Spaceship Landing in 3D – Wiener Zeitung Online

If there is a god of the time, he must be a powerhouse fan. No wonder, because the Düsseldorf group has for some years been the best, which you can see on concert stages. Contrary to the unfavorable prediction, about 3500 visitors were spared by thunderstorms and showers Sunday evening in St. Margarethen quarry in Burgenland

A victim, however, demanded bad weather: The legendary 40-channel sound system of the German pioneers of electropop was not built, there was rather a powerhouse in stereo. But even that was quite impressive for the partly traveled public, as could be seen on the parking lot next to the license plates of Hungary and Vienna also from Berlin and other German cities

. somatic experience

Kraftwerk has not had a new studio album for fifteen years plus published and their actual Glanztaten date from the second half of the 1970s. For ten years the band has reduced to a single founding member, Ralf Hütter, 71 years old. In the 21st century, Hütter focused on digitizing Kraftwerk's badog music and revising and refining it with the latest means of music technology.

And it was in St. Margarethen as wonderful to hear. Its crystalline and low abyssal electronics, such as the programmatic song "The Human Machine" of 1978. The threatening chatter of the "Trans Europa Express" approach was not only a musical treat, but also a great sound experience. Again and again sensational is "metal on metal", which has served as a model for the industrial sounds of many other groups: With the means of electronic sound production, the collision of metal parts, including overlapping vibrations , was bloody loud (but not deafening) brought. Power plant, it is also a somatic experience. In line with Ralf Hütter's statement: "Music brings vibrations – it's waves that penetrate directly – it's their power."

Kraftwerk has long ceased to be a pop band, but a work of pop art. The fact that Hütter and his comrades now see themselves as a performance art group has become apparent since their appearance at the New York Museum of Modern Art in April 2012, during which they spent eight evenings with eight albums of "Autobahn" (1974) to "Tour de France" (2003), as in a retrospective. Other concerts on cultural sites such as the Tate Modern in London, the Sydney Opera House or the Vienna Burgtheater (as part of the Wiener Festwochen 2014) followed. As a result, their concert in the Roman quarry could be understood as a localized audiovisual installation.

Without Double Puppets

There were two more next to the huge screen that hung behind the musicians and where the songs were accompanied by impressive 3D projections of other smaller screens on both sides of the scene, which had additional visuals
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In addition, there were the colorful illuminations of the imposing rock canyon in the back of the stage; in the clbadic "road", they shone in the blue color of the road sign, while they shone bloody in "The Man Machine" in the red of the album cover. The "Spacelab", an instrument in which, after a spectacular space flight, Burgenland appeared from an astronautical point of view, the Kraftwerk spacecraft finally landed in the auditorium quarry.

For exactly two hours, the Kraftwerk beads works catalog without filling each other. Only one thing was missing: For the song "The Robots", there unfortunately did not have the usual appearance of the double mechanical puppets, but a freshly arranged version with new sounds. And a few drops of rain. Even Peter himself seemed a bit bored by an otherwise perfect evening.