The short version
- In 1981 Klaus Schulze gave a short German-language interview about his record label, IC (Innovative Communication). The original is on his official website.
- The line we picked is his answer to what mattered most about IC: that the thing is fun.
- If it ever stopped being fun, he added, he would hand the whole shop to his partner and walk away. The website follows that with a bracketed note from the partner, Klaus D. Müller, saying he politely declined at the time.
- The official chronology says IC was set up in 1978 and sold off in 1983. It does not say why.
The piece opens in the countryside. For about two years, the introduction says, Schulze had been running his own record company from the middle of nowhere in Winsen an der Aller. It was called IC, short for Innovative Communication. Besides his own last two LPs, the introduction says, IC had put out fourteen other productions, among them the first record by the Berlin group Ideal, which had already gone gold. The introduction's count is a little off. Schulze's official discography lists Dig It, from 1980, as first released on Brain. The one that came out on IC was Trancefer, in 1981.
Where it was said
Schulze's official website runs the interview under the year "1981" and the title "...daß die Sache Spaß macht", which comes from his last answer. It does not name the interviewer or say where the piece first appeared. Schulze turned 34 that August.
IC was more than a name on a letterhead by then. According to the official chronology, a second studio and a video studio were set up for IC in 1979, and audio and video productions for the label kept coming through 1980 and 1981. Schulze's own records sit in between, a line at a time.
The first question was whether IC was his second career. He wasn't sure it counted as a career at all, he said. And IC was three people working together: Klaus D. Müller, who ran the business, Claus Cordes, the engineer, and himself. If IC ever did become a career, it would belong to all three of them.
Then came Ideal. Schulze had fallen out badly with the record company WEA at one point, the interviewer said, and this year he had sold IC's top act, Ideal, to WEA of all labels, for 300,000 marks. Wasn't that one of fate's ironies? Schulze said he found it very funny. When kdm first offered Ideal to WEA, WEA turned them down as too Berlin. Now the whole industry was grinning about the sale. The record trail runs in that order. Ideal's first album, Ideal, came out on IC in 1980, and their second, Der Ernst des Lebens, on WEA in 1981.
Was Schulze a businessman? Ask my partner Müller, he said. When the interviewer said he was asking him, Schulze said no, he wasn't one, and it didn't interest him. Müller always said IC would run better if he could fire Schulze, so Schulze's job at the company was just the music and "human relations". Living out in the country, did he lose touch with what was happening on the ground? He went to Berlin and Paris a lot, he said, and met a great many people there. He also produced other musicians himself, such as Scala 3 and Avis Davis.
The line
The last question was what mattered most to him about IC. Schulze answered:
"Daß die Sache Spaß macht."
That the thing is fun. Then he set a condition. If it ever stopped being fun, he would give Müller the whole shop and leave. That much was certain.
The reply in brackets
The official website adds a note in square brackets at the end of that answer. It says, in effect, "I declined with thanks at the time", followed by a smiley and the initials kdm. On the site's contact page, kdm is Klaus D. Müller. The man who was nearly given the shop wrote his answer beside the offer later on.
The official chronology tells the rest briefly. In 1981 Ideal's record went gold, and the chronology names kdm as its producer. In 1982 it went platinum, with more than 500,000 sold in Germany. The 1983 entry has a single line: the divestment of IC. In 1984 Schulze founded a new label, INTEAM. Whether it had stopped being fun, the chronology does not say.
How to listen
Play "Silent Running", side two of Trancefer, through to the end on headphones. It runs around 19 minutes, depending on the pressing. Michael Shrieve plays percussion on the record and Wolfgang Tiepold plays cello. It is Schulze's own album on IC. Leave it on and walk slowly around the room, and your feet will pick up the sequencer's beat. If Schulze is new to you, our Schulze guide sets out the order.
If you send a friend one track, make it this one. It came out the year he staked the shop on having fun.
The 1981 answer and the later reply now sit side by side on one page.
Where to get it
Trancefer first came out on LP on IC in October 1981. It was reissued on CD by Brain in 1984, and the 2006 Revisited Records edition adds two bonus tracks.