The short version
- Moondawn came out on Brain in April 1976, Schulze's sixth solo album and the first with a Moog on it.
- In the French magazine Best's list of fifty albums in August 1976 it stood at number 10, between Wings at 9 and Queen at 11.
- German pages read it as a record that burned every bridge back to rock and pushed open a new door.
- A Belgian page had already covered it in July. The quotations come from the contemporary notices collected on Schulze's official site.
In August 1976 the French magazine Best printed a list of fifty albums. Number 9 was Wings, Wings at the Speed of Sound. Number 11 was Queen, A Night at the Opera. Between them, at number 10, sat an electronic LP one German had made on his own.
What this piece read
Schulze's official site keeps a separate page of contemporary notices for each album. The Moondawn page holds four: one Belgian, one French, two German. Titles and dates are given here as that page gives them. The record itself is in the Moondawn review.
Between Wings and Queen
Only three lines of the Best list are quoted. Wings at 9, Schulze at 10, Queen at 11, in August 1976. That a Brain electronic LP sat among the names filling the British and American charts that spring is the whole content of those three lines.
Whether the list counted sales or reflected an editor's choice is not stated. No figures are given either. What remains is that the magazine put all three in one table.
Burning the bridges
The German EKZ-Informationsdienst wrote that year that with this latest electronic spectacle Schulze had left every bridge back to rock music behind him and pushed open a new door.
That piece takes the two tracks separately. "Floating" is unheard-of in how relaxed it is, outwardly almost monotonous and inwardly highly differentiated. "Mindphaser" runs the other way, on an unsettling forward-pressing rhythm, with a beauty the writer calls oppressive. The last sentence is the verdict: a demanding performance, but an uncommonly rewarding one.
The word inventor
Another German page the same year opens by calling Schulze the inventor of German cosmic music, with the quotation marks in place. The evidence it offers that he is on the right road comes from outside rather than at home: that he finds artistic recognition well beyond the German borders.
The notice describes the shape of the record too. Moondawn again carries one piece per side, and it is rockier than his LPs so far. The piece ends by saying the writer does not know which way Schulze will go on his next records. One thing is certain, it adds. He will make his own way.
July, in Belgium
The earliest date is the Belgian one. On 15 July 1976, Binneninformatie called it a beautiful LP and Schulze a phenomenon in the cosmic and esoteric record shelf. The quotation stops after two sentences.
Rewound twenty years later
The site also gathers short reactions to the Original Master edition from the mid-1990s. A man at the German station ORB wrote that the master edition was fine music with a fantastic cover layout; someone at a Dutch station wrote that an achievement like this after twenty years was hard to believe, musically and technically. The French Oniric described it as Moondawn stripped of its later retouching, straight out of Klaus D. Müller's archive, and noted that an unreleased piece came with it, titled simply "Supplement."
One short line sits among them. It says this really does sound great, and the person who wrote it is Schulze.
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.