Kraftwerk at The Bomb Factory

The foundation for Kraftwerk’s music was the sounds of everyday life, a concept first fully realized on the 22-minute title track of the Autobahn album (1974). Repetitious, monotonous, lulling, and entrancing, “Autobahn” became an unlikely hit in Europe and the United States (where it was played on commercial radio stations in severely edited form). Subsequent albums explored such subjects as radios and trains with a combination of childlike wonder and cold objectivity. The band revolutionized ideas about how a “rock” tour should look and sound by appearing in the United States in the guise of identical mannequins who performed their music exclusively on keyboards. The title of their album The Man-Machine (1978) epitomized the concept. Although the band recorded rarely in the 1980s and ’90s and virtually stopped touring, its music was a huge influence on New York hip-hop, particularly Afrika Bambaataa’s hit “Planet Rock”; Detroit techno dance music; Neil Young’s album Trans (1983); the collaborations between David Bowie and Brian Eno; and the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and countless others.

– britannica.com