Songfacts®:

• German musician Florian Schneider began playing in bands as a student in the '60s. One of them, Organisation zur Verwirklichung gemeinsamer Musikkonzepte ("Organisation for the Realization of Shared Music Concepts"), was an experimental krautrock group, which also included Schneider's fellow Robert Schumann Hochschule student, Ralf Hütter.
  
  Schneider formed the electro-pioneering group Kraftwerk (German for "power station") with Hütter in 1970. Four years later, they released Autobahn, their first commercially successful album. David Bowie acknowledged Kraftwerk as a significant influence during his "Berlin period" in the late 1970s, and he titled the Heroes track "V-2 Schneider" in tribute to the musician.
  
  Schneider's last performance with Kraftwerk was in November 2006 in Spain. He officially left the group in November 2008 and largely withdrew from public life.
• Schneider released this sparse electronic ode to ocean conservation in 2015 as part of the Parley for the Ocean campaign to highlight plastic pollution in the seas. Speaking to Dazed, Schneider explained he'd been inspired to write the song after "taking a swim in the ocean at the coasts of Ghana, watching fishermen catch nothing but plastic garbage in their nets."
• Florian Schneider died from cancer on April 30, 2020, aged 73, following a brief treatment for the illness.