Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk fans at MoMA on Tuesday night. The band's performances include 3-D imagery. More Photos »

By MELENA RYZIK

Published: April 11, 2012

Sell-out rock shows usually mean a lot of shouting, some sweating, maybe a few drunken pass-outs. Kraftwerk inspired none of that on Tuesday night. The first of its eight consecutive sold-out performances at the Museum of Modern Art had reverence and stylistic weight; even for a New York museum crowd there was a lot of black. Artfully swept hair, uncomfortable-looking shoes, architectural glasses: check, check and check. The high-design audience was rewarded with an equally aesthetically tuned concert, with the band, a foursome in graphic black-and-white unitards, playing neon-lighted synths. Behind them a video screen offered a parade of simple 3-D images, like stick figure robots and spinning numbers, a retro future in an MS-DOS font.

 

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Kraftwerk at MoMA

The show, part of a retrospective for this pioneering German electronica group, was a coveted event, with fewer than 450 tickets available to the public for each night of the run. All eight sold out within an hour when they went on sale in February. (With a face value of $25, they were going for hundreds online afterward.)

On Tuesday several diehard Kraftwerk fans waited outside the museum in the vain hope of scoring an extra ticket. “I grew up listening to this in high school,” said Andy Horowitz, 49, a banker turned teacher from Long Island. “It’s got a real good sound. It’s melodic, pulsating, makes you want to move. It’s timeless.” Mr. Horowitz, who had also turned up at the museum a few days earlier to inquire about more spots, said he might return nightly but was holding out for Friday, when the band is scheduled to perform its seminal 1978 album, “The Man-Machine.” “The personal computer, space, technology — they hit it right on the head,” Mr. Horowitz said. Kraftwerk was expected to play a full album a night, with some bonus and new material mixed in.

 

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk, the German group whose members were early adapters to the world of the computer, at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday. More Photos »

By JON PARELES

Published: April 11, 2012

The Robots” — the first song Kraftwerk played on Tuesday to start its eight-night series of retrospective concerts at the Museum of Modern Art — is adroitly misleading. “We’re programmed to do/anything you want us to,” Ralf Hutter sang.

 

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The album in focus on the opening night of the Kraftwerk retrospective at the Modern was “Autobahn,” from 1974, performed live with prominent graphics and along with additional material. More Photos »

In fact Kraftwerk has been far more predictive than obedient. It can rightfully claim to have done some cultural reprogramming of its own. Back in the 1970s Kraftwerk conceptualized itself as the Man-Machine and started writing songs about what technology might do to — and with — the modern mind. It can now claim a direct influence on all sorts of electronic and computer-driven music, while its lyrics clearly envisioned our computer-mediated daily lives.

Tuesday’s concert was the beginning of Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, with Kraftwerk performing eight consecutive albums on eight nights for just 450 people per show. Only Mr. Hutter remains from Kraftwerk’s original lineup; the other current members are Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Stefan Pfaffe. Onstage the quartet stood at keyboards — playing some of the music’s components live — in front of a very active video screen with images that sometimes sandwiched the musicians between the planes of eye-popping three-dimensional geometry and typography. (Concertgoers were handed 3D glasses on the way to the museum’s atrium.)...