The short version
- WAVES was an electronic music fanzine made by German fans. This piece reads issue 5, which came out in the autumn of 1990.
- The lead feature is an interview with Klaus Hoffmann-Hoock of Mind over Matter. On the eve of his Tour de Trance he explains how he bought up equipment and then sold nearly all of it.
- The news pages in the same issue keep returning to records people could not buy. Schulze changed labels because his records could not be bought abroad.
- Readers who could not find the new Tangerine Dream album in the shops were told to order it by post, and Edgar Froese said he had no interest in a tribute album to Dalí.
A summer Saturday in July 1990, in Rheurdt, a small town in the west of Germany. Two editors of the fanzine WAVES sat down in the garden behind a musician's house. He was Klaus Hoffmann-Hoock, born in 1951, who records as Mind over Matter and had just released his third album, Trance 'n' Dance, on the IC label. Near the end of the interview he said: "Wir sind doch schließlich Musiker und keine Käufer, oder?" We are musicians, after all, not shoppers. Aren't we?
What we read
WAVES was edited by Chris Höppner and Torsten Zimmer. The Internet Archive has it from issue 1 in 1990, and issue 5 was the fifth that year. It treats an event on 6 October as past and one on 3 November as still to come, so it reached readers around October.
The editorial opens with a note about the name. Up to issue 3 the subtitle had been "the magazine for electronic music"; after that it became "fanzine". "Magazine", the editors explained, risked making readers expect something glossy like GEO. The issue carries no licence statement, so we quote the German only briefly and show no pages. The quotations were checked against the pages of the scanned PDF.
Tour de Trance
Hoffmann-Hoock started with a guitar course in 1966. Within a few months he had turned the guitar over and was drumming on the back of it, and in 1967 he got a drum kit. In 1981 he signed to EMI and started a project called Cosmic Hoffmann, which put out a single. Mind over Matter began in 1986 with Music for Paradise on IC.
Then the talk turned to the stage. On the coming 1990/91 Tour de Trance he would play the new CD live, and there would be more to watch than before. His wife Dagi was rehearsing dance routines with a friend, and the staging would get bigger. A spot on the WDR radio programme "Nachtmusik im WDR" was booked for March 1991. What he would not do was sit alone behind the keyboards with a computer playback running for an hour and a half. He was not, he said, Reinhard Mey, the German singer-songwriter.
Asked about his equipment, he took his time. A few years earlier he had gone through an upgrading phase and spent a lot of money on everything he could get. Afterwards he regretted it and sold almost all of it again. What was left was a Yamaha DX7 S, a Minimoog, two Prophet samplers and a lot of guitars. The heart of his studio, he said, was the 16-track tape machine. He was tired of pouring money into new developments, and as long as a machine did what he wanted, he was happy with it.
The Mellotron came up too. He had just finished a three-part Mellotron story for the magazine Soundcheck. As he told it, the first Mellotron had only three sounds, cello, strings and flute, and those three were enough for thousands of songs. Nobody agonised over which strings to pick. He knew plenty of musicians who were only in it for the shopping, and the music suffered. Find your instrument, he said, stick with it, and cancel all the trade magazines. That is where the line at the top comes from.
The news pages: records you could not buy
Read the news at the back of the issue and his line lands differently. In 1990 a fan was often someone who wanted to buy and could not.
Klaus Schulze had left Metronome/Brain and signed to Virgin. The main reason, the fanzine said, was that Brain had failed to find partners to distribute his records abroad. His records were played on the radio and reviewed in North America and Japan, but you could not get them in the shops there. The first Virgin release was announced as a double CD, The Dresden Performance: two long pieces played live in Dresden on 5 August 1989 in front of 6,800 people, plus three pieces meant for that concert that time and weather had cut, recorded in the studio.
The Tangerine Dream news starts with an address. If you could not find the new album Melrose in the shops, you could order it from the mail-order department of Filmhaus München: LP 19.95 marks, CD 29 marks, plus 5 marks postage, Eurocheques only. The same column passes on fan-club news that a Japanese broadcaster wanted to make a 90-minute film about the band's twenty years.
Kitaro was back on the European tour he had broken off a few months earlier for health reasons, and the remaining dates ran from Paris on 22 October to Brussels on 2 November. In the reviews Torsten wrote that even Kitaro's most loyal fans had to admit he had put out a lot of albums that sounded alike. Kojiki, though, belonged in every collection. It is the one with violins and cellos.
The last word goes to Froese. The Californian label Coriolis was putting together a tribute album to Salvador Dalí, with a track from Schulze. According to the fanzine, the compiler also approached Edgar Froese, who had worked with Dalí in the sixties. The answer came back through his management: "kein Interesse an so etwas". No interest in that sort of thing. The fanzine added one word. "Schade!" A pity.
How to listen
Put on the first disc of The Dresden Performance. The opening piece, "Dresden 1", runs 44:24. Headphones, and no stopping. By the time it ends your breathing has settled into its long stride. If Schulze is new to you, our Schulze guide gives you an order to go in.
The man in the garden sold his gear and kept a 16-track tape machine as the heart of his studio. The same issue's news pages also announce the 40th edition of the Schulze discography Klaus Schulze The Works: 10 marks including postage, payable in cash or in stamps.
Where to get it
The Dresden Performance came out as a double CD on Virgin's Venture label in October 1990.
