Fifty Years Of Unique Audentity: Klaus Schulze

Borrowing the pun of one of his landmark double albums, it seems fitting on the last day of June to look at the vast body of work of one of the most individual electronic music visionaries of our times, someone with a very unique and instantly audible identity... pardon, audentity...

In June 1970, the first album appearance of Klaus Schulze occurred. At that point he was a member of what has become a veritable institution in the electronic music sphere: the band Tangerine Dream, founded by the late Edgar Froese.

Electronic Meditation was the first and last Tangerine Dream album that featured Schulze - as he promptly moved on to establish his, by now legendary, solo career. 

Audiences may not have suspected at that time that the drummer, who joined Tangerine Dream after a brief and unreleased musical contribution in the rock band Psy Free, would become a unique and vastly (seldom successfully) imitated electronic music luminary.

His early solo albums, Irrlicht and the double LP Cyborg, presented us a daringly and unashamedly experimental musician who could conjur up entire strange worlds in as long as possible continuous compositions. Back then, the physical medium only allowed twenty-odd minutes of continuous sonic poetry... but the later Klaus Schulze of the CD era could mesmerise us with seventy-plus minutes long monumental electronic structures...

Well before "trance" entered the terminology of music, and well before it has become a label for a particular sub-genre of electronic music, Klaus Schulze was creating an unmistakeably personal and truly unique kind of electronic trance.

One could pick from his vast discography the hypnotic Timewind and Mirage from the heroic and analogue 1970s, the astounding Audentity or En=Trance from the confident and digital 1980s, the spellbinding Das Wagner Desaster or In Blue of the mature and limitless 1990s... or the epic, but intimate, Rheingold or Silhouettes of the recent years...

The one central trait of all Schulze albums has been a rare, much sought-after, and countless times attempted to be imitated feeling that this music simply comes into being, without someone playing electronic or other instruments... and it exists, flows, occupies all available space without any human intervention.

It is impossible to listen to Klaus Schulze as background electronic music. Whilst he was and is recognised as a giant of the sequencer-oriented Berlin School of electronica, Schulze's music demands close attention.

Even if, on the surface, repetitive structures or sequenced elements are present, they are full of continuously changing, morphing, flowing myriad details. The intricacies of his live or studio performances are dazzling, if one closely listens to the ever-changing sonic Universe he achieves to create in our room. 

Over the fifty years, Schulze has never stopped innovating and changing. Sure, some artistic decisions could be seen as questionable or one could point out major U-turns in his ars poetica.

The key aspect one must not forget is that artists like Schulze have experimented with sometimes wild departures in highly unexpected directions, instead of standing still. We may wish that we had been treated to countless repetitions of Timewind and we may go misty-eyed when thinking nostalgically of the musical world of Dune or X. 

However, as in the case of Tangerine Dream, one has to realise that instead of self-repetition, such artists were daring enough to constantly seek out new directions, experiment with even never before touched technologies, and move with the times - or, actually, define those times. 

He has treated us to superhuman-looking and -sounding live improvisations, impossible to dissect and mind-blowingly complex whirls and galaxies of sequencer patterns, vast floating sonic ambiences before ambient music became a term, trance-inducing grooves before trance music became a term, imaginative and daring use of sampling, collaborations with legendary musicians as far from electronica as one could possibly imagine... Who would have thought the legendary  Lisa Gerrard's vocal improvisations would perfectly and astonishingly blend in with Schulze's vast sequenced structures in a live setting, too?... 

It might be impossible for an avid electronic music, or even Klaus Schulze, fan to like all his live and studio albums... However, the one constant we can easily hear on his albums, irrespective of the fundamentally different sound worlds he has experimented with over half of a century, is that Schulze sound...

What is it exactly? The long flowing compositions? The mind-bendingly complex and constantly shifting sequencer work? The superhuman improvisations running through the fluid soundscapes? The seamless combination of ancient sonorities, even ethnic vocals, ocean-deep sonic textures, and fiery improvised leads?

Even after fifty years of album releases, one cannot be sure... but as soon as previously unknown to me Schulze album or composition popped up on radio or elsewhere, I used to jump: that had to be Schulze!.. and it was.

