From Andy Thomas Sent Mon, Jun 8th 1998, 19:49
From Andy Thomas Sent Mon, Jun 8th 1998, 19:49
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 19:13:38 From: Catweasel <xxx.xxxxxx@xxx.xxx> To: xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, xx-xxxxx@xx-xxxxx.xxx Subject: Music, non stop. The place: Warfield Theatre, San Francisco. The time: 8PM, sunday evening. The crowd: An odd mix of punkers, cyberfreaks, ravers, oldies, college kids and plain freakers. Pot smoke is thick in the air. The venue: A baroque theatre, beutifully decorated and very plush. So there we all are, a thousand or so people, looking at a curtained stage and listening to random bleeps emenating from the huge speakers. I feel strange being in a gig atmosphere, haven't been to one for many years, not used to being just an audience, a tiny part of a passive mob with all the attention directed at people on stage. Suddenly the bleeping and blooping gets louder, the house lights go down and an electric tension of anticipation glows in the air. Then the sound system kicks into full booty shaking volume with a wikked electro beat and the cheers go up, people start to move n groove. The curtain rolls back to reveal what can only be described as a scene worthy of NASA mission mission control in hou ston - huge consoles of screens and banks of buttons and LEDs and knobs. In front of the consoles are 4 control stations looking like keyboards on stands, but in reality they are far more than just keyboards - full midi control stations. The crowd are goi ng wild, it's a totally spectacular sight, there are 4 huge video projection screens behind the setup, and as the vocoder voice kicks in they start shooting off old-school computer style digits in time to the voice. "One, two, three, four"; "Uno", "Dos", "Tres", "Quattro". And at this point four imposing figures clad in all black vinyl polo neck jumpsuits march on stage and take their place in front of the control consoles. Kraftwerk have now entered the building. What ensues is a very strange and unparalleled show, involving strangely old-skool visuals using high tech methods, and updated versions of their greatest hits along with some newer stuff (sounding like Underworld gone all dark and angry). I was quite pis sed they sang the English verisions of tracks like "The Model" rather than the more natural sounding German vocals (Sie ist ein model und sie sieht gut aus) , but hey ho. Highlights included the front stage jamming of "Pocket Calculator" where they took m ini handheld keyboard controllers and played right up front, and the incredible spectacle of "The Robots" where for the first part the track was played in its original glory with no-one on stage at all, then the track turned into a heavier beat and sudden ly the video screens lowered to reveal the four original robot models dancing the original strangely coreographed moves, lit with a spectacular display of lighting and a pounding bass-heavy remix of the track blasting out of the speaker stacks. Inspiratio nal to the max. As it finished and I walked out I wondered if the four ageing balding Germans were really true visionaries, or just lucky that their brand of esoteric pop caught on and inspired an entirely new generation of musicians to create a new kind of music. x@xxx. ----------------------------------------------------- http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Underground/5185 -----------------------------------------------------