The power of an icon

Klaus Schulze is no longer with us. After a long illness, the pioneer of cosmic music and kraut-rock has reached and gone beyond the places his fervid creativity had imagined and recreated through entirely new sonic worlds. Schulze's mind-spaceship is now beyond the horizon and — like a gravitational slingshot — has drifted away from Earth for good, with no way back.

A life as a pioneer, a forerunner of a new sonic world, like a colonizer of unexplored universes that his electronic symphonies let us see with our eyes closed and feel almost sensorially. A career that began as "the coolest drummer in the world" (as Julian Cope once called him) on the first splendid Tangerine Dream album of 1970 ("Electronic Meditation"), and continued with the hyper-lysergic debut of Ash Ra Tempel. Two great albums that alone would have been enough for an entire career, yet somehow they felt too small for Klaus. His vision was pushing him further, beyond the earthly space known to common senses, to venture into deep space.

This futuristic ambition led to his split from Tangerine Dream and the start of a fervid, extraordinary solo career. From "Electronic Meditation" onward, the paths of Schulze and Froese diverged to run in parallel. Out of this split came a kind of ongoing intellectual rivalry, a constant one-upmanship to establish who could push deeper into the eerie abysses of space.

This healthy "conflict" led to the creation of unforgettable works that, on the Tangerine Dream side, range from "Alpha Centauri" (1971), "Zeit" (1972), "Atem" (1973), "Phaedra" (1974) and "Rubycon" (1975), which Schulze answered blow for blow, even going further still. Not only beyond Froese's band's discography, but beyond the very common understanding of what cosmic music was meant to be. While the early Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel had looked to the stars and imagined space travel, Schulze was the first to give an authentically sensory feel of deep space. Schulze was the first to truly shatter the porthole of the spaceship in which the earlier cosmic couriers had remained firmly trapped, throwing himself naked and without a spacesuit into absolute darkness and cold.

This is the era of his masterpieces, from "Irrlicht" (1972), his most ambitious work, of a visionary power so intense it leaves you almost disbelieving at times, to its twin record "Cyborg" (1973), through to "Blackdance" (1974) and the Wagnerian "Timewind" (1975).

One of Schulze's key insights was to break radically away from the world of rock and bring classical music into contact with a strand of American minimalism, particularly the monolithic minimalism of La Monte Young, whose eternal music sparked a generation of musicians who would draw on his ideas. Schulze was one of them, so much so that his music builds a world to inhabit, sketches a landscape meant to be lived in and experienced to the fullest, much like the aspirations behind John Cage's works, now regarded as proto-minimalist ("In A Landscape").

We will miss Schulze, we will miss his music for the mind, his quadrophonic symphonies, the Wagnerian power of his compositions ("Satz Ebene", "Bayreuth Return"), almost overwhelming to the listener, with a descriptive power never before heard in cosmic music.

Now Schulze is there, in the places he had imagined and "seen". In a way, he has come home.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google