Kraftwerk - more Coachella 2008 videos

I know, there has been nothing but videos posted here recently. I'll do better soon. But right now, no.

Kraftwerk (or someone) has posted two videos from their recent Coachella performance , apparently filmed by people in the audience, at their MySpace page. Here they are:

Vegetable Flute Man!

Sputnik Roadhouse

While we are waiting for Florian Schneider to reappear in Kraftwerk, this is what we should be looking at.



It's a clip from the movie Klassentreffen - Mordfall unter Freunden from 2001. The band appearing on stage is Sputnik Roadhouse, in this movie referred to as The Wondering Stars.

You can see "Fredi Schnitzel", also known as Florian Schneider, on the left. He's wearing a wig, playing the double bass (i guess). On stage with him are Marian Gold (vocals), Klaus Schulze, Toni Nissl and F.J. Krüger, who passed away last year.

There used to be a Sputnik Roadhouse website, but nowadays it just redirects you to the official Alphaville site.

Related:
Florian "Don" Schneider

Soundcheck, hippie

A section of Kraftwerk's soundcheck at Coachella a few days ago, and a jumping hippie:





Notice: Stefan is not there.

Karl

I was just tipped off about these photographs of ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos' show in Budapest yesterday.

Notice the crowded mess of computers, cables and general "stuff" on that table, and compare that to the complete strictness of the current Kraftwerk setup.

Karl needs some help.

This is Mathias Black, by the way.



No... wait. Isn't that LG Petrov (front, left), in his confirmation outfit?

Related:
Kraftwerk on tour - without Florian.
White Cube.

Kraftwerk on tour - without Florian

Kraftwerk are currently (barely) touring the US, and apparently Florian Schneider is not participating in the concerts. This is rather amazing news, and probably the first time ever, since the formation of Organisation in 1967, that the band plays without him. Ralf Hütter was out of Kraftwerk for a brief moment in the early seventies, and as far as I know, that is the only time the band has performed without it's two founders on separate sides of the stage.

As you can see from the picture above (borrowed from here), Ralf still occupies his traditional spot on the left, but Florian's far right location seems to be taken by a man in his late twenties/early thirties, by the name of Stefan Pfaffe. This man was listed as "Kling Klang Crew" on the Minimum-Maximum DVD release, so apparently he's not entirely new to the game.

Pfaffe has even got his own robot, for the performance of "The Robots"! Weird times indeed...

Apart from that, visitors to the new tour report that no new songs are played, but that there are some satisfying reworkings of older material to look forward to.

Kling Klang battle, update

A short follow-up to this previous post:

One can sense a little bit of friction between the band Kling Klang and their management. Again according to Drowned In Sound, the band has issued another statement, in which they begin to conclude that "some members from their management failed completely to represent correctly their ideas about the entire matter. And blaming them for a misrepresentation that sprung from an ill informed employee is not right."

More quotes from the same article:

“In Cologne on Sunday 6th April the UK band Kling Klang were issued with a document by representatives of Messrs. Ralf Hutter & Florian Schneider of the German band Kraftwerk. The document is an order to cease and desist using the name "Kling Klang" as the name of the group. Since Messrs. Hutter & Schneider own the single-word trademark "Klingklang" (the name of Kraftwerk's studio, and publishing/merchandising companies), they feel that use of the two-word term "Kling Klang" as a band name is an infringement of their trademark rights.

“The UK band Kling Klang arrived at the name by way of an onomatopoeic reference to a guitar improvisation of binary structure, and were under the impression that "klang" is a German word for sound, with "kling klang" meaning "bell-sound" (similar to "ding dong" in English). The term appears to be in popular usage in more than one language, including Swedish, and the band in no way thought they would be infringing upon the trademark rights of Messrs. Hutter and Schneider in utilizing this term as a name for the group.

“Kling Klang holds Kraftwerk in the highest esteem as musicians and hope to resolve this matter quickly and amicably.”

Kraftwerk are known for having made similar threats before, sometimes valid but sometimes not at all, for ending auctions of bootlegs, promos and similar collectors items from eBay, and for having sent rather unpleasant threats of legal action to force a fan to delete a site with an address that contained the word Kraftwerk. It will be interesting to see where this ends.