ABOUT KLAUS SCHULZE

 

I'm coming back to Klaus Schulze.

 

I'm listening to his discography again... He was one of the people who led me to make music myself...

 

I also went to many of his Paris concerts, between the late 70s and the 90s.

 

And I met him several times, in Paris or at his studio in Germany.

 

I've been in close contact with his manager/publisher, Klaus Mueller. 

 

And I think there's a text by me in the booklet of one of the “special editions” of his complete works, the historic one, perhaps - under the signature of ‘Séji’, I think.

 

I would like to say that I have immense respect for the man. He was an inventor, a pioneer. A real one.

 

Since Irrlicht, Cyborg, Black Dance, Time Wind, he has never ceased to open up new, experimental, exploratory avenues. Some of Schulze's later albums, even his most recent ones, may seem to capitalize on this legacy.

 

But Schulze's music has always had a sound, a style recognizable among a thousand...

 

Without being controversial, someone like Jean-Michel Jarre didn't invent anything. He had other talents, such as marketing and staging mega-concerts financed by public and private sponsors. But his music hasn't had the directing force of a Klaus Schulze, a Tangerine Dream or a Kraftwerk, or even a Brian Eno.

 

Along with Tangerine Dream, Schulze was one of those who brought this music to the concert stage, when it could have remained a studio creation. He was accompanied by Harald Grosskopf, Manuel Göttsching, Arthur Brown, Rainer Bloss, Lisa Gerrard, and perhaps Wolfgang Tiepold on cello (I'm not sure if he played live with Schulze). But for the most part, it was Klaus Schulze at the helm, with his modular moog, organ, minimogs, polymoog, VCS3, then the GDS computer and the new Midi lutheries (Alesis and others).

 

The memory I retain of these concerts is that of this white silhouette, sitting on the floor in front of his black wall of modular synths, launching his sequences, coating his polyphonies, and immersing himself in his minimoog solos, the solos of a whirling dervish, lost in tangled oriental loops.

 

Schulze's concerts were an immersive, hypnotic experience of life.

Schulze's recorded music offers a purer, more controlled, more intellectualized version of this experience.

 

But duration is always a given.

 

Unless I'm mistaken, Klaus Schulze has seldom recorded short pieces.

 

He would have been blackballed by the little bastards who lock Spotify playlists these days, and exclude without warning anything longer than four minutes and with an ounce of experimentation - you don't want to wake listeners up from a playlist “to sleep on”, do you...

 

Schulze taught me a lot about the temporality of a composition. He invited me to reflect on its linearity, its ruptures. He taught me about its architecture - a bass line, the polyphony that carries it, the rise of a first sequence, then a second sequence that acts as counterpoint, and electronic effects that cross the stereophonic spectrum, like spices that add the “final touch” to a cooked dish.

 

I loved Klaus Schulze, too, for his hybridization of certain classical references, Wagner, Mahler. And for the genius with which he constructed some of his most abstract compositions - Mirage, Dune, X...

 

For me, one of the summits of Schulzian art is “Sebastian im Traum” in Audentity... It's an absolute masterpiece, in its abstraction, its unfolding, its leit motives...

 

I don't think anything has ever equalled for me the experience of listening to “Sebastian im Traum”. This piece took me very far, very deeply inside myself...

 

I could write pages and pages about what Klaus Schulze has meant to me, about his inspiration, about what he has allowed me to imagine and think, and finally, about his driving role in my decision to make electronic music myself...

 

I don't know how to express all that I owe him...