Forget Berghain, Boston’s Boch Center on a Tuesday night was the place to be for chest-thumping techno.
Remember those lyrical, almost-gentle, electronic bops from the godfathers of techno, Kraftwerk? When seeing the band live, get ready to embrace high-octane, fat-bottomed bass versions of their hits “Computerworld,” “Tour de France,” and “Autobahn.”
Kraftwerk was on tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of their album Autobahn, drawing a mixed-age crowd at Boston’s Boch Center on March 11. Some were there as long-standing disciples of the electronic music wizards from their beginning in the 1970s, but there were new initiates in attendance; a sizable young crowd was drawn in by Kraftwerk’s new, clubby sound.
The concert proved that the band is not beholden to their recordings, replacing some of the electronic warbling of their famous songs with bass-boosted techno rhythms. Despite the amped-up versions of their hits, Kraftwerk maintained their unmistakable identity: four robotic figurines, near motionless at their lecterns of sound, crammed with modulators, synths, sequencers, knobs, and dials, resembling more of the interior of a cockpit than a musical instrument. They use these setups to organically construct spidering electronic riffs, underlaid with unfolding drum machines, all manipulated and tinkered with live. Founder, and last remaining original Kraftwerk member, Ralf Hütter, 78, led the band with indefatigable thumping bass while singing and ripping live synth solos. Kraftwerk transported the audience to a Berlin nightclub; any molly-popping club-goer would have been right at home.
The sound was only half the experience. Their show, dubbed the “Multimedia Tour,” included mesmerizing graphics full of pre-internet polygon graphics, cryptic strings of Matrix-like scrolling numbers, and strong single-word projections on the massive screen behind them. Their song “The Man Machine” projected the title words in various hypnotic configurations, lulling you into a trance as if you were morphing into something part-android. As the concert went on, a sneaking suspicion turned into a sincere belief that the four-piece on stage were actually automatons, especially with their neon morph suits segmented into squares, making them look like 8-bit video game characters.
Their song “Radioactivity” was the most foreboding song of the set. An anti-nuclear anthem, “Radioactivity” deployed the haunting found rhythm of a Geiger counter, while the names “Chernobyl,” “Harrisburg,” “Sellafield,” and “Hiroshima” flashed behind them. They flirted with a fascistic aesthetic, as if the towering techno overlords themselves had the Big Red Button at their disposal on their controllers.
In sound and visuals, Kraftwerk was incredibly orderly (they are German after all), with precise, unwavering beats, recurring hooks, and bitesize sections. The audience, however, was raucous, and the thought that this 2025 iteration of Kraftwerk would be better experienced on your feet in a sweaty underground club rather than the opulent Jazz Age Boch Center was an appropriate one.
“Autobahn,” the title track of Kraftwerk’s 1975 album whose 50th birthday they were on tour celebrating, is a digitized soundscape of a high-speed German highway, with screaming cars, doppler-affected horn honking, and a scrambled radio tuning. “Autobahn” was updated for the electric car age, with the more happy-go-lucky sound of this track giving way to soaring synth lines, a heftier back beat, and a jolt of electricity.
Their songs “Computer Love” and “Computer World” projected an iconic ’70s computer terminal onto the screen, somehow both nostalgic and futuristic. These songs remain catchy, with their simple earworm melodies and upbeat rhythms. More than that, they’re still achingly relevant, as if Kraftwerk had predicted — 50 years ago through music — man’s marriage with machine. Just as Kraftwerk was putting the coming computing age to music in the 1970s, their songs remain a fitting soundtrack for our machine-learning present.
After reaching their final robot form backstage, Kraftwerk reemerged for an encore with “The Robots,” a song where they inhabit the role of obsequious automatons to the sound of dotted synths and laser-like rhythms, the soundtrack of microchips and motherboards. They ended with a medley of “Techno Pop” and “Musique Non Stop,” whose singular message, reflected in the title, broadcasts the current and future role of Kraftwerk: whether in physical form, their inevitable robot reincarnation, or cultural relevance, Kraftwerk is not stopping anytime soon.