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-seven, with four solo albums behind him and not a sequencer on any of them. 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 sequencer called the Synthanorma directly from its makers 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 went onto a two-track recorder, so there was no way 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 played the drums on Tangerine Dream's first album, Electronic Meditation (1970). What he would do with the machine was another matter.
This record is his answer. One sequencer line keeps running, and for thirty minutes he changes it by hand, a little at a time. As Wikipedia puts it, the rhythmic backbone is a single sequencer pattern, transposed and varied in real time. Where Tangerine Dream stacked several sequencers in layers, Schulze held on to one and stretched time around it. Almost everything he made afterwards is built 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 noting: 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 carries 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 titles point to 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.
Listening through "Bayreuth Return"
The sequence starts at once, with no preamble. That is the opposite of Tangerine Dream, who wander in fog for minutes before a pulse appears. 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 moves and reshapes the sequence by hand without ever letting it show. That is the craft here. Cope wrote that around twenty minutes in the sequencer settles into a loop and the sound thins into something like twinkling stars. Then the silence arrives, all at once. That is how a two-hour night ends.
"Wahnfried 1883", twenty-eight minutes
Side two is another kind of piece. Slow, shifting pads settle in layers, and the harmony keeps turning like a kaleidoscope, never landing on a 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. Listeners do not even agree on whether there is a sequencer. Some hear less of it than on side one; others hear it surge near the end. Either way, what you listen for is the same: twenty-eight minutes of floating, with no idea where the floor is. If side one is a pulse, side two is a breath.
How to listen
- At night. The record was made between ten in the evening and midnight, and that is the hour it belongs to.
- Play side one through. The way into this piece is noticing when the sequence disappeared, and if you skip ahead you miss that moment.
- Put it on and do something else. Stare at it and nothing seems to happen. By the third play, 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". Warn them it runs thirty minutes. Then add one line: he played it in a single take one night, over two hours, straight onto a two-track with no way 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.