Kraftwerk will perform in Thailand for the first time ever on Sunday, 10 May. The “Kraftwerk Multimedia Tour in Bangkok 2026” lands at QSNCC as part of an Asia run through Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

We are marking the occasion the night before with a listening party. No 3D visuals, no neon grid suits—just the records, played loud, by Thai DJs who love Kraftwerk's music.
 
In a creative run of five albums from 1974 to 1981, Kraftwerk created a new language for music that still defines what electronic music sounds like. Founded by Ralf Hütter and the late Florian Schneider in Düsseldorf in 1970, they rejected the Anglo-American rock playbook entirely and built something from scratch—with drum machines, synthesisers, sequencers, and vocoders—a sonic language with no precedent. Their posture was equally contrarian; no rock-star posturing, Gilbert-and-George-like personas, the deadplan irony. The impulse driving Kraftwerk was to begin from zero, while reconnecting with German artistic traditions like Bauhaus (not the band) and European constructivism: functional, cool, elegant, radical, and aesthetically resolute.

The consequences were enormous and unpredictable. Afrika Bambaataa fused "Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers" with an 808 beat for "Planet Rock" and invented Electro hip-hop. In Detroit, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson heard Kraftwerk on late-night radio and channelled this influence into Detroit techno. Derrick May famously described techno as "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company." From there, the threads run through the Synth-pop of Human League, Depeche Mode, New Order, through David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, Daft Punk, Underground Resistance, and Drexciya's Afrofuturist electronics, through hip-hop production. As Carl Craig put it: "Kraftwerk were so stiff, they were funky."

Playing the records: Krit Morton, Club Mascot, Eizu 映図 b2b Mayuu, and CRSRCRSRRR. 
Also listed on Resident Advisor

This launches a new strand of our programme dedicated to club music, running alongside our existing series on live coding, experimental and new music.