The short version
- Around 1968 the Zodiak Free Arts Lab opened in the back rooms of a theatre building on a Kreuzberg canal. It opened only after the evening's performance, and it closed early the next year.
- In October 1969 Tangerine Dream recorded their first album in a rented Berlin factory on a single tape machine. The drummer was Klaus Schulze.
- Christopher Franke spent his nights teaching himself sequencing on a Moog modular at Hansa's studios. That sound later became Tangerine Dream's pulse.
- West Berlin was an island beyond the reach of the draft. Yet many of the people at the centre of this music were Berliners born and bred.
The doors opened only once the evening's audience had gone home. Kreuzberg, Hallesches Ufer, the embankment along the north bank of the Landwehr Canal. At the front of the building was the theatre that the Schaubühne company had used since 1962. The two big rooms at the back came alive only at night. One was painted entirely white, the other entirely black. Instruments, amplifiers and speakers lay around, and whoever walked in could do what they liked with them. This was the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. It could not make a sound until the play next door was over, so the music always started late.
An island's rules
Why this music was born in West Germany in the 1970s at all is the subject of the soil of the seventies, which called West Berlin a greenhouse. This piece walks inside the greenhouse and checks the addresses and dates one by one.
Work on the Wall began on 13 August 1961, and from that day West Berlin was an island in the middle of East Germany. The island ran on different rules. The city was under the four wartime Allies, and because of their reserved rights West Germany's conscription law never applied there. West Berliners were not drafted. Young men from the West moved their address to the city. On paper they still owed military service, but the draft offices could not reach the island. The German Wikipedia, citing the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, puts the number at around 50,000.
There was money to keep people there as well. From 1971 everyone working in West Berlin received an extra 8% of gross pay, tax free. It was called the Berlinzulage, the Berlin bonus.
Look at the musicians at the heart of this music, though, and something stands out. It is hard to find one on record as having come to dodge the draft. Klaus Schulze was born in Berlin in 1947. Peter Baumann was born in West Berlin in 1953. Christopher Franke started a band in Berlin at 13. Edgar Froese studied painting and sculpture in the city. What the exemption drew in was less the players than the people around them: young men with nights to spend in back rooms.
The back rooms on Hallesches Ufer
Three people opened the Zodiak: Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Boris Schaak. The English Wikipedia dates the opening to spring 1968; the German one says late 1967. Both agree it closed in early 1969. It lasted a few months, and nobody wrote down why it shut.
In those few months the names that passed through would add up to a genre. Ash Ra Tempel. The Agitation, soon to be Agitation Free. Klaus Schulze. And Tangerine Dream, who played there often over three months, sometimes for 5 or 6 hours a night, for little or no money. It was a room where songs were considered bourgeois. In 1969 Schnitzler and Roedelius formed Kluster with Dieter Moebius.
The building is still there. The Schaubühne moved out towards the Kurfürstendamm in 1981, and the old theatre is now HAU 2, the second stage of the Hebbel am Ufer.
October 1969, a rented factory
That autumn, with the Zodiak gone, Froese made a record with new people: Klaus Schulze on drums, Conrad Schnitzler on cello and violin. The room was a rented factory in Berlin. The equipment was one two-track Revox tape recorder. The date was October 1969.
Looking back in Sound On Sound in 1994, Froese listed what they used. A sieve full of dried peas, an old office calculator, two iron bars, stiff parchment paper. Things from the kitchen and the office were shaken and struck in front of a microphone and sent through reverb and delay. There was no money, so everything went straight onto the one Revox. They never dreamed, he said, that anyone would press it onto vinyl.
Someone did. In June 1970 the tapes came out as Electronic Meditation on a new label called Ohr. Before it was even released, Schulze had walked out in the middle of a tour, and Franke took his place.
A Berlin band on a Cologne label
Ohr was home to Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and Schulze, all Berlin names, but the man who founded it was from Cologne. Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was a Cologne music journalist. The money came from Peter Meisel, who ran Hansa, a Berlin music publisher. The two joined forces in 1969, and Metronome handled distribution.
