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After stints with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, drummer-turned-keyboardist Klaus Schulze created with his debut as a soloist a work that for many just possibly might out-Zeit Zeit. "Irrlicht" (literally meaning "erring light") is the German equivalent to the British 'Will o' the Wisp'; malevolent lights said to be fairy tale creatures luring people off of well-known paths and into a marshy doom. This is the musical equivalent of taking out a huge, cosmic knife and slicing off a gigantic slab of space. Just how inert is this one? The first 10 minutes of the opening track represent a strict meditation on D. Not the chord of D, mind you. The note. Piercing through the slow pulsations of D-drone, like wisps of clouds rapidly slicing through a full moon fixed in location on some October night, are strands of strings and other metallic sounds. The orchestra strings, echoing somewhere off in the distance, represent the most incredible blurring of real orchestra and imitative mellotron I have ever heard. If it weren't for some contextual clues dropped that this is an orchestra, you really wouldn't be able to tell if it were one or the other. Around the ten-minute mark, Schulze initiates a series of gothic, minor chords on the organ (predominantly Gmin, Fmin, and Cmin, and variations on these), set against a ghastly wind that begins to simulate crying voices as the music progresses. Towards the close of the piece, the chords begin to throb and swell from channel to channel, generating rhythm pulses that take on an eerie sequencer quality, in an age long before sequencers were established. With "Satz Gewitter," the void opens, and all becomes sucked into a blob of echo, electronic wave-shifts, and tranquil, static organ lines that continue to reverberate the minor chords in the previous movement. The final movement is a precursor to the amorphous purgatories explored by Robert Fripp in his soundscape works (e.g., A Blessing of Tears, Gates of Paradise). This is pretty much the archetype of a Klaus Schulze album: experimental, colossal in its ambient geography, and quite beautiful if one's ears are in the right place. If you hate his work, you are likely to substitute these descriptors with words like monotonous and pointless. In any event, rest assured that in purchasing Irrlicht you can distill the essence of what Klaus Schulze in his prime period was bringing to the table. review by Joe McGlinchey — 12-3-04 —

m a t t

After working briefly with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel (he appears on the debut albums by both bands), Klaus Schulze began a career as a solo artist that is among the most important in the history of electronic music. His meditative, stretched-out style helped form the basis of the so-called Berlin School of electronic music, which came to prominence in the mid 1970s. Schulze was one of the pioneers of ambient electronic music and, along with Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh, was an influence on the style that would become known as New Age. Schulze's early albums have a few things in common with the contemporaneous releases by Tangerine Dream — which is ironic, considering that the one Tangerine Dream album released while he was in the band (Electronic Meditations) doesn't have much in common at all. Schulze often goes for a bigger sound than Tangerine Dream, though, and the music is (to my ears, anyway) even more intensely "German." Schulze's compositions also often have a more sophisticated sense of development than Tangerine Dream's (though a listener partial to Tangerine Dream might substitute "conventional" for "sophisticated") and a kinesis that is usually absent in music of this style. These characteristics may be the result of Schulze's classical training as well as his background as a drummer. Schulze's debut, Irrlicht, is my favorite of the early Klaus Schulze records. Thick, resonant, repetetive and sometimes dramatic, Irrlicht does indeed out-Zeit Tangerine Dream's infamous double-LP spacefest, which was also released in 1972. Though Schulze would quickly become known for his use of synthesizers, Irrlicht does not feature them; Irrlicht's atmospheres are created by organs, generators, and electronically-processed orchestral passages. While Tangerine Dream's Zeit is an obvious point of reference for Irrlicht, I detect an important divergence of philosophy: whereas Zeit was about making sonic paintings — music that essentially existed outside of time — Irrlicht treats time more traditionally and does consist of passages that move (albeit slowly) from a point A to a point B and beyond. It is likely this attention to development that accounts for the album's moments of drama. Nevertheless, this is principally an album designed to be played for its atmosphere and Irrlicht certainly delivers on that score. The ideal context would be at night during a thunderstorm in an old house, but this music is powerful enough that you can simply dim the lights, put on Irrlicht and be transported somewhere unsettlingly gothic no matter where you are. If you're into this kind of music, Irrlicht is one of your essential purchases. review by Matt P. — 9-2-06 —