Florian Schneider has died at age 73, Billboard reports. The cause of death has not yet been announced. Schneider was a co-founder of Kraftwerk, the seminal electronic German rock band that helped infuse a sleek electronic sound into music of the '70s and '80s, performing live up through recent years in groundbreaking immersive audiovisual spectaculars that blended men and machine.

Florian Schneider was born in Germany in 1947. In 1970, he co-founded Kraftwerk with Ralf Hütter. Schneider played the flute, and he started treating the instrument with electronic effects, then began focusing on purely synthesized sound along with his adventurous bandmates. Kraftwerk made music history with their 1974 album Autobahn, named after the German highway system. It was their first fully electronic album, and became a surprise international hit.

For a new generation of pop musicians, Kraftwerk became iconic. David Bowie, whose Berlin trilogy was inspired by Kraftwerk and their peers in what became known as the "Krautrock" genre, named his song "V-2 Schneider" after Florian Schneider; and Afrika Bambaataa helped introduce the band to hip-hop fans when he sampled Kraftwerk on his robotic "Planet Rock" single in 1982. Kraftwerk's style, which combined German electronic experimentation with the spirit of rock and funk, was vastly influential in disco and synthpop, helping to shape the sound of popular music in the '70s, '80s, and beyond.

Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk are now recognized as music legends. After Schneider left the band in 2008, Kraftwerk were honored in 2012 with an eight-night retrospective...not at a rock club, but at New York's Museum of Modern Art. They had just announced an eagerly anticipated 50th anniversary tour for 2020 that was postponed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Artists across the music spectrum have already started sharing their tributes to a true pioneer.