Speaking of technology, I enjoy Kraftwerk and get a sense of fun out of the music, but also there is an ambivalent feeling because it is technology which tends to be alienating and emotionally distancing?

I think there is that, but it has to do with the people operating it. If you just make bank accounts or text or make financial calculations, just technical configurations, that is only one type. But creativity, computer art is different and that is what we are doing, creating computer patterns of sound and images, a technological multi-media performance that we create ourselves. We create the visuals that are synchronised with the music and sometimes we are working with outside artists or cameramen. Basically we develop the whole Kraftwerk concept.

And you trigger your images live, or are they predetermined?

Everything is on-line and in real time.

So when you are on stage and you improvise, because I know you do a measure of that, you are also triggering the appropriate visual imagery.

Yes, but not everything can be done yet. When we rehearse in the afternoon or when we change from country to country we change the languages. When we go to Poland we will do Pocket Calculator in German because they want to hear the original language, but in New Zealand obviously we will sing in English - although I may use some German words, and we will create the images out of our storage.

So in a way some people call it live DJing. With the Kraftwerk repertoire we now have maybe 40 years of sounds in our computer memory, so we are able to use old and new sounds to modify and modulate our music. Some people call it sound design, from 40 years of the Kling Klang archive.

We have the original Autobahn sounds from 74 and then we modify and work with those, and we might change them during the performance. Although there is a basic structure so everybody knows where they are going.

If you didn't you'd be a free jazz group at that point.

Yes! Although we do have some free jazz type of feelings: no harmonics, atonal things and frequent improvisation.

One of the things that was always said about Kraftwerk and explained why there was such a delay between albums was because you were perfectionists. You've said you can replicate exactly on stage what you do in the studio. That is important to you? Because when a rock band is on stage or at a classical performance people don't expect, or perhaps even want, to hear the same as the studio.

No, we treat the records as a documents in time and for example something from 1977 is there, but now it is 2008 and it will sound completely different - but it is still the same composition. Our compositions are very minimal - minimum/maximum - but we have all the maximum possibilities of changing and reprogramming. Even during the tour we would do that. There are experiments all the time.

Who is coming as Kraftwerk to New Zealand, because I see Florian hadn't played with Kraftwerk in Ireland recently.

Yes, he never likes touring so in the last years he is working on other projects, technical things. So we are travelling with our live set-up as on the last American tour and now Europe. We are me, Mr Henning Schmitz, Mr Fritz Hilpert and Mr Stefan Pfaffe who is programming visuals with us.

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