The short version
- Silver Edition is a limited 10-CD set by Klaus Schulze, released on 4 November 1993. His official website counts the ten discs as his 30th to 39th solo albums.
- Discogs lists it as a single release. The German National Library catalogue lists it three times, as boxes of two, four and four CDs.
- According to Discogs it was limited to 2,000 copies. The label was Musique Intemporelle, founded by Bernd Kistenmacher, and the producers were Klaus D. Müller and Schulze.
- All ten discs went whole into the 50-disc The Ultimate Edition in 2000, and from 2009 the music came out again in the La Vie Electronique series.
Search the German National Library catalogue for Schulze and three entries sit side by side around 1993: "Silver edition vol. 1/2", "Silver edition vol. 3-6" and "Silver edition vol. 7-10". All three give the publisher as Bernd Kistenmacher. The year field reads "[1993?]", question mark and all. The format field says "2 CDs in Kassette" once and "4 CDs in Kassette" twice. Ten CDs that came out together became three boxes on the library's shelves.
A different face in every catalogue
Each catalogue writes the same set down differently. On Discogs it is one 10-CD release, with a single catalogue number, "Musique Intemporelle Special KS 1-10", marked limited and numbered. The notes say it was limited to 2,000 copies, and that pre-ordered copies were numbered by hand and signed. MusicBrainz also has it as one release, with the ten CDs listed underneath as its media.
Schulze's official website also treats it as one entry: first released on 4 November 1993, on "Musique Intemporelle Special", with kdm, that is Klaus D. Müller, in the producer field. All ten discs together run 12 hours, 28 minutes and 45 seconds. The official chronology, though, counts that one entry as ten. Its 1993 line calls the set Schulze's 30th to 39th solo CDs and adds that it was a genuine limited edition.
The library names Kistenmacher as publisher because of the label. According to its Discogs profile, Musique Intemporelle was founded by Bernd Kistenmacher in 1988, renamed from Timeless Sounds, and was renamed again in 1998, as MI Records.
Three boxes
The period reviews remember three boxes too. Among the reviews collected on the official website, the French Crystal News noted that the edition was spread across three cases. The excerpt from the Danish magazine Tangenten is almost nothing but numbers: 12.5 hours of playing time, 2,000 copies, a 48-page book, three boxes. The site's editor labelled it "A funny counter". The critic had done the counting for everyone.
The British Audion introduced the set as ten CDs celebrating 21 years of Schulze as a solo artist, and was amazed that it was neither a half-baked compilation nor a pile of demos but entirely unreleased music. Look at the track list on the official website and unreleased does not always mean new. Between the studio recordings from 1992 and 1993 sit concert recordings from 1975 and 1976, and a 1972 studio piece, "Landpartie", closes the tenth CD. The fifth CD is a single track: the first movement of "Picasso geht spazieren", 78 minutes and 39 seconds long.
The reception was mostly warm. In the American magazine i/e, two critics put the set in their top five of 1993, at number three and number four. The official chronology's 1993 line notes the sensational reception too.
The faces that came later
Seven years on, the box went inside another box: The Ultimate Edition, 50 CDs, released on série poème on 1 January 2000. On the official website's list, CDs 1 to 10 are Silver Edition CDs 1 to 10. They were not copied over untouched. CDs 7 and 8 carry the note "5 minutes longer!". English Wikipedia says the 50 discs were split across five boxes of ten.
According to English Wikipedia, between 2009 and 2015 all the music on The Ultimate Edition came out again, in recording order, as a run of multi-disc sets called La Vie Electronique. The 1975 concerts and the 1993 studio pieces that shared one box in 1993 now sit apart, by year.
Three lines in a library, one on Discogs, ten albums in the chronology, ten discs inside fifty. The same music, counted four ways.
How to listen
Play the fifth CD from start to finish in one go: the first movement of "Picasso geht spazieren", 78 minutes and 39 seconds. The two Audion critics wrote that this was the piece they liked best. With one piece filling the disc, there is nowhere to stop. Past the hour mark, the clock in the room starts to sound like part of the piece. If Schulze is new to you, our Schulze guide sets out the order.
If you send a friend one track, make it "Landpartie": 10 minutes and 47 seconds, one of the shorter pieces in the set, and the 1972 recording that sits at the very end. A sound from the year of his first solo album closes a box marking 21 years.
Where to get it
The 1993 box was limited to 2,000 copies. The same music went into The Ultimate Edition in 2000, and from 2009 into the La Vie Electronique series, in recording order.