The short version
- In September and October 1980 Klaus Schulze gave an interview about his new LP, Dig It. His official website carries an English version, translated from the German by kdm in 1997.
- The line we picked is his answer to a question about the future of digital synthesizers: the eighties are electronic.
- Schulze predicted that within ten years the synthesizers of the seventies would no longer be seen.
- In the same interview he said he was taking old gear to his next concerts, from the Big Moog and two Minimoogs to his EMS.
The interview opens with the new record. It's called Dig It, Schulze said, and it's the first electronic digital LP. The whole programme was stored on digital disk, and he had left his usual analogue synthesizers alone. All he used was the G.D.S., the most advanced synthesizer computer in the world. A computer? the interviewer asked. Anyone who's afraid of computers, Schulze replied, will never understand. Then he added that the era of analogue wheelchair electronics was over.
Where it was said
Schulze's official website runs the interview under the date "September 1980" and the title "The Eighties are Electronic". A set of extra questions from October follows, and a line at the bottom says kdm translated it from German in 1997. The interviewer isn't named, and neither is the publication it first appeared in. Schulze had turned 33 that August.
He was just getting his hands on the new machine. Cheap synthesizers had carried this music into the cheapest kind of pop, the interviewer said, so wasn't it natural for a pioneer to go looking for new ground? Schulze agreed, though less resolutely than that: he liked trying new things because they were fun. When the talk turned to the young players following in his tracks, he didn't take the credit. Most of them sounded more like Kraftwerk than like him, he said. Plenty of fans told him they had just bought a Korg MS-10 or MS-20, and Korg had probably sold thousands of the little boxes to his audience.
Then Linz. Schulze had played the opening concert of that year's "ars electronica" festival, and the official chronology lists it under 1980. There was television, he said, and a live broadcast from a steel works. The promoters talked about 400,000 marks in costs for his one evening.
The line
One of the October questions asked how he saw the future of digital synthesizers and computers. Schulze answered:
"The eighties are electronic!"
For him there was no question about it. Synth computers were the leading instruments of the new decade, and he was on the right track. He also made a forecast. The classic synthesizers that had played such a big part in the seventies, for him too, would not be seen anymore in ten years. There would only be digital equipment with huge data banks.
The stage list
The September part of the interview has another list. Dig It used only the G.D.S. and percussion. For the concerts in Linz and next in Brussels, though, he would bring parts of his old equipment as well: the Big Moog, two Minimoogs, the Polymoog, a Yamaha CS-80, an ARP 2600, an ARP Odyssey, a Korg 3300 and his old EMS. Any change would come slowly, he said, organically, the way it always had.
He talked about drums, too. He was tired of the sound of a normal drum kit. He had used one on records and on stage all through the seventies, but now it was more interesting to play against the electronic rhythm than along with it. In Linz he had a percussionist beside him playing four or five huge gongs and two timpani.
On the record itself, two accounts sit side by side. Schulze said Dig It took him a week, with no time pressure at all. The official discography dates the recording May to September 1980, in Hambühren. In October he also corrected the idea that it was all G.D.S.: there was some percussion, and a tape loop from the group Ideal. When the interviewer said the sounds were new but the form was still the old Klaus Schulze, Schulze laughed and said you got me. The sounds had moved a step ahead. The form would take a little longer.
How to listen
Put the opening track, "Death of an Analogue", on headphones. The title makes the record's argument before a note is played. Then play "Synthasy", the last track on the original LP, all the way through. It runs about 23 minutes. The official discography credits the album to Schulze and the drummer Fred Severloh. Walk slowly around the room and your feet will find the machine's pulse before you do. If you're new to Schulze, the Schulze guide sets out an order.
If you send a friend one track, make it "Death of an Analogue", a song titled for the end of analogue. In the year it came out, the Big Moog still headed Schulze's list of stage gear.
Where to get it
Dig It first came out on LP on Brain in October 1980. Brain reissued it on CD in 1984, and the 2005 Revisited Records edition adds a DVD of "Stahlsinfonie", his concert at ars electronica 1980 in Linz.