Florian Schneider co-founder of German electronic band Kraftwerk has died. He was 73.
Kraftwerk's lead singer Ralf Hütter confirmed in a statement, "the very sad news that his friend and companion over many decades Florian Schneider has passed away from a short cancer disease just a few days after his 73rd birthday."
Faith No More have a range of influences from many different genres and Kraftwerk have often been cited. You can certainly hear shades of their synthpop noise throughout FNM’s catalog particularly on the album Angel Dust.
Their electronic sounds were of profound inspiration for Roddy Bottum who was listening to Kraftwerk during the writing of We Care A Lot, and actually described the song as 'Kraftwerk meets Black Sabbath!'.
"It wasn't so exciting back then sampling wasn't being done in a rock context, it was mostly Moog synthesizers, real cheesy, stupid stuff. I liked Kraftwerk a whole lot, that whole 'Planet Rock' thing, which was really good stuff because I'd never really liked keyboards in rock." - BAM 1990 In 2015 Roddy again mentioned the influence.
"And that's where We Care A Lot came from: it drew on the stuff we loved — Soulsonic Force, Kraftwerk, the first Run-D.M.C. album — while poking fun at modern culture and the media, stuff we thought was stupid." - Mojo 2015 In 2017 Roddy presented his first short opera The Ride which was based on Kraftwerk's 1983 song Tour de France. "When I approached the instrumentation of this opera I was just thinking about the theme of bike riding. Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France,” is the quintessential bike sound to me. But for some reason flutes to me evoke the sort of bicycle spirit, I don’t know why, but that just was in my head. And using flutes and synths together felt super clean so I knew I had to dirty it up a little and add something organic and a little bit rough. Live drums felt like a good rhythm stabilizer to put in there." - EIO 2016 Roddy also chose Kraftwerk's 1978 song We Are The Robots while guest programming on Australia's Rage TV in 1995. Roddy recalled how Bill Gould saw the band live as a kid . Watch below [ starts 3:13 ].
RIP Florian.