Like only a handful of other artists from the last century, it's truly impossible to imagine modern music without Kraftwerk.
Their metronomic, digitized and futuristic -- yet still highly accessible -- works of the '70s and '80s not only laid the groundwork for genres like synth-pop and techno, but they were also a foundational sample source for much of early hip-hop and electro.
To many, Kraftwerk were nothing less than the Beatles of electronic music.Today (May 6), it was confirmed that the group had lost one of its two founding members in Florian Schneider-Esleben.
Described by group co-founder Ralf Hütter as a "sound fetishist," Schneider was responsible for the cultivation of many of the sonic innovations that would become the group's.
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