Kraftwerk, a German industrial techno band, has brought its pulsating, pounding, electronic music to the scene since 1970, influencing countless bands around the world. It continued to display the endurance of its craft at The Rave last night, one of only three tour dates this year.

When the first rumbling beat dropped, it spread out like a shock wave, vibrating the ground and penetrating the audience. A red backlight flooded the stage curtain, silhouetting four rigid, unmoving figures, looming tall and iconic over the crowd. The ballroom erupted into wild, deafening cheering and whistling.

As the curtains parted the figures were revealed as Ralf Hütter, Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Stefan Pfaffe (original founder, Florian Schneider, was not present); four men, dressed in black, looking very serious, moving very little. They stood practically inanimate behind a podium holding what appeared to be soundboards, Moog synthesizers and laptops.

The sound was instantly recognizable. The band is the father of modern electronic music and even if you've never heard any of its songs, it's likely the sound one imagines comes directly from Kraftwerk. Its repetitive patterns of heart-stopping bass overridden with clear electronic melodies, mixed with glitches and glorps, and topped with simple lyrical messages, announced more than sung, and run through voice distortion and synthesizers.

The video playing behind the band varied between hugely rendered pixel fonts ("Manmachine," "Minimum Maximum"), Microsoft Paint-like graphics bursting forth like Batman "Pows" and "Biffs" ("Boing Boom Tschak!"), vintage footage of the Tour de France ("Tour de France") and the Autobahn ("Autobahn") and wire frame renderings of robots ("Die Roboter").

Kraftwerk was the future of music and 40 years ago, perhaps this was true. However, that future was yesterday; today they're considered retro. And that's not to say that the music is no longer relevant. When the deep bass beats started throbbing and your heart stopped beating and let the vibrations do its work, you knew there was still an intensity to the work.

Each of the quartet's songs could have lasted any length of time, but Kraftwerk displayed excellent showmanship by keeping each one brief, performing a wide array of songs, bleeding into each other, and occasionally stopping for applause.

As a result, the entire set moved so quickly I was surprised when the curtains closed only an hour later. The crowd whistled and begged for more and soon enough the backlights went up again, and the silhouettes of four figures appeared once again, but this time with cybernetic enhancements.

When the curtains re-opened, mannequin robots had taken their place, each with a familiar visage and each dancing in a limited fashion. The curtains closed again, the audience pushed for more, and the curtains re-opened, the robots replaced by their human counterparts, this time outfitted in black outfits with glowing green lines, reminiscent of the outfits from the movie, "Tron."

All in all, it was a pretty impressive show and the fact that hundreds of people turned out to the show to watch four people apparently do barely anything, yet still provide a satisfying evening, speaks to the talents of the group.

As Hütter once said, "It's nice being the basis of a whole new cultural movement."