Klaus Schulze - The Cosmic Courier

"Kraut-rock" was one of the most revolutionary musical movements of the 20th century. The quotation marks are necessary, since, strictly speaking, one should rather talk of a widespread climate, in a Germany — the one straddling the Sixties and Seventies — exposed, by then defenceless, to the