Kraftwerk

A Kraftwerk concert is like Morpheus's fateful red pill: it's the revelation of the machine world you find yourself immersed in. But it's also much more. It's the discovery that the machine is part of you. The Man-Machine.

Aren't those four android shadows looming over the audience, backlit and projected onto the curtain veiling the stage, machines themselves?

And isn't the metallic echo of the voice announcing their entrance the signal of the dawning of the mechanical age? But Kraftwerk's machines, unlike the Matrix of the Wachowski brothers, don't aspire to enslave humanity: what they want is a universe of geometric perfection in the service of mankind, a ribbon of asphalt winding toward the horizon, a train launched to the ends of the earth. It's the First Law of Robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being."

So as the curtain opens, it seems almost natural that the four shadows reveal their belonging to a lineage of dual nature, in symbiotic union with their own non-human component. The Man-Machine. It's impossible to separate the four men in grey suits from the square-shouldered silhouette of their keyboards and computers.

Motionless and hieratic like icons of an Asimovian utopia, the four golems are ready to show humans that androids, too, dream of electric sheep.

A Kraftwerk concert is a surprising experience: nothing like the cold detachment one might expect from over two hours of electronic music.

That's thanks to the warmth of those synthetic pulses, with their metronomic march and a sound so flawless it leaves you open-mouthed. But it's also thanks to an ironic, imaginative multimedia backdrop that gives listening to Kraftwerk's music an even more immersive depth than simply hearing it on record.

Behind the four Germans' stations, the screen spanning the entire length of the stage fills with a kaleidoscope of images that give body and soul to Kraftwerk's technological visions. From the shower of multicoloured pills in "Vitamin" to the black-and-white epic of the Tour de France, from the endless tracks of "Trans-Europe Express" to the retro elegance of the female faces in "The Model", it becomes impossible to separate the music from its visual apparatus.

The setlist strictly follows the running order of "Minimum Maximum", but then again it would be madness to expect improvisation in a programme planned by infallible automatons.

So, just as on the double live album recently released, what convinces least are certain techno drifts accompanying the more recent compositions, such as the tracks from the latest "Tour De France" and the closing party of the older "Music Non Stop": while it's true that Kraftwerk were the ones who paved the way for the generation of Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk, chasing after one's own imitators rarely proves a happy choice. Especially when those imitators have seldom matched the genius of their forerunners.

So what ignites the ovations of the crowd packed into the theatre-tent at Villa Arconati is not so much any attempt to keep up with trends, but rather the unmistakable stamp of the volksmusik of the four men from Düsseldorf, starting with the roaring engine of "Autobahn" and running all the way to the cybernetic dance of "The Robots".

Among the classic synth minuets and the disorienting reverberations of alien voices that everyone identifies with Kraftwerk's retro-futurism, the track that towers most above the legendary originals is undoubtedly "Radioactivity": introduced by an apocalyptic vocoder-driven warning linking Hiroshima to the British nuclear plant at Sellafield, its melody straight out of an old Japanese cartoon soars with gripping energy amid the electric colours of atomic hazard symbols and the swirling orbit of electrons around the nucleus.

At the heart of the customary run of songs about the computer age drawn from "Computer World" comes the long-awaited Italian version of "Pocket Calculator", which, predictably, whips up the crowd's enthusiasm: “Sono l’operatore del mio piccolo calcolatore/ io aggiungo/ io sottraggo/ io programmo/ io compongo/ se premo un bottone/ lui suona una canzone”.

The definitive blending of human and artificial is completed when the curtain rises again for the encore: in place of Ralf, Florian and company there are four humanoid robot-mannequins bearing their likenesses, who will hold the stage for the entire duration of "The Robots", performing slow-motion movements. Had Kubrick gone through with his plan to direct "Artificial Intelligence", he would not have passed up an image like this one. “We’re functioning automatic/ And we are dancing mechanic/ We are the robots”.

For the last part of the concert, Kraftwerk shed jacket and tie and don futuristic dark skin-tight suits crossed by a grid of phosphorescent lines, making them look as if they'd just stepped out of a scene from "Tron". The relentless pulse of "Elektro Kardiogramm" kicks in, and by now the crowd has gathered around the stage to celebrate the physicality of kraftwerkian abstraction. From that point on it's literally "Music Non Stop", since sounds and rhythms keep vibrating through the grounds of Villa Arconati even after Kraftwerk have left their stations. Then again, they said it themselves: all it takes is pressing a key to create a melody. Can machines really do without man?

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