The short version
- Klaus Schulze's second solo album, released on Ohr in October 1973 as a double LP.
- It is the first record on which he used a synthesizer, an EMS VCS 3, alongside a doctored Farfisa organ.
- Forty-nine players handled the strings and flutes. Schulze wrote their parts himself.
- Every CD pressed before the 2006 reissue had two of the pieces in each other's place.
In 1973 a label gave four sides of vinyl to a twenty-five-year-old making his second record. The first one had been built without a synthesizer and it had not sold. Ohr pressed a double album anyway. Schulze recorded from February to July that year in Berlin, with a doctored Farfisa organ and the first synthesizer he ever had his hands on.
Where this record sits
There is no synthesizer anywhere on Irrlicht. Schulze built that one from a taped university orchestra and a broken amplifier. A year later one machine has changed the picture: an EMS VCS 3. The German Wikipedia calls the album a milestone in his music, and that is why. The instrument that would carry his next thirty years arrives here. The writer of the reissue notes lands on the same spot. The gear is still spare and the keyboard work still comes almost entirely from that modified organ, but this is where a synthesizer first turns up in a Schulze recording.
The guide leaves this one out of its five. Long drones before the sequencer arrived are a hard place to begin. If you want to see what Schulze picked up and when, though, you cannot step over it.
He was not alone in the room. The German magazine Zero printed the line-up in its summer 1974 issue: 12 cellos, 3 double basses, 30 violins, 4 flutes. Schulze wrote the orchestral movements, and the magazine added that they have nothing to do with classical form. The players mostly hold a single tone while it shifts too slowly to catch, and the electronics settle on top of it. The same piece compares the music to a very slow river, its waves folding over one another, breaking and running out again.
- Released
- October 1973, Ohr · Kosmische Musik (West Germany, double LP)
- Recorded
- February to July 1973, Berlin
- Played by
- Klaus Schulze (Farfisa organ, EMS VCS 3, percussion), Colloquium Musica Orchestra
- Line-up
- 30 violins, 12 cellos, 3 double basses, 4 flutes (Zero, Summer 1974)
- Produced by
- Klaus Schulze, Klaus D. Mueller
- Sleeve
- Marcel Fugère, Peter Geitner (the 1975 Brain reissue uses a painting by Urs Amann)
Track listing
| 1 | Synphära | 22:49 |
| 2 | Conphära | 25:52 |
| 3 | Chromengel | 23:49 |
| 4 | Neuronengesang | 24:57 |
| 5 | But Beautiful (2006 reissue bonus) | 50:45 |
Those timings come from the official discography. The German Wikipedia lists 22:48, 25:51, 24:43 and 50:55, a few seconds off in each case. On the original double LP each piece took one side. "But Beautiful" was added to the 2006 reissue and is the first part of a concert played on 17 October 1977 at the Cathedral of St Michael in Brussels. The rest of that night sits in the Historic Edition box.
Through the four pieces
- "Synphära." The organ holds the middle and Schulze improvises over it. The electronics chirp around the edges without ever stepping forward. For a record made on so little, the opening sound arrives thick. Listen for where that thickness comes from.
- "Conphära." This is where the taped orchestra gets cut up and spliced back together. The fragments push in between the electronic pulse and the drone, and they sound like a Mellotron. There was no Mellotron. A pair of scissors made that sound.
- "Chromengel." High electronics climb over strings soaked in reverb. The first 12 minutes never brighten. Around the 18-minute mark something arrives that was not there before: a synthesizer on its own, no organ and no strings under it. Wait for that.
- "Neuronengesang." It fills a whole side. The title means song of the neurons. Turn it down, let it sit in the room and put your breathing on the speed of the long tones as they swell and drop.
How to listen
- Take one piece at a time without stopping. All four run between 23 and 26 minutes.
- Listen at night and keep it quiet. Loud, the rough edge of the organ arrives first and buries everything else.
- On the second pass, go looking for the strings. Knowing that forty-nine players were in that room, you start to hear bows moving inside the drone.
What happened next
The reviews split. The French magazine Best called it a masterpiece in May 1974, a record that would mark a date in the history of music, and said Schulze was one of the few musicians of the rock generation who deserved the word genius. The Spanish magazine Vibraciones looked at the same album in June 1975 and wrote that it does not surpass Irrlicht. Thirteen months sit between the two.
Something else bothered Schulze himself. He wrote an introduction for the 2006 reissue booklet, and in it he said he had disliked the cosmic tag stuck on his music at the time. It was also the word that sold the record.
Brain reissued the album in 1975 with a painting by Urs Amann on the front, the same artist who had painted the Brain reissue of Irrlicht. When Revisited Records brought it back in 2006 it was the nineteenth Schulze album in that reissue series, with a 16-page booklet and "But Beautiful" attached.
And one thing got corrected. Every CD pressed before 2006 had "Synphära" and "Chromengel" swapped. The running order printed on the packaging had been right the whole time. It was the disc inside that was wrong.
One track to send a friend
Send "Chromengel." 23 minutes 49 seconds. Add one line: anyone who bought this album on CD before 2006 heard that piece in the opening slot. The order on the box was correct from the start. What was inside it was not.
Where to get it
This album runs to two LPs. The 1973 Ohr first pressing puts Schulze in front of a red swirl, and from the 1975 Brain reissue onwards the front carries Urs Amann's painting. If you want "But Beautiful" and the booklet, take the 2006 Revisited edition. Turn the lights off and drop the needle on side one. The organ fills the room in under a minute.