Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Dvorana Tivoli (Mala dvorana) / Slovenia
Concert date: February 22, 2018
Attendance: 3,500
Ticket price: €45.00 (floor) / €42.00 (stands)
Time, what is time? Really, there’s no such thing. A sincere artist doesn’t know it and doesn’t even acknowledge it. Especially when you collide with the Düsseldorf music monster Kraftwerk, a band that has been going, no joke, since the early seventies, and that with its revolutionary albums from 1974 onward has leapt (in terms of the evolution of music worldwide) a few eras into the future, while also uncannily predicting the lifestyle we live today and that is being generated in the future. Just like the spaceship in their stage choreography suggests, Kraftwerk really did arrive in Ljubljana from some other time and place, from a galaxy of the future, which for two hours in Ljubljana became the present, or a seriously tangible imprint of something that has yet to happen. Who would have thought that Computer Love, created in 1981, would become so relevant in the new age. Back when it was made, nobody was thinking about virtual love, which is now perfectly ordinary online. The dehumanization and the fusion of machine and human, in other words, is becoming reality. When you’ve been watching Ljubljana’s numbness and coldness for quite a few years now, the alienation of high-school kids especially, melting into the circuitry of their pocket androids, all these associations are cruel. A scourge. Kraftwerk, a timeless phenomenon, have proven to be not just a great innovator on the galaxy’s music scene but a prophet too. And that prophecy is still coming true.
They weren’t the only exceptionally intelligent musical collective to emerge in West Germany in the late sixties. There were also Faust, Can, Amon Düül, Neu! and a whole bunch of other visionaries who, with their adventurously avant-garde spirit, set a new genre of “cosmic music” on its feet (the British coinage “krautrock” was “blasphemous” to these German intellectuals, who saw it as a desecration of their art). Still, the Düsseldorf pioneers in their Kling Klang sound laboratory, where they had to build entirely new instruments themselves, including vocoders, modulars and synthesizers, in their revolutionary nomenclature of sound “distortion,” with the groundbreaking “Autobahn” (1974), were the ones who really threw the doors wide open for the boom of electronic music. In all its “post-Kraftwerk” spheres of evolution. Or in the “evolutionary hunt” of the Kraftwerk doctrine.
The years go by, and there haven’t been new Kraftwerk studio albums for a long time, but the band keeps showing up on stages year after year and keeps refining and expanding the arrangements of its music as a result. Along with that comes the visual side of the concerts, which accompanies their spectacular shows. After the sold-out Križanke in 2004, 14 years later Kraftwerk filled the small hall of Hala Tivoli too, with similar, if somewhat higher, numbers!
Last year the band released an extensive catalog of eight live CDs titled “3-D The Catalogue,” and this year’s “3-D” concert tour was built around it. After a long drought, with the last big night being October last year when we were crammed into the Arena for Nick Cave, Ljubljana got a new, more resonant musical spectacle with Kraftwerk’s arrival, and the crowd really did pile up to several multiples of a thousand. Plenty of visitors from Italy, Croatia, even from around Villach and Klagenfurt in Austria, and a clientele that I, as a “buttoned-up guitar-gig regular,” rarely run into. Lots of people on the floor, though, were once again there just to be there. That is, with androids in their hands, busy with everything except following the concert performance of the legendary group, well, no.
Two hours of hypnosis. A gigantic screen with outstanding visuals, combined, you guessed it, with the group’s musical artistry. A heavenly match of two worlds! Sound and vision. In strictly German manner. All the films about music stories, all the way to Laibach and Rammstein, reel through your head in a flash, and our karate master Miha Kralj very likely didn’t skip this concert either. The feelings you go through at a Kraftwerk show are, on the one hand, hugely nostalgic (if you were born back in the early seventies), and Kraftwerk, especially in the new era, get more grotesquely entertaining from year to year, since with their presence and legacy they touch on the times of the first feats of digitization, as shown for instance by the primitive computers and early forms of digital recording on the screen. Then to the real seventies, where you get blown away especially by the visuals during Autobahn, where you easily become part of the Volkswagen Beetle’s rumble and the Mercedes of the kind our own long-dead marshal, and of course former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, was once driven around in. And on the third hand, with tracks like Radioactivity, Computer Love and The Robots, Kraftwerk are still very much the current heralds of the new reality of modern social order, which they so uncannily predicted! Their often bizarre minimalism actually creates its own opposite. It reaches into “maximalism.” A walk through all the eras and all ten albums of the group, and it surprised many that The Model was played in the first half of the concert, but Kraftwerk wanted to present the live material in as sensibly conceptualized a sequence as possible, partly in the sense of a chronological evolution of their cult albums.
Over the years the group has enriched and expanded the arrangements of the originals and “refined” the sonic experience. The bass was pushed with such intensity that you could feel your stomach tremble. For example, Das Model, or The Model, rang out far more concise than the original, almost in a symphonic nomenclature, and in general the songs have grown ever friendlier to dance steps over the years. So they’ve picked up even more rhythmic punch along the way!
Ralf Hütter, Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Falk Grieffenhagen, after almost five decades of musical revolution, remain, with their interstellar spacecraft, the great musical phenomenon of the future! And still a musical revolution! As far as the concert experience goes, going to their show is in every respect an obligation for every Earthling and a treat worth any sin. Whether you’re a fan or an absolute music layperson. An experience that rouses you, wakes you up, shakes you, and not only takes you for two hours into a world of its own beyond reality, but opens and widens your consciousness, your senses and your intuitive interior.
Ahhh…. and by the way, in case anyone’s wondering. Sexy glasses. 3-D glasses! The mandatory prop you got at the door of the hall for the show! I almost forgot.
Setlist
1. Numbers / Computer World
2. It’s More Fun to Compute / Home Computer
3. Computer Love
4. The Man Machine
5. Spacelab
6. The Model
7. Neon Lights
8. Autobahn
9. Airwaves
10. Geiger Counter / Radioactivity
11. Electric Café
12. Tour De France / Prologue / Etape 1 / Chrono / Etape 2
13. Trans Europe Express / Metal on Metal / Abzug
—Encore I—
14. The Robots
—Encore II—
15. Aéro Dynamik
16. Planet of Visions
17. Boing Boom Tschak / Techno Pop / Music Non Stop
Photo Gallery
