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In 1972 Klaus Schulze made an orchestra disappear. For his first solo album, Irrlicht, he taped a classical orchestra in rehearsal and ran it through filters and a broken amplifier. What reaches the record is a hum, a drone. You would only know that more than twenty players were in there because the subtitle calls it a quadraphonic symphony for orchestra and electronic machines. Six years later, in Frankfurt, he booked string players again. This time he erased nothing.

Where it sits in the history of music

In 1977 Schulze had dropped the drums and stood alone on the ice for Mirage. Body Love Vol. 2 followed that year. From January to the summer of 1978 he recorded this album at Studio Panne-Paulsen in Frankfurt. Harald Grosskopf came back on drums. Wolfgang Tiepold played cello, and a small string section drawn from the Hessischer Rundfunk orchestra played on two pieces and the opening minutes of a third: eight violins, three violas, three cellos and a double bass. Fifteen people.

English Wikipedia sums up what he did with them. He recorded the strings and looped them on tape, the same method as Irrlicht, but this time he did not filter them beyond recognition. A man who had worked alone in a room full of synthesizers put real strings in the middle of his music and let you hear them for what they were.

The shape was big too. Two discs, four sides, six pieces, each named after a person: the philosopher Nietzsche, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, Frank Herbert of Dune, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (eldest son of Johann Sebastian), King Ludwig II of Bavaria and the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Wikipedia calls them figures who had an influence on Schulze. Klaus D. Müller wrote the booklet and did the photographs and the cover.

Tracklist

Timings are from the 1978 German first pressing. Four pieces share the first two sides; the last two sides get one piece each. Pressings differ by a few seconds. The 2005 CD lists "Georg Trakl" at 26:04, and there is a story in that, told at the end.

Listening through "Ludwig II. von Bayern"

Side three, all of it, close to 29 minutes. This is where the strings are loudest. The theme comes from Vivaldi: according to English Wikipedia, Schulze took his idea from the third movement of the Concerto No. 11 in D minor (RV 565) for two violins, cello and strings. Tiepold conducted.

Nothing here hurries. Chris Furse, reviewing it for the British magazine Face Out in December 1978, heard heavy, violin-led strings and a climax built very slowly, and he guessed this would be the most controversial thing on the album. Listen for the places where the strings and the synthesizers overlap. With Schulze's synthesizers laid over a tape loop of real strings, your ear briefly loses track of where the bows stop and the machines start. That confusion is the fun of it.

He was right about the controversy. In the January 1979 issue of the French magazine Best, Hervé Picart called it the masterpiece of the album and marvelled at how Schulze mixed machines and orchestra. Two months later Rock & Folk took the other side: the piece would have come close to perfect, it said, without an interminable transition between its two parts. Both reviews point at the same thing. The passages with the strings are beautiful, and the stretch that joins them is long. Which one you hear louder is up to you.

The rest of the album

"Friedrich Nietzsche" opens the record, 24 minutes packed with synthesizers, Grosskopf's drums and percussion. It reminded Furse of Moondawn. Played loud on headphones, he wrote, it comes close to sensory overload, yet it is too carefully made and too melodic to turn into noise. Your foot finds the beat before you do.

"Georg Trakl" runs just over 5 minutes on the LP. Furse admitted he had no idea who Trakl was and liked the piece anyway, quiet and reflective. Müller, who made the cover, came back to it in 2012 in a piece on Schulze's official site and heard a playful lamb bouncing across a field on a sunny spring morning.

"Frank Herbert" opens side two, 11 minutes of tight rhythm, lighter on its feet than the Nietzsche piece. Furse thought it very close to Tangerine Dream. "Friedemann Bach" is where the strings first arrive, with a solo violin and Tiepold's cello on top. Furse took them for synthesized violins, shivered, and said he would not be playing this one often. The credits list the Hessischer Rundfunk players and a solo violinist.

"Heinrich von Kleist" takes all of side four. Strings open it, and then it becomes the sparsest piece on the album. Furse compared the mood to Mirage. It is slow and bare, and the bareness is what carries it. After 116 minutes, the album ends on a long breath out.

How to listen

• Do not take it all at once. One disc a night, two nights.
• Save side three, "Ludwig II. von Bayern", until you have heard the first two. The strings only land when your ears are full of synthesizers.
• "Friedrich Nietzsche" can go loud. Everything else, late and quiet.

What happened next

In September 1978, as the album came out, Schulze played "Ludwig" on a tour of Belgium with an orchestra of young musicians. According to the 2005 reissue, they had almost no time to rehearse. The recording survives as "Objet d'Louis", 21 minutes long.

Two of the six names came back. The next album, Dune (1979), took its inspiration from Frank Herbert's novel, and Tiepold's cello came with it. In 1994 Schulze made Totentag, an electronic opera about the last days of Georg Trakl, and told interviewers he loved Trakl's poems. His final album, Deus Arrakis (2022), went back to Dune one more time.

The strings stayed as well. English Wikipedia notes that he kept using a cello on later records, especially Dune. The orchestra that vanished on Irrlicht came out into the open here and never went back into hiding.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Georg Trakl", ideally the 26-minute version on the CDs from 2005 onward. Then add this: anyone who bought the LP in 1978 heard only 5:20 of it, because that was all one side of vinyl could hold. Schulze put a reworked "Discover Trakl" on the 2000 compilation The Ultimate Edition, but the complete original recording did not appear until 2005, 27 years later.

Where to get it

The one to have is the 2005 double CD on Revisited Records, or the 2016 MIG reissue with the same contents. Both were transferred afresh from the original analogue master tapes, carry "Georg Trakl" at its full 26 minutes, and close the second disc with "Objet d'Louis" from the 1978 Belgian concert. The booklet notes that the earlier CD had altered sound and some tracks slightly shorter than on the original vinyl.

On vinyl there is the 2017 Brain/Universal pressing, remastered by Eroc of Grobschnitt. Like the original LP it has the 5-minute "Georg Trakl", and "Objet d'Louis" comes on the download voucher. Drop the needle on side three and fifteen string players from Frankfurt, 1978, walk in carrying a theme borrowed from Vivaldi.

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