Review: Kraftwerk, in 3-D at the Electric Factory

When conventional stage patter is all but verboten and the pioneering German krautrock - or if you prefer, motorik - band principally responsible for bringing electronic music to the masses in the 1970s plays an exceedingly rare show in the City of Brotherly Love, how do it members find a way to wordlessly say: "Hello Philadelphia! How you doin'?"
Well, if you're Kraftwerk, the Teutonic quartet who played a sold out concert at the Electric Factory on Friday night that was the band's first area appearance since they performed at Emerald City in Cherry Hill in 1981, you cleverly do it with retro-futuristic 3-D animation.

During "Spacelab," a song that the four man band of co-founder Ralf Hutter and fellow programmers Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffen performed from the 1978 album Die Mensch-Maschine - that's The Man-Machine to you - the Jetsons-like video projections showed a UFO floating through the heavens. Its GPS locator, showed it to be flying directly above Philadelphia, and when it mind blowingly came in for a landing, its destination was the Electric Factory, where the marquee listed Kraftwerk as the headlining attraction.

The sci-fi cool and forward motion rhythms of "Spacelab" were representative of a seamless, two-hour rapturously received show. The geeked out intergenerational audience happily donned old fashioned cardboard glasses to gain a multi-dimensional perspective on the emotionless, proudly robotic performers. Kraftwerk specialize in songs about travel ("Trans Europe Express," "Tour de France" and "Autobahn," with a video that could have doubled as an ad for under-fire German automaker Volkswagen), while exploring ways humans have been transformed by technology of their own creation.

Kraftwerk's influence is vast. Not only as it pertains to synth-pop bands like Pet Shop Boys and robo space men  Daft Punk and every electronic dance act currently getting rich on the festival circuit, but also on the entirety of hip-hop. A key building block of that essentially electronic genre is Afrika Bambaataa's 1982 hit "Planet Rock," which borrowed from both Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers," which the band opened with on Friday night.

The four members of Kraftwerk seemed to be programming their intoxicating, often energizing and sometimes a little too samey sounding dance-trance grooves live, and not just pushing 'Play' buttons on the machines sitting on the podium before them. Many of the song title mantras, such as "Man ... Machine," "Techno ... Pop" were pre-recorded samples. But Hutter - whose original partner, Florian Schneider, left the band in 2008 - also talked-sang is share of vocals live, enunciating lines like "I'm adding and subtracting, I'm controlling and composing / I'm the operator of my pocket calculator" in a colorless monotone.

While the sleek music was often transfixing, the staging was the star of the show, as the quartet of technicians went about their business and the B-movie spaceship looked like it was going to float off screen and knock you in the forehead. The high point came in the first encore of "The Robots," in which the entities on stage literally were robots, mechanized shop window dummies who were more animated in their movements than the presumably human counterparts who had been constructing the ingenious machine driven music all night long.

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