So Tangerine Dream's next three albums, Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem, were recorded near Cologne, in Dieter Dierks's eight-track studio, on the label's recommendation. The sound grew up in Berlin, and it was put on tape by the Rhine.
The arrangement soured. Kaiser released jam recordings under another name without the musicians knowing, and several of them, Schulze among them, went to court. German courts voided Kaiser's contracts. Tangerine Dream signed with Virgin in Britain in 1974.
A symphony with no synthesizer
After leaving the band, Schulze recorded his first solo album, Irrlicht, in Berlin in April 1972. Its subtitle calls it a quadraphonic symphony for orchestra and electronic machines. There was no synthesizer on it. He used a broken, modified electric organ, a tape of an orchestra rehearsing and a damaged amplifier. In 2005 Schulze said he still did not own a synthesizer at the time.
The third movement, "Exil Sils Maria", was recorded backwards. Play it in reverse and you hear it the way it went down. This is a record by a man who did not wait for the right equipment. He turned the tape round instead.
The Moog at Hansa
Franke's story runs through one studio. His music teacher, the Swiss composer Thomas Kessler, got him interested in electronic music. Kessler ran the Electronic Beat Studio at Pfalzburger Straße 30 in Wilmersdorf, where Agitation Free, Ash Ra Tempel and the early Tangerine Dream rehearsed. There is a plaque on the building now.
And then there was Hansa. This is how Franke told it to Sound On Sound. At the time of Zeit he had no synthesizer of his own. But Hansa's studios had a big Moog modular. The Rolling Stones had used it on a film in 1967 and let it go cheaply, and nobody at the studio knew how to use it. There was no manual. Franke went in every night and sat with it. He was not allowed to take it out of the building until 1973, so for two years he practised there. What he dug into was the sequencer, the part that could generate a rhythm that never stopped. He spent hours building sequences. Froese heard them and decided that driving rhythm was exactly what the band needed.
When the Virgin deal came, Franke used part of the advance to buy that Moog. The story continues in an English country house with Phaedra. The eight-note sequence described in the Phaedra review had spent two years of nights growing in a Berlin studio.
A hundred and fifty metres from the Wall
In 1975 the Meisel brothers bought the building at Köthener Straße 38 in Kreuzberg. Inside was a large recording hall, the Meistersaal, and the building stood about 150 metres from the Wall. People called it Hansa by the Wall. In 1976 David Bowie and Iggy Pop came to work there.
Tangerine Dream came home to Berlin in 1976 as well. That year they recorded the music for William Friedkin's Sorcerer in an old cinema they had rented and turned into a small studio, on an eight-track Ampex that had once belonged to Abbey Road. In August they made Stratosfear at Audio Studios, a room used for orchestral sessions. Seven years after the back rooms and the rented factory, the band was working in a proper studio in their own city.
How to listen: two tracks that let you hear the city
- "Journey Through a Burning Brain" (Tangerine Dream, Electronic Meditation, 1970). 12:26. Recorded in the rented factory on one machine. Follow where Schulze's drums and Schnitzler's strings collide. Remember that Zodiak nights ran for 5 hours, and these 12 minutes feel short.
- "Exil Sils Maria" (Klaus Schulze, Irrlicht, 1972). 21:25. The backwards movement. Listen to what an organ and some tape can do without a synthesizer.
- Play them back to back, with the lights off. You can hear how far apart two men from the same city had moved in a few years.
The one track to send a friend
Send "Journey Through a Burning Brain". Warn them it runs past 12 minutes. Then tell them this: the sequencer pulse that became Tangerine Dream's heartbeat came out of a Moog that a young man practised on, night after night for two years, in a Berlin studio. According to Franke, the Rolling Stones had owned it first.
A wall ran round the island, and inside the island the back rooms opened only when the theatre went dark. This music grew in borrowed rooms while everyone else was asleep. The building on Hallesches Ufer still stands over the canal. Put one of these records on at the hour the theatre lights go out, and the back room lights up again.
Where to get it
Both records are still available on CD and vinyl.
