Postponed twice due to the pandemic, Kraftwerk’s 3D performance was finally able to take place on Wednesday evening at the Geneva Arena as part of the Antigel festival. The German pioneers of electronic music have delivered a technological show there at times faithful to its promises.
The Kraftwerk concert initially scheduled for May 19, 2020 in the heart of the Geneva airport noise absorber, as a delayed epilogue to the tenth edition of the Antigel festival, was finally able to take place on Wednesday evening. Despite its relocation to the Arena, the technological show of the emblematic German group proved for a few moments to be faithful to its visual and sound promises.
This concept of a three-dimensional show for which a pair of glasses is distributed at the entrance was initiated by Krafwerk at the MoMa in New York in February 2012, before stopping at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July 2013. Almost ten years later in Geneva, the principle remains unchanged.
Standing in checkered jumpsuits that we would swear inspired by the film “Tron” behind their large desk where we guess a laptop and control levers, the German quartet who lost in May 2020 Florian Schneider-Esleben, co-founder of the avant-garde entity, impassive pilots its audio-visual performance.
After the surprise effect, it is unfortunately a painful and purring repetition effect that then predominates. After an introduction as graphic as numerical with “Numbers” then “Computer World”, before bursting the dream of the man-machine that Krafwerk called with his synthetic voice from the end of the 1970s (“The Man-Machine “), this computer-assisted electronic pop ends up losing its retro-futuristic charm, despite the prowess of the depth of the 3D images that parade between constructivist, naive, pixellated inspirations or visuals taken from archives.
Spectators with 3D glasses during the concert of the German group Kraftwerk at the Arena in Geneva, as part of the Antigel Festival, on May 11, 2022. [Aude Hänni/Antigel 2022 – DR]
human and machine
Like Kraftwerk’s repertoire, which has been nourished as much by nature as by technology, by humans as by the noise of machines, the films and animations reproduce the aesthetics of his successive albums, referring as much to a futuristic imagination as ‘to the vestiges of a bygone era.
We thus borrow with the pioneers of electronics this highway of the time when the double track represented the ideal of generalized mobility (“Autobahn”) as well as the mythical trains of the “Trans-Europe Express”, we think back to the advent of the nuclear era over “Radioactivity” or at emblematic stages of the “Tour de France” which sees body and machine merge, while projecting themselves like them into automated humans or übermensch in “The Robots” where the quartet suddenly sees itself embodied by mechanical mannequins backstage.
Still, this technological shoot spreading both a wind of conquest and anxiety often reaches its limits by the repetitiveness of its gimmicks. Kraftwerk’s show ends up looking like the static assemblage of works of art in a museum of modern art. The visit to this institution turned out to be pleasant, but will not leave lasting memories.
Olivier Horner