I saw Kraftwerk's show at the Warfield last night.
The show had a certain visual appeal -
the four musicians standing at futuristic consoles,
giant projected video behind with a combination
of lo-res 16-color graphics and various B&W footage
of bike racers, trains, fashion models etc;
various lighting color schemes in a
chartreuse/pumpkin/cobalt saturated palette
(Lynne was enthusiastic about this).

The music was marred throughout by huge noise
in the 15-20 Hz range, gut-rattling, I couldn't even
tell if it was supposed to be drums or bass.
It made it very hard to discern the layers of detail
at higher frequencies (which are what make Kraftwerk great).

The music was familiar, starting with Man/Machine,
some Tour de France stuff off their last CD,
Radioactivity, Pocket Calculator, Boing boom tschak, Autobahn, etc.
They did three groups of encores;
during the second, the musicians were replaced on stage
by four articulated robots, and the music was We are the Robots.
In the last encore they wore suits with ultraviolet reflecting
strips, making them look like the stick-figure mannequins
from the cover of Computerworld.

It wasn't clear exactly what the four musicians were doing.
Some of the singing, and maybe some of the synth playing,
was live, but most of the music was recorded.

In the post-concert deconstruction we (Lynne, Berg and me)
agreed that it was good to have seen,
and that now we never need to see them live again.
We also agreed that perhaps the most impressive thing about Kraftwerk
is their definition of a certain style, energy, lyric type, and
sonic pallette, and their extremely disciplined adherence
to these constraints.  It might seem odd to praise limitation,
but limitation can have its merits.