21 July: Théâtre de Fourvière - Lyon (France)

25 July: Teatro Antico - Taormina (Italy)

14 August: Place du Palais Royal - Brussels (Belgium)

2 December: AFAS Live - Amsterdam (Netherlands)

And also in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria and of course in Germany

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo: Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Florian Schneider with Kraftwerk on stage at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels (Belgium) on 7 June 1981