Remembering Florian Schneider, Who Brought Sonic Perfectionism and Humor to Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk was supposed to be the man machine, the ultimate fusion of culture and technology. The band’s use of electronic instruments in pop-song form paved the way for those that followed, an influence felt from Detroit techno to London grime, from Kanye to Coldplay. This was a unit whose music would live on via automation long after its human incarnation had departed the natural realm. And yet the death of Florian Schneider—the band’s co-founder, sonic perfectionist, and erstwhile flute player—still hurts like hell.

At least in Kraftwerk’s later years, there was little left of them in the whole endeavor: Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, key members of the imperial 1970s lineup, were replaced by an anonymous roll call of musical technocrats; Schneider himself departed in 2008, but still the Kraftwerk live revue rolled on. Co-founder Ralf Hütter suggested that the group might even continue after his own death, commenting in arch Kraftwerk style that “certain programs keep running.”

For all the pretending otherwise, though, Kraftwerk was always a band of flesh and blood, where real human emotions ran deep. And Schneider and Hütter were the beating heart and pulsing brains: the group’s founders, principle songwriters, and even one-time roommates. They were there for all of it, from Kraftwerk’s formation amid Düsseldorf’s uninhibited art scene, to their electronic breakthrough on 1974’s Autobahn; from their jaw-dropping run of albums in the mid-’70s and early ’80s, right through to the all-conquering live monster they became in the new millennium.

Perhaps we’re not meant to think of Kraftwerk as individuals so much as contributors to a common good, inhabitants of a realm of ideas that subsumed and surpassed them. Certainly, the group played up this anonymity, at times sending robots to replace them on stage and in interviews. But now is not the time for theories of digital immortality, when faced with the very flesh-and-blood death of Florian Schneider. So what of Florian? What did he bring to Kraftwerk?

At first, he brought the flute. In Kraftwerk’s early days, Schneider’s wistful flute lines and occasional violin melody floated above Hütter’s organs and guitars, as the band jammed out an elegant, enchanting, and often unsettling take on krautrock. It is, perhaps, hard to think of an instrument less suited to latter-period Kraftwerk than a flute. And yet, on those first three Kraftwerk albums—Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, and Ralf und Florian, all since excised from the catalogue by the band’s revisionist approach to history—Schneider’s flute provides the closest suggestion of what is to come, its fragile timbre giving the suggestion of the bell-tone classical melody that would infuse Kraftwerk’s electronic hits. You can still hear the flute hidden away on side two of Autobahn, the band’s international breakthough and the “first album” of their revised canon. “Morgenspaziergang,” the album’s gorgeous closing number, features a flute riff of such pastoral simplicity that it seems criminal it will never be heard again live.

Schneider also brought perfectionism to Kraftwerk. His refusal to compromise his sonic vision arguably hobbled the band in the ’80s and ’90s as they worked to bring the pristine surfaces of their studio work to the stage, bogging down ceaseless innovation with endless tinkering. But these ideals proved the band’s savior in the ’00s when they returned to touring; their live sound was so jaw-dropping in its crystalline perfection that it felt like it was cleansing your ears.

When I saw Kraftwerk at London’s O2 Academy Brixton in 2004 (still one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to), the sound of a bicycle chain snaking percussively around the hall on “Tour de France” was so perfectly realized it felt closer to an aural hallucination than something actually coming out of the speakers. The band’s 10th—and possibly last—studio album Tour de France Soundtracks, released the year before that Brixton gig, may not have been light years ahead of its peers in terms of musical innovation, but its sound design was so perfectly buffed as to make any competitors feel vaguely ridiculous in their sonic gloom.

Schneider’s interest in speech synthesis drove Kraftwerk’s exploration of the crossover between human and robotic voices. They weren’t the first mainstream pop act to go there—Stevie Wonder notably used a talk box on his 1972 album Music of My Mind, which predated Kraftwerk’s “Ananas Symphonie” by a year and a half—but they really dug in, using tools like the Vocoder as part of their standard musical palette, wringing soul and compassion out of something that was largely seen as a musical novelty. In 1990, Shneider patented the Robovox, a “system for and method of synthesizing singing in real time”; apparently the tool was first used on The Mix, the band’s 1991 remix album, where its elastic and slightly haunting tone drove the new version of “The Robots.”

Perhaps most unlikely of all was the humor that Schneider brought to Kraftwerk, a band whose sly wit on songs like “The Model” makes a mockery of their poe-faced image. Schneider rarely gave interviews, leaving the talking up to Hütter, but when he did, the results were spectacular. Particularly worth seeking out is the wonderfully dry interview he gave to Brazilian TV in 1998 (excitable journalist: “what are the songs that you are going to play tonight?”; poker-faced Florian, after long, hard stare: “all”), or an interview he gave in 2001 as “Don Schneider,” riffing on Kraftwerk’s history in broken Spanish behind dark glasses and a fake moustache, to an interviewer dressed as Che Guevara.

Why, you might wonder, would a man of Schneider’s impeccable credentials and intellectual renown do such a thing? But maybe the better question is: why not? We are at risk of seeing Kraftwerk as a perfect musical jewel that arrived flawless and gleaming with “Autobahn.” The band itself has encouraged this, refusing to reissue those first three albums and taking Wolfgang Flür to court to try to avoid the publication of his wonderfully warts-and-all biography Ich war ein Roboter.

But the members of Kraftwerk were never robots—they were flawed, funny, grouchy, brilliant, and even partial to the flute. For me, that makes Kraftwerk even more special, their imperfect humanity beaming through their perfect robotic outer core. Unlike robots, though, humans pass away. And now we have to say goodbye to Florian.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork