Showing how music can change the world, the Aston University in Birmingham will be holding an international academic Kraftwerk conference later this month. The two day conference titled “Industrielle Volksmusik for the Twenty-First Century: Kraftwerk and the Birth of Electronic Music in Germany” includes lectures and discussions about Kraftwerk’s cultural origins and links to German techno.
Subsequently, former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür will be reading from his memoirs and holding a Q&A session. The ticket prices are beyond affordable at £20 (about $30) and £10 (about $15) for non-students. It’s all happening this January 21st & 22nd at Aston University’s Byng Kendrick Lecture Theatre. This event surfaced two years after Kraftwerk held an eight day live performance exhibition at the MoMA with a chronological exploration of their musical and visual experiments.
The tickets to their MoMA shows sold out immediately (respectively) and were also affordable at $25 a pop. In our last burst of Kraftwerk news, Ralf Hütter teased a ninth album in 2013 – so here’s to hoping that still happens!
Get your tickets for the Kraftwerk Conference here!
Schedule:
Wednesday, 21 January 2015
9.00 Registration
9.30 Stephen Mallinder (Brighton/Cabaret Voltaire): Kraftwerk: Modernity and Movement
10.15 David Stubbs (London): The Archaeological Years: Kraftwerk before Autobahn
11.00 David Pattie (Chester): Ralf und Florian, Krautrock and Germany
11.45 Nick Stevenson (Nottingham): Cabaret Voltaire and Dada Modernity
12.30 Concluding discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Melanie Schiller (Groningen): Fun Fun Fun on the Autobahn: Kraftwerk Challenging Germanness
14.45 Hillegonda Rietveld (London): Europe Endless: Geopolitical Retro-futurism?
15.30 Uwe Schütte (Aston): We Are the Robots! On the Cultural-Historical Origins of the Man-Machine
16.15 Tea/Coffee Break
16.30 Wolfgang Flür (Düsseldorf/ex-Kraftwerk): I Was A Robot. Reading, panel discussion and Q&A
19.00 Kraftwerk Disco @ The Electric Café
Thursday, 22 January 2015
9.00 Pertti Grönholm (Turku): Nostalgia For The Modern. Re-Imagining the Past Futures in the Concept of Kraftwerk
9.45 Johannes Springer (Osnabrück): Kraftwerk and the Cultural Studies of Cycling
10.30 Ulrich Adelt (Wyoming): Moving Up: Kraftwerk and ‘kosmische Musik’
11.15 Tea/Coffee break
11.30 Rusty Egan (London/Visage) presents…
12.15 Heinrich Deisl (Vienna): Searching for Modernity: Socio-historical perspectives on techno music and »das Deutsche«. (Kraftwerk – Wolfgang Voigt – Dopplereffekt)
13.00 Lunch
14.15 Alexei Monroe (London): Trans-Slovene Expressions: Kraftwerk on the Sunny Side of the Alps
15.00 Alexander Harden (Surrey): Kraftwerk and the Issue of Post-Human Authenticity
15.45 Sean Albiez (Southampton):Kraftwerk in the context of the 20th century avant-garde
16.30 Concluding discussion
17.00 Departure
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www.kraftwerk.com
www.facebook.com/KraftwerkOfficial
www.twitter.com/kraftwerk
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