Klaus Schulze

The German keyboardist Klaus Schulze (1947) virtually invented cosmic music with the Tangerine Dream and then became its most typical exponent in the 1970s. He was one of the greatest pioneers of popular electronic music, a forerunner of dozens of styles that would take hold in rock music over the following 30 years. From Bach’s organ openings, from the stillness of Tibetan monks, from Wagner’s polyphonic architectures, from the cosmic psychedelia of Pink Floyd, from Gregorian liturgy, from the metaphysical whirlwinds of John Coltrane, Schulze chiseled out the first aesthetic of popular electronic music—an aesthetic that inherited from the raga its sense of time, from jazz its spontaneity, and from the late-Romantic symphonists a penchant for grandeur.

Throughout his prolific career, Schulze personified both the strengths and weaknesses of “kosmische musik”: the metaphysical impulse and soundtrack sensationalism, the majestic and elegant slowness and the cold, naive redundancy, the fluid electronic improvisation and the boundless paranoia. With him, the cathedral-like organ, synthetic rhythms, synthesizer timbres, and half-hour-long suites ceased to be avant-garde experiments and became consumer stereotypes.

After serving as percussionist for the early works of Tangerine Dream (alongside Edgar Froese and Conrad Schnitzler) and Ash Ra Tempel (with Manuel Göttsching), in 1972, drawing on his background in classical (Bach and Wagner) and contemporary (Ligeti’s continuums and Stockhausen’s electronics) music, he began a solo career that would lead him to found a new genre of synthetic symphonism based on increasingly sophisticated electronic machinery.

His first album, and probably his masterpiece—and the masterpiece of all cosmic music—Irrlicht (Ohr, 1972 - Revisited, 2006), is a grandiose and monumental “quadraphonic” symphony for an electronic orchestra of thirty elements. Schulze, who had started out as a late psychedelic musician, reinvented himself as a pioneer of a new baroque electronic music, more related to the 19th-century symphony than to acid rock. In a sense, he built a bridge between the “visionary” element of these two genres. Schulze also condensed half a century of German culture, from Wagner’s sound masses (which he was perhaps the first to replicate in an electronic context) to expressionist painting (of which he preserved the obsessively gothic traits). Schulze’s symphony begins with a “pictorial” idea but transcends it into atmospheres dripping with cascades of panicked sensations. A Michelangelo-like architect of sound, he was capable of erecting dazzling mirages in the universal chaos, of distilling ecstasy from magma, of weaving fairy tales and spells into eternal silences. His “fantasy-music” endlessly replicates sidereal sounds and conveys forebodings of planetary cataclysms.
The three movements of Irrlicht elaborate a documentary-like music that slowly ascends through gentle surges and breaks into sudden bursts, oozing with anxiety and fear before the unknown and the infinite. The electronic hisses that open the work gradually accumulate into a cataleptic suspense that prepares the entrance of the violins; their poignant melody sinks into a chaos of sound layers that has become deafening; other sounds plunge in, reverberating from galactic distances, and suddenly a pipe organ intones the liturgical crescendo that is the heart of the record: deformed, cadenced, accelerated, simulating a mad pulsar torn apart by immense pressure that finally explodes at the climax of its orgasm. The second part is a monolithic, hypnotic vibration, in which the virtues and flaws of this atmospheric descriptivism are sublimated.

The spirit of that masterpiece also permeates the monumental Cyborg (Kosmische Musik, 1973 – SPV, 2006), which—much like Tangerine Dream’s contemporary Zeit—contains four twenty-minute suites in a style of visionary psychedelic electronic music. Schulze is accompanied by a chamber orchestra (twelve cellos, thirty violinists, four flutists). Compared with Irrlicht, this second album is more “composed” and less spontaneous. Each of its glacial scores is conceived with a structure in mind rather than an atmosphere. The techniques that had emerged almost by accident on the first album here become dogma—particularly two, repeated endlessly: the oceanic chords sustained to infinity (an effect achieved by placing weights on the keys) and the hypnotic metronomic pulses of the sequencer.
The galactic spirals of Synphara unfold at a relentless pace amid the solemn vibrations of ancient organs, weaving a filigree that is more spiritual than cinematic, more Zen than Ulysses. The enchanted stasis of Chromengel (reminiscent of Poppy Nogood by Terry Riley) towers over a desert of spatial sounds, generating both fear and hypnosis. The frenetic pulse of Conphara recalls the cosmic suspense of Irrlicht and hurls it into the depths of the mind, returning to the balance between the psychedelic and the gothic that lay at the center of the first album. The menacing vibrations of Neuronengesang close the work in a mood of deep mystery—a kind of meditation on the human condition and a recovery of the ancestral roots of human history.
The technique of dropping melodic lines nonchalantly into the dense chirping of synthesizers opened new horizons for electronic music, freeing it both from the shackles of atonality imposed by the conservatories and from the subservience to acoustic instruments to which rock bands had confined it.

