Florian Schneider

“We always found that many people are robots without knowing it. The interpreters of classical music, Horowitz for example, they are like robots, making a reproduction of the music which is always the same. It's automatic, and they do it as if it were natural, which is not true.”

“As for ourselves, we love our machines.”

“In Paris, the people go in the Metro, they move, they go to their offices, 8 a.m. in the morning - it's like remote control.”

“Emotion' is a strange word.”

“Kraftwerk isn't a band. It's a concept. We call it 'Die Menschmaschine,' which means 'the human machine.'”

“Kraftwerk has become historic and is now exposed in museums.”

“We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine. Sometimes we play the music, sometimes the music plays us, sometimes... it plays.”

“We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehicle for our ideas.”

“There is no beginning and no end in music. Some people want it to end. But it goes on.”

“A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of the experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.”

“We don't make a distinction between an acoustic instrument as a source of sound and any sound in the air outside or on a manufactured tape. It's all electric energy, anyway.”

“Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes. They willingly produce nothingness, opulence and ill behavior. And it is their very vacuity that is their strength...It does not entail the transmission of something from those who have to those who do not, but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforeseen accesses.”

“We're just private people.”

“The image of the robot is very important to us, it's very stimulating to people's imaginations.”

“Our studio is in the middle of an oil refinery. There's smoke and fire around it and when you emerge from the studio you hear this hissing sound all around you.”

“I found that the flute was too limiting. Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesiser. Much later I threw the flute away; it was a sort of process.”

“Our method of speaking is interrupted, hard-edged... a lot of consonants and noises.”