The short version
- In March 1993 Klaus Schulze gave a long German-language interview about synthesizers, samplers and digital recording. The original is on his official website.
- The line we picked is the three sentences that end the interview: he had no idea about technology, but suddenly it sounded completely different, and he liked that.
- He said it about opening up an organ and rewiring it while making Irrlicht in 1972. A conversation full of equipment ends on those words.
- The site does not name the interviewer or say where the interview first appeared.
The interviewer opened with something from thirteen years earlier. The first track on Schulze's 1980 LP Dig It was called "Death of an Analogue", and the interviewer described the record as a kind of farewell to the analogue synthesizer. By 1993, though, second-hand analogue gear was in such demand that you could almost argue it was digital that had had its day. How did Schulze see it now?
Where it was said
Schulze's official website runs the interview on a single page in German, dated "March 1993" and titled "Das fand ich gut". The same site also carries an English interview from September that year.
Most of it is about equipment. Digital, Schulze said flatly, was not going to die. Analogue instruments had their limits: a Mellotron choir note lasted eight seconds, so for his long chords he had a device built with two manuals and a swell pedal to fade from one loop to the other. By the early 1980s he felt he had exhausted what analogue sequences and sounds could do, and that was when the Crumar G.D.S. arrived: 64 oscillators and ferociously steep filters.
Then he turned to what worried him about 1993. Presets and computer programs had made everything so easy that anyone could make something, and everyone wanted to put out a CD. You play any old thing into the computer, quantise it to sixteenths, and if that still doesn't sit right you quantise it to eighths, and before long you have a march. The old oscillators went out of tune at the slightest change in temperature, and that instability was part of their character. The beating on a Moog would be different a quarter of an hour later, which meant every note really was one of a kind.
His answer was to combine things. The point was not to replace analogue with digital, or the other way round. At the time he was fitting his old ARP with MIDI. He took several Akai S-1000 samplers on his recent concerts, loaded mainly with his own sounds. Hard disk recording was still no use to him because his pieces were so long: when makers boasted about eight tracks and then admitted they ran for four or five minutes, he lost interest on the spot. He was keener on a new Tascam digital recorder that gave about 100 minutes on eight tracks, enough to put a whole opera on one tape. The opera, as it happened, was already composed. Only the vocals were left to record.
Back to 1972
At the end, the interviewer went back to 1972. The subtitle of Irrlicht, his first solo album, mentions "E-Maschinen", electric machines. What were they? Schulze first passed on a joke from Edgar Froese, who had once asked whether that included coffee machines and a fridge.
What Schulze actually meant was this: a reverb spring taken out of a Hammond organ, microphones, a small echo mixer and his Fender guitar amp. He plugged the amp into the mixing desk and fed the amp's output straight back into a microphone channel on the same desk. Turn it up and it howled with feedback; turn the tremolo knob on the Fender and the howl began to wobble. That was where all the chirping sounds came from, sounds he later made on an EMS VCS3. The thunderstorm was the reverb spring, plucked from above.
Last came his Teisco organ, which already had a pitch wheel. He opened it up and swapped a few wires around the oscillators, just like that. Then he said:
"Ich habe keine Ahnung von Technik, aber es klang auf einmal ganz anders. Das fand ich gut."
I have no idea about technology, but suddenly it sounded completely different. I liked that. And that is where the interview ends.
What one line undoes
In March 1993 Schulze was 45. Over the course of the conversation he had reeled off oscillator counts, filter slopes, sampler memory and how many bars his sequencer software could hold. Then, at the very end, the same man said he knew nothing about technology. The good sounds did not come from understanding the machines. He moved a wire, listened, and kept what he liked.
Earlier in the same interview he pointed out that fifteen years before he had already been saying a mixing desk was a musical instrument too. In a room in 1972, that desk was wired to a guitar amp and whistling.
Put Irrlicht on headphones and find the storm. One finger plucks a spring, and the steel coil shakes until the room fills with thunder. The man it belonged to said he had no idea about technology.
The order in which to hear Schulze's records is in our Schulze guide.
Where to get it
Irrlicht first came out on Ohr in Germany in 1972 and has since been reissued on several labels.