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 more difficult, but because there is so much of it and it is so much the same. 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. Almost every one is a single man, alone, playing a piece that lasts as long as a side of vinyl will allow. If you pick the wrong one you will hear thirty minutes of drift and decide he is a bore. Pick the right one and you will hear the most patient music ever made on a synthesizer.
Here is what you need 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 order below goes from most to least accessible, and it stays in the seventies, because that is where the argument is won. The eighties and after are for your second month.
Before you listen
- Play these at night. That is not romanticism; the music was made at night and it makes more sense there.
- Do not skip ahead inside a track. The structure is the change, and if you skip you will miss it.
- The German originals on Brain Records are the ones to look for. 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 Moog sequence that runs and runs and never quite repeats. "Bayreuth Return" is the closest thing Schulze has to a hit, and it asks for your whole attention. If you play one Schulze album, play this one, and play it end to end.
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 piece to convert people who think this music has no energy. This is also the record where Schulze's Big Moog, the wall of modules in the photograph above, 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 made to be listened to with the lights off in January. 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 piece; it is a single sequence, slowly frozen and slowly thawed.
X
The big one. A double album, each side a portrait of a German thinker: Nietzsche, Wagner, Ludwig II. 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 listen of the five, and if you had heard it first you would have expected the others to be like it, and then you would have been 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. When 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
