The short version
- Timewind → Moondawn → Mirage → X → Body Love. In that order, at night.
- One track from each, full length, no skipping. The change is the music.
- Leave Irrlicht, Cyborg, Dune and everything after 1980 for next month.
- Sixty albums is the wall. Five albums is the door.
Klaus Schulze is the "klaus" in klausdream, and he is harder to get into than Tangerine Dream. Not because the music is harder, but because there is so much of it, and so much of it sounds alike. Sixty solo albums between 1972 and 2022. He was born in 1947 and kept working until the year he died, so this is most of a lifetime spent on one sound. Nearly all of it is one man on his own, playing a piece as long as a side of vinyl allows. Start with the wrong record and you get thirty minutes of drift and decide he is a bore. Start with the right one and you hear the most patient music anyone has made on a synthesizer.
One thing to know before the list. Schulze started as a drummer, in Tangerine Dream for a year and then in Ash Ra Tempel, and he never stopped thinking like one. Where Tangerine Dream build a piece out of layers, Schulze builds it out of pulse: one sequencer line, sometimes real drums on top, and then very slowly, over fifteen or twenty minutes, he changes it. The changes are small and they are the whole point. The first time you hear him you will think nothing is happening. The third time you will hear everything happening.
So the list runs from easiest to hardest, and it stays in the seventies, because that is where he wins you or loses you. The eighties can wait for month two.
Before you listen
- Play these at night. Not for the mood: the music was made at night, and it makes more sense then.
- Do not skip ahead within a track. The change is the structure. Skip, and you miss it.
- The German originals on Brain Records are the ones to look for. Body Love is the exception: it first came out on Metronome. The 2000s reissues on SPV/Revisited are fine and cheaper.
The five, in order
Timewind
The one everyone agrees on. Two pieces, both named after Wagner's Bayreuth, both built on a single sequence that runs and runs and never quite repeats. No Moog yet. That arrives on the next record. "Bayreuth Return" is the closest thing Schulze has to a hit, and it asks for your whole attention. If you only ever play one Schulze album, make it this one, start to finish.
Moondawn
The same idea with a drummer, and the drummer changes everything. Harald Grosskopf plays like a man trying to keep up with a machine and enjoying it, and "Floating" is the track that wins over anyone who thinks this music has no energy. This is also the record where Schulze's Big Moog, his wall of modules, arrives in full. Play it second because after Timewind you will want to hear the pulse become a beat.
Mirage
Subtitled "an electronic winter landscape," and it is exactly that. No drums, no warmth: a record for January with the lights off. It is the quietest of the five and the one most people come to love last, which is why it goes third and not first. By now you know how to wait. "Crystal Lake" is the one to hear, a single sequence that slowly freezes and slowly thaws.
X
The big one. A double album of six pieces, each a portrait of one figure: Nietzsche, the poet Georg Trakl, Ludwig II and three more. It is the record where Schulze stops being a man in a room and becomes a composer, with strings on "Ludwig II. von Bayern" and Grosskopf back on drums for "Friedrich Nietzsche." Too much, too long, and the one fans argue about most. Play it fourth because by now you have earned it, and because "Friedrich Nietzsche" is the best thing he ever recorded.
Body Love
Yes, it is the soundtrack to a Lasse Braun adult film, and no, that does not matter. Schulze took the commission, made the music he was going to make anyway, and the result is the most relaxed and melodic record of his peak. "Blanche" is the track people pass around. Play it last because it is the easiest of the five. Hear it first and you would expect the rest to sound like it, and you would get lost.
What you have just heard
Five albums, four years. What you have heard is one man working out, in public, what the long solo synthesizer piece could be: pulse without drums, pulse with drums, pulse frozen, pulse orchestrated, pulse relaxed. Everything he did for the next forty-five years is a variation on those five. Everything Steve Roach did, everything Redshift did, a large part of what modern ambient techno does, comes out of the same room. Once you get this far, go back to Electronic Meditation and hear the drummer he was before all this.
Organ and tape
Irrlicht, Cyborg, Blackdance. Before the sequencer. Orchestras through filters, church organ, drones. Strange and slow.
The Big Moog
Everything on this page. The sequencer years, the Brain Records years, the peak.
Digital
GDS and Fairlight, shorter pieces, Dig It, Audentity, En=Trance. Some of it dated, some of it his best.
The long tail
Sampling, then a return to analogue. Moonlake, the Lisa Gerrard records, Deus Arrakis released weeks after his death.
Save these for later
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.