Picture Music (Brain, 1973), recorded right after the second album but released after the third, marked the beginning of a new phase in which the artist abandoned the gothic and psychedelic premises of his early work and began to exploit his electronic arsenal for purely sensorial purposes. Adopting a disco-like rhythm (albeit camouflaged behind banks of sequencers and years ahead of actual disco music) and eliminating the more anguished tones of his electronic keyboards, Schulze ventured into the realm of consumer-oriented electronics—the forerunner of much modern muzak. Totem (23 minutes), with its insistent sequencer cadence (Schulze remembered he had once been a drummer), became a classic; but what followed included many bland and monotonous works diluted by repetitive artifices. Mental Door (24 minutes) merely speculates on rhythmic patterns.

On Blackdance (Brain, 1974), however, there is no shortage of masterful touches from a great scenographer. Voices Of Syn (22 minutes) recycles Verdi arias (complete with an opera tenor) within a “voice-and-electronics” framework à la Stockhausen, enhanced by hypnotic percussion. Some Velvet Phasing indulges in a minimalist, almost Zen and proto-ambient stasis. Ways Of Changes (one of the few Schulze pieces featuring guitar) launches into a deafening, hammering raga.

Timewind (Brain, 1975) is a concept album dedicated to Richard Wagner, and fittingly it is also the most “Teutonic” work of Schulze’s career. Bayreuth Return remains perhaps his wildest electronic concerto, while Wahnfried 1883 exudes a panicked, titanic grandeur in every note. Both pieces recover the sonata form within a violently psychological context.
These suites were born from ideas as brilliant as those of Irrlicht and Cyborg, but their flaw lies in not developing those ideas further—simply repeating and sustaining them for twenty minutes. This trick would later become a method and a norm in the world of new age music, but it diminished the pictorial and narrative premises of cosmic music.

Schulze was also active with the esoteric group the Cosmic Jokers (alongside Gottsching and percussionist Harald Grosskopf), the (involuntary) authors of two albums: Cosmic Jokers (Ohr, 1974), featuring one suite per side, Galactic Joke and Cosmic Joy; and Galactic Supermarket (Ohr, 1974), with two more 19-minute suites, Kinder des Alls and Galactic Supermarket—all simply recordings of acid parties. He later joined Stomu Yamashta’s ensemble, appearing on Go (1976) and Go Too (1977), and finally took part in the Richard Wahnfried collective, which released five albums: Time Actor (Innovative Communications, 1979), the most rock-oriented; Tonwelle (Innovative Communications, 1983), the most percussive; Plays Megatone (Thunderbolt, 1984), the least interesting; and Miditation (Brain, 1985), the most symphonic.

In 1976 Schulze brought in Mike Shrieve, formerly of Santana, to work on rhythms, and his influence is already evident in the explosive Floating, the standout track from Moondawn (Brain, 1976), where sequencers are doubled by Harald Grosskopf’s percussion. Mindphaser (the album’s other half) is instead a suite in the “spiritual” mood that Schulze was beginning to leave behind.

The soundtrack to *Stardancer* further emphasized rhythm, definitively breaking away from the conventions of cosmic music.

By contrast, Mirage (Brain, 1977)—his first fully electronic work and one of the earliest ambient albums alongside those of Brian Eno—abruptly eliminated rhythm altogether. Velvet Voyage, which draws on ideas from Pink Floyd (its gothic-psychedelic crescendo) and Terry Riley (its dervish-like, whirling repetition), and Crystal Lake, an impressionistic suite that feels like a radiant version of Irrlicht, both suffer somewhat from excessive length (each lasting nearly half an hour).

A singular interlude in his career is the soundtrack for the film Body Love (Brain, 1977), featuring music of almost hallucinatory sensuality—achieved without any use of sampled moans. Body Love 2 (Brain, 1977) includes another portion of that material.

Schulze reached another artistic peak with yet another monumental album, X (Brain, 1978), perhaps the very quintessence of his grandiloquence — another concept work dedicated to his “Teutonic” idols of the past. In Nietzsche, built on counterpoints of electronic layers and a Gregorian choir suspended in the void, Schulze develops a titanic sense of the Übermensch: the extreme minimalism of the thematic development gives the melodic phrases a sinister tone, while the rhythm drives forward until it erupts into a wild tribalism. The Gregorian chant of Heinrich Von Kleist instead emerges, dilated and lysergic, from a shapeless and atonal chaos. Frank Herbert is a cathartic ritual for Schulze’s feral synthesizers and Harald Grosskopf’s demonic percussion.
Ludwig Von Bayern (featuring a real orchestra) is the most dynamic suite, which, from the opening baroque, Indian, and dissonant string sinfonietta, through a cold and spectral mantra, plunges into a maelstrom of electronic noise only to rise again in a mechanical ballet — the apotheosis of the menacing metaphor running through all his work.

The baroque period culminated in the soundtrack Dune (Brain, 1979). But Schulze was already contemplating another step forward — Dig It (Brain, 1980), in which he used the computer to synthesize sound. With this, the transition from analog to digital sound was complete. Trancefer (Brain, 1981), however, is little more than a banal recycling of his early ideas.

