There are a ton of horror stories about touring with analog synths in the old days -- bringing two of everything and a synth tech just to have one machine working every night, or using space heaters on stage next to synths to keep them at a constant temperature so they stay in tune. Or Keith Emerson bringing along a 5 panel Moog Modular, which would of course have to be repatched and tweaked every night to get it in the neighborhood of the patch used in his songs.
Ironically, the variability and unpredictability of analog is one of its prized attributes these days, and in the digital emulations, they go to the trouble of programming in 'analog variability.' I attended a group discussion with Tim Hecker a couple weeks ago and he said some interesting things about the performance aspect of modern electronic music, and he said he thought that playback only performances were just fine, if the quality of the music and presentation was sufficiently involving. I tend to agree with him. Having played in orchestras, and seen plenty of rock bands perform, I think that the idea of the live performance is way overrated. What happens a lot of the time is that a band is rehearsed to the point where they are mostly a rote playback machine, not appreciably more 'creative' than a computer sequencer. And the point at which I become dissatisfied with a band performance is when they 'jam it out' -- unless they're superlative improvisors, I'd much rather they stick to the script. I make an exception in judging performances whose foreground attribute is improvisation. That is an art unto itself. Paradoxically the best improvisational performances I've seen actually were the result of hundreds of hours of rehearsal, for the ensemble to reach the point where they could 'freely improvise' without things turning into a dog's breakfast. The rest -- the guitarist making faces, the singer cutting figures, the prancing around -- is just entertainment. What you're there for is a shared experience in an environment larger than your living room or your headphones. You have a right to expect an interesting and satisfying experience, not any particular standard of stagecraft, unless the stagecraft is the standard by which you judge a performance. In the particular case of Kraftwerk -- and this goes for techno in general -- the means of production happen so far out of real time that to ask them to 'play' their songs for you becomes an absurd request. It might be possible for them to 'learn' the productions as realized on tape, but it's silly to ask a human being to duplicate the precision of a digital sequencer. And I've been dissatisfied with the work of performers like Richie Hawtin who go to great lengths to put together a high-tech performance system they can 'play' because often the result isn't as interesting as it was to be at events where he 'just' played records. Your mileage may vary.
