The short version
- In January 1984 Klaus Schulze gave a German-language interview that walked back through his records from the start. The original is on his official website.
- The line we picked is about Mirage from 1977: the reviews were superb, and the sales were close to zero.
- Right after that answer the website adds a note in brackets. Mirage sold fantastically at the time, it says, about three times as many as Body Love on Brain.
- The site does not name the interviewer or say where the interview first appeared.
The interviewer opened with something from ten years earlier. The two of them had talked about music about a decade before, when what absorbed Schulze most was music therapy. Did that still matter to him in January 1984? Not directly, Schulze said. But he did get letters from people who used his records that way.
Where it was said
Schulze's official website runs the interview dated "January 1984" and titled "Wir haben irgendwie durchgehalten", roughly "somehow we held out". The title comes from his last answer. He was 36.
The conversation goes through the records one by one. First comes the day he took Irrlicht to a radio station. The two engineers who played it bent over the turntable to see whether the needle had stuck. Once he was sent out of the room they left the talkback speaker on and ran the record down, and Schulze heard every word outside. Cyborg, in 1973, was paid for by a 3,000-mark advance for the worldwide rights: 1,000 marks for a second-hand Revox, and 1,000 marks for the orchestra players at 50 marks each. The money from the Body Love film score bought him a two-manual Mellotron. There is also the rhythm lesson he said he only really took in around 1978 or 1979, working with Santana's drummer Michael Shrieve. Schulze had just set up a sequencer, and Shrieve told him to walk to its beat. Schulze walked in circles around the studio for half an hour while Shrieve kept changing the sequencer's tempo until his steps and the machine were in time.
Then it was Mirage's turn. As Schulze told it, Body Love and Moondawn had come out on neither Virgin nor Island, yet sold well and went gold in France. Island, who had turned him down five times, now wanted to sign him. Everyone was waiting for more of the same. What they got was Mirage: no drums, hardly any sequencer apart from a glockenspiel-like part, and a first side so quiet that nothing at all seems to happen.
The line
Schulze said:
"Kritiken, wirklich Superkritiken. Verkauf gleich fast Null."
Reviews, really superb reviews. Sales, next to nothing. Then he added a rider: by now, when he got a good review, he more or less knew the record would not sell. Perhaps that was why people said the bad reviews were the best ones.
The objection in brackets
The website puts a note straight after that answer. Mirage, it says, sold fantastically at the time, about three times as many copies as Body Love had on Brain. It gives two reasons: Mirage had a worldwide release, and Island put a lot of work into it.
The interview is dotted with brackets like this. When the interviewer lists groups founded in 1968, the note says Ashra came a few years later. When Schulze says Can were at that first Paris concert, the note says they were not. When he says he produced the next Far East Family Band record two years later, the note says it was three months. The site prints its owner's words as he said them and does not cut them. It just writes the correction beside each one.
We have no sales ledger to settle it. What we can say is this. In 1984 Schulze remembered Mirage as the record with good reviews and bad sales. The website that carries his name put a different number next to that memory.
How to listen
Play side one of Mirage, "Velvet Voyage", all the way through on headphones. It runs 28:20. This is the side Schulze said nothing happens on. By the end your breathing has slowed to its pace. If Schulze is new to you, our Schulze guide gives you an order to go in.
The record does not say whether it sold. On the turntable the needle just goes round one side for 28 minutes.
Where to get it
Mirage first came out on Brain in Germany in April 1977, and on Island in Britain the same month. The 2017 MIG 40th anniversary CD is the one to have.