The short version
- The KS Circle was Klaus Schulze's newsletter. Issue 1 ran to fourteen pages on 21 August 1995.
- The official site keeps a page of issue contents for each year. This piece reads 1995 to 1999.
- The contents are not only about records. Return postage, money sent with no name, a reader's crossword.
- The arrival of the internet is in there too: a book recommendation in 1996, a new web address announced in 1997.
The first item in issue 1 was two questions and some rules: why, what, and a few rules. 21 August 1995, fourteen pages. The other items in that issue run like this. Schulze in a British top 100. Absurdly high prices being asked for the Silver Edition. A new Wahnfried album. A piece asking who on earth loves modern operas. And a collection of press articles from 1994 and 1995.
What this piece read
Schulze's official site posts the contents of The KS Circle one page per year, starting in 1995. The articles themselves are not there, only the tables of contents, and that is what this piece has read. So we can say what each issue covered, not what it said.
Even so, the lists show a good deal. The man who made the newsletter was Schulze's manager, Klaus D. Müller. Issues ran between twelve and twenty-six pages, six to ten times a year.
A world that moved on paper
One item keeps coming back: a reminder about return postage, printed in German. Another, from 1997, reports that international reply coupons are no longer any use.
A request not to send money without a name and address appears twice, in the first issue of 1999 and again at the end of that January. An envelope with cash and nothing else in it leaves nowhere to send the newsletter.
Photocopies were a regular feature. A drawing of Schulze's 1976 equipment by Harald Grosskopf. Scribblings from the Moondawn sessions. A cue sheet for "Walking the Edge." The cover of an old Moog leaflet with keyboard players' faces drawn on it. Things that would take one upload today were copied and posted, issue by issue.
The years the internet walked in
The contents for April 1996 include a recommendation for a book about the internet. Elsewhere that year the web barely appears.
1997 is different. The March issue carries a piece about the amateur KS homepages out there on the internet, and the June issue announces the new web address of the KS website. The same issue mentions a Schulze interview on a friendly American site.
In January 1998 the results of a survey among users of the KS website were printed. While the newsletter went out on paper, the website was growing alongside it, and the same person was looking after both.
What the newsletter did
There are a lot of corrections. September 1995 carries a note fixing misprints in the Silver and Historic editions. The same issue reports that the British Moondawn CD arrived with the same fumbling as the German one.
Price warnings were part of the job. The Silver Edition item in issue 1 is one, and later issues offer the last remaining copies. Silly ratings on British CD releases, a French label lifting another label's logo, a German copycat offering a Schulze track as his own: all of it is in the contents.
Longer material was serialised. Müller's own text from a German book about Schulze was translated into English and spread across issues, starting in issue 2 in 1995 and reaching part 4 by January 1996.
What the readers wrote
The reader side is the most striking part of these lists. Issue 2 in 1995 carries a fan's short story under the title "Strange but true." March 1998 has a piece about a fan's adventure while playing Moondawn in an Islamic country.
There was a vote on album covers. The results appear in January 1998, followed by an article on how covers get made. January 1999 has a crossword, and the answers run in the next issue.
Schulze himself turns up. "KS for beginners," one dictum per album, is in the January 1999 issue, and a top ten list he picked in 1983 appears in March 1997.
One line we cannot read
The contents for March 1999 hold a single line: the legal verdict against "cosmic" from 1975. With no article to read, this list cannot say what the case was or who brought it. What remains is that the word went to court, and that 24 years later the newsletter pulled the story out again. Schulze's own dislike of that word is in the Cyborg piece.
Where to get it
Where to find the records in this piece. New CDs and LPs are on Amazon; older pressings and used copies are on Discogs.