The short version
- August 1975, Schulze's fifth solo album, on Brain. The first one with a sequencer.
- Side one, "Bayreuth Return", went onto a two-track machine in one take. The reissue notes put it at two hours, ten at night to midnight on 3 June.
- The whole record is dedicated to Richard Wagner. Both titles come from Wagner's town and Wagner's house.
- The next year it won the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros in France.
Spring 1975, a flat in Berlin. Klaus Schulze was twenty-eight and had four solo albums, and none of them had a sequencer. Organ, synthesizers, tape, and on the last one a drum kit he played himself. This is the record where that changes. According to Julian Cope, a few weeks before the sessions he bought a prototype of a sequencer called the Synthanorma from the people who built it, at the Frankfurt instrument fair. He plugged an ARP 2600 into it. Then, one night, he played the whole of side one in two hours. It was a two-track recorder. There was nowhere to fix anything. He dedicated the record to Wagner.
Where it sits in the history of music
Schulze's solo work starts with Irrlicht (1972), an organ and an orchestra recording played backwards. Then Cyborg (1973), Blackdance (1974), and at the start of 1975 Picture Music. Four different records with one thing in common: no machine that repeats. That same year Tangerine Dream had already put the sequencer at the centre with Phaedra and Rubycon. Schulze had been Tangerine Dream's first drummer. What he would do with this machine was a separate question.
This record is the answer. One sequencer line running, and thirty minutes of changing it by hand, a little at a time. In Wikipedia's phrasing, the rhythmic skeleton is a single sequencer pattern transposed and varied in real time. Where Tangerine Dream stacked several sequencers into layers, Schulze took one and stretched time over it. Almost everything he did afterwards stands on this method.
- Recorded
- March to June 1975, Berlin. The sleeve names Berliner Weltklang-Studio, Schwäbischstr. 7
- Released
- August 1975, Brain 1075
- Line-up
- Klaus Schulze alone
- Instruments
- ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, EMS Synthi A, Farfisa Professional organ, ELKA string synthesizer, Synthanorma sequencer
- Award
- Grand Prix du Disque, Académie Charles Cros, France, 1976
- Length
- 30:25 + 28:37
Worth writing down: there is no Moog here. The photographs of Schulze in front of a wall of modules belong to Moondawn the following year and after. The sound of this record is ARP and EMS and organ, which makes it thinner and drier than what came later. That dry sound holds for thirty minutes.
Tracklist
| A | Bayreuth Return · Schulze | 30:25 |
| B | Wahnfried 1883 · Schulze | 28:37 |
Two pieces. One per side, each close to thirty minutes. Printed timings differ by a few seconds from pressing to pressing; these are from the German first LP. Both names are Wagner. Bayreuth is the town where he built his own theatre, and Wahnfried is his house there. He died in 1883 and is buried in its garden. Schulze later took the name of the house as his own alias: the records he released as Richard Wahnfried from 1979 on.
"Bayreuth Return", as it goes
The sequence starts at once. There is no waiting. It is the opposite of Tangerine Dream, who wander in fog for minutes before producing a pulse. What to listen for is not the sequence itself but the moment you stop noticing it. For the first few minutes you hear a machine. Then at some point it becomes part of the room, and all that is left is the string-synth chords laid over it and an improvised line. Schulze shifts and alters the sequence by hand and makes sure it does not show. That is the craft of this piece. Cope wrote that around twenty minutes in the sequencer settles into a loop and the sound thins into something like twinkling stars. After that the silence comes suddenly. A two-hour night ends like that.
"Wahnfried 1883", twenty-eight minutes
Side two is a different piece. Slow, shifting pads lie in layers, and the key keeps moving like a kaleidoscope with no clear home note. Wikipedia calls that constant modulation a nod to Wagner. A sharp synthesizer rises over an organ bed, and in the words of Schulze's official site the ending is dramatic in a Wagnerian way. Whether there is a sequencer at all is something listeners disagree about. Some hear less of it than on side one, some hear it surging near the end. Either way, the thing to listen for is the same. Floating for twenty-eight minutes without knowing where the floor is. If side one is a pulse, side two is breathing.
How to listen
- At night. This record was made between ten in the evening and midnight. That is the hour it fits.
- Do not cut side one short. Knowing when the sequence disappeared is the way to hear this piece, and if you skip ahead you miss the moment.
- Put it on and do something else. Stare at it and nothing seems to happen. By the third time, everything is happening inside it.
What happened next
The next year it won a prize in France: the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros, an award that usually went to classical records. And in April 1976 came Moondawn. The Moog arrives, and so does the drummer Harald Grosskopf. The pulse becomes a beat. Timewind is the record that stands just before that. One sequencer, one man, two hours. The first chapter of what Schulze did for the next forty years.
The one track to send a friend
Send "Bayreuth Return". Say in advance that it is thirty minutes. Then add one line. This piece was played in one take over two hours one night, onto a two-track with nowhere to fix anything.
Where to get it
The 2016 MIG double CD is the one to have. Alongside the album it carries the 1975 rehearsal recordings "Echoes of Time" (38:42) and "Solar Wind", which is to say another version of side one. The 2006 Revisited edition has the same contents. On vinyl there is the 2017 Brain/Universal 180g pressing, remastered by Eroc.