High priests of techno-nostalgia delight Wellington crowd

Thursday, 30 November 2023

Kraftwerk at Wellington’s TSB Arena, November 29. Reviewed by Max Rashbrooke.

Stood still behind their consoles, their suits covered in a glowing green grid, the four members of the legendary synth-pop outfit Kraftwerk might have been the priests of an Ethernet religion.

Performing in Wellington for the first time in over a decade, to a seated TSB Arena crowd that bore the serious air of a TED Talk audience, they oversaw an evening of nostalgic music that seemed to ease the burden of modern, technology-driven angst, and offer instead the promise that a sine wave might bestow some kind of blessing.

Part of the appeal of a Kraftwerk song lies in its subtle emotional dissonance.

The music is at once deeply serious and very silly; robotic lyrics sit atop impossibly jaunty themes. Everything is tinged with melancholy; it is the sound of small lonelinesses, of alienation, of a man walking the city in the dark. But the songs also take an almost childlike joy in technology: there is a sense of wonderment, of contentment, even.

Paired with the deliberately clunky graphics projected on the screen behind the band members, the music’s overall effect was to teleport the audience back to a time when our relationship with technology was so different it seems irrecoverable. Even though we live in the age of algorithms and ChatGPT, the ultimate in machine-led decision-making, everything in the debate about technology today is hot, urgent, angry. Kraftwerk’s cool and distanced imperturbability, its embrace of modernity, could hardly be more different, or more soothing.

The show itself was a finely tuned fusion of sound and light, the mechanical graphics carefully matched to the ethereal songs. It built slowly, moving from largely wordless and ambient tracks into the territory of the most familiar hits: Autobahn, The Man Machine, The Model, Neon Lights and, of course, The Robots.

Occasionally one sensed the passing of time: founding member Ralf Hütter’s voice no longer has the smoothness of youth, and the odd mistake in the programming reminded us that the band members are, indeed, man as well as machine.

Not that the audience seemed to mind. They cheered politely, and even started dancing – cautiously – in the aisles, before filing out in an orderly manner that might have pleased the ministers of their cool music.