If there was one person who would, not too strong of a word, hate pigeonholing his vastly varied musical output, it would be Schulze himself. 

As the grand master put it in a recent interview, "Remember ‘fusion’ once? Or ‘jazz rock’? And in 1990 it was for some parts of electronic music ‘acid’, ‘acid jazz’, ‘house’, ‘deep house’, ‘Detroit techno’, ‘rare groove’, ‘New York garage’, ‘industrial’, ‘Latin hip hop’ et cetera. All these fashionable coming-ups of words are not the terms and definitions I think or care much about. I am neither a swish sociologist nor a smart journalist but just a dull little musician who’s doing and enjoying his very own doings, and I call it ‘music’.”

Thus... thank you for fifty years of live and studio albums of music, Maestro... and may we be spoiled by further sonic creations in the future...

Cosmic dialogues: Tangerine Dream's 'The Sessions III'

When recently the first live composition sounded at a Tangerine Dream concert, the new line-up immersed the audience in a sonic world they, and TD fans in general, have not had the chance to hear since the pioneering 1970s.

These structured improvisations, first unleashed on the wider audiences on the CDs Particles and then Sessions I,  have shown that yes, in the second decade of the 21st century, Tangerine Dream is still synonymous with a type of electronic music that is eminently human.

These live compositions are not only spirited jams one would traditionally expect to hear only in rock and jazz concerts, but also show that for TD, technology never became an all-dominating factor nor an end in itself.

Sessions III continues the series of CDs started by Sessions I and II, both covered on this blog, too. The listeners, who may not have had the chance to witness the live material in Hamburg or Berlin, are being treated to two lengthy live pieces again, the album totaling 77 minutes.

There is something rather poetic about the by now well-established titles, which always contain the exact time when the live pieces were born. The musical content is rather timeless, hence the timestamps even more poignantly suggest the ephemeral and one-off way in which the pieces were created...

Hanseatic Harbour Lights was recorded in February 2018 in Hamburg. It runs for a highly pleasing 35 minutes, and it is has everything old and new fans of TD like - most notably, the disciplined, never self-indulgent introduction of characteristic sequencer patterns and the floating meditative section. The presence of the violin in the vast electronic vista is sublime as usual, adding a very organic and intimate-sounding element...

One just knows, simply knows, that things will happen when the first metallic sequenced notes appear - and the track develops into a full-blown cosmic journey. That sentence may sound so 1970s - but the music is not a retro nostalgia exercise, far from it...

This is 21st century Tangerine Dream with the breadth and the trust in listeners' attention span that was characteristic of electronic acts of some heroic early decades. Once again, this track demands attention and it is a rewarding demand on the listener - as it takes us from the ethereal first drone through sequenced textures to gentle, meditative piano improvisations floating on top of the electronic ocean.

The energy is carefully dosed, never too abruptly, no rigid shapes, no harsh angles, just waves and swirls exist here. Same goes for the second track, recorded at the Synästhesie III Festival in Berlin...

A masterclass in Berlin School-style electronic music in... Berlin, it doesn't get more superlative than that. Although edgier and more heated than the first piece, it has its oases of quiet ambience, with the inevitably and achingly beautiful violin and Mellotron flutes.

One experiences that Ricochet-era feeling: it is perhaps satisfying to keep track, up to a point, of what is going on - but one can be absolutely sure, it will not be possible to catalogue every inter-twined sonic sequence and layers upon layers of textures... and then comes the best moment, when listener has to give up and just let him/herself float away on the currents of this electronic ocean.

As this track also demonstrates, in the TD sessions each section is important and never rushed - we know the expositions and the middle sections can be mind-bending and expansive, but so are their sonic constructs in the closing parts.

The trio, namely Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss, and Hoshiko Yamane, have again delivered a pair of live compositions that, for the entire length allowed by the physical medium, take us on a spellbinding musical journey.

Sessions III continues the series that show: the new Tangerine Dream line-up remains absolutely connected with one of the core principles that has always characterised the band: make, even if channeling something from other galaxies, eminently living and pulsating rock music that happens to employ electronic instruments...