Florian Schneider, the co-founder of the pioneering electronic music group Kraftwerk, has died at the age of 73. Record label Sony confirmed his death on Wednesday.
Schneider had reportedly been diagnosed with cancer. He founded Kraftwerk alongside fellow German Ralf Hutter in 1970 after meeting as students in Dusseldorf.
Schneider worked on all the group’s studio albums, including The Man-Machine, which spawned their biggest hit, The Model, which topped the UK charts in 1982.
A multi-discipline artist, he played the synthesizer, vocoder, flute and saxophone. Kraftwerk played a major role in the emergence of synthpop in the 1980s and were widely sampled by house and disco producers in Chicago and Detroit.