Top to bottom/ "We had a vision: to make electronic folk music. To become the Volkswagen of pop music; accessible to a big audience, but still innovating." Kraftwerk (German for power station) is a Grammy award nominated, electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The signature Kraftwerk sound combines driving, repetitive rhythms with catchy melodies, mainly following a Western classical style of harmony, with a minimalistic and strictly electronic instrumentation. Kraftwerk’s releases in the 1970s and early 1980s, most significantly a quartet of albums that would exert a huge influence on popular music—Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981)— continue to inspire many popular artists from many diverse genres of music and artists, from David Bowie to New Wave, to Chicago House Music, to hip-hop, to current electronic acts, among them LCD Soundsystem and the Chemical Brothers. The band is notoriously reclusive, as they reject to accept mail and allow no visitors at the Kling Klang Studio. It is rumored that their label partner, EMI, does not even have the members’ phone numbers. Originally announced in 2004, Kraftwerk released eight of their albums in remastered versions on October 5, 2009. Kraftwerk is preparing a new album, the first without co-founder Florian Schneider.
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