Shrieve’s rhythms would also be responsible — for better or worse — for the rhythmic excesses of later records, especially the new colossal work Audentity (Brain, 1983), a concept album that sums up the mature Schulze’s style. The album combines bold experimentation with lighter background music. In Cellistica, for example, the cello is played against its own computerized replica, and immediately afterward Schulze launches into one of his most driving progressions, bordering on disco music; at the same time, Sebastian Im Traum is the most anarchic and atonal piece of his entire career.

Few artists like Schulze understood the importance of finding a balance between space and rhythm, between stasis and dynamism. By pairing faintly colored panels with frenetic pulsations, Schulze found a vital resonance that had likely lain hidden for millennia in the human soul.

The following decade was actually one of the densest of Schulze’s career. On one hand, the growing demand from the new age market; on the other, the rediscovery of his work by “ambient” dance clubs — both brought Schulze back into the spotlight. Ever prolific, he began releasing two or three albums per year. Apart from live recordings such as Live (Brain, 1980) and Dziekuje Poland (Brain, 1984), collaborations such as Drive Inn (Thunderbolt, 1983) and Aphrica (Inteam, 1983), both with Rainer Bloss, and Babel (Venture, 1987), with Andreas Grosser, as well as soundtracks like Angst (Thunderbolt, 1983) and Le Moulin De Daudet (Virgin, 1994), the albums from this period — namely Interface (Brain, 1985), Dreams (Brain, 1986), and En=trance (Brain, 1987) — rank among the weakest of his career. The track FM Delight on En=trance is the one that stands out.

A more interesting phase began with Miditerranean Pads (Thunderbolt, 1989) and culminated in the colossal Dresden Performance (Venture, 1990). Schulze had become an avant-garde musician with the craftsmanship of an artisan: he explored rhythms and harmonies (as well as found noises and voices) that were challenging and complex, yet he packaged them in dazzling, polished forms.

Beyond Recall (Venture, 1990) continued this program of highly “Teutonic” climaxes, extracted from an unsettling magma of ever-shifting sounds.

The music for the performance at the “Royal Festival Hall,” collected on Royal Festival Hall vol. 1 (Venture, 1992) and Royal Festival Hall vol. 2 (Venture, 1992), reveals his new impulses toward ambient and oriental sounds (respectively Ancient Ambience and Yen). The third part of those performances would appear on The Dome Event (Venture, 1993), equally marked by oriental influences and sampled voices. A nearly classical composure characterizes this third part. In this monumental and eclectic vein, Schulze would give another large-scale demonstration with Das Wagner Desaster-Live (ZYX, 1994), which presents two different mixes of the same performance.

The ten-disc Silver Edition (Musique Intemporelle, 1994) gathers dozens of pieces composed for various occasions, as does the subsequent (and equally ten-disc) Historic Edition (Manikin, 1995), which includes a fragment of the legendary Poet (as well as material from the Tangerine Dream period).

Picking up ideas he had left unfinished in the days of Voices Of Syn and Aphrica, Schulze also attempted his first theatrical work, Totentag (ZYX, 1994), confirming that maturity was drawing him inexorably toward classical music. The opera is dedicated to the philosopher Trakl and reprises themes first sketched out on Audentity and X.

The double album In Blue (ZYX, 1995) instead marks a return (after five years of odd experiments) to his most typical format. The three long compositions (Into The Blue, Serenade In Blue, and Return Of The Tempel) reveal how much Schulze’s art of electronic counterpoint had matured.

Meanwhile, Schulze had also revived the alias Richard Wahnfried for the albums Trancelation (ZYX, 1994), Trance Appeal (ZYX, 1996), and Drums’n’Balls (ZYX, 1997).

In the 1990s, Schulze’s activity therefore oscillated between titanic ambitions to create the masterpiece that would immortalize him and commercial trivialities of no artistic value. The double album Are You Sequenced (ZYX, 1996) and the live/studio album Dosburg Online (ZYX, 1997) reveal yet another deep creative crisis. Jubilee Edition (ZYX, 1997) is an insult to the intelligence of his fans: 25 albums collecting all the tracks discarded from previous albums, for a total of nearly two thousand minutes of awful music. Equally depressing is the series The Dark Side Of The Moog (Fax, 1994–2001), recorded with Pete Namlook, which would be released in torrents throughout the following decade.

Contemporary Works vol 1 (Manikin, 2000) and vol 2 (2002) are multiple-CD box-sets that collect assorted compositions of the 1990s.

Schulze kept speculating on his unreleased music or limited-edition music with the 50-disc CD box set The Ultimate Edition (2000), that collected Silver Edition, Historic Edition and Jubilee Edition and other amateurish music.

La Vie Electronique is another series of multiple-CD box-sets that collect unreleased music from the early days. The artistic quality is poor to say the least.

Dziekuje Bardzo (2009) was a collaboration between Lisa Gerrard and Klaus Schulze.

Klaus Schulze died in 2022 at the age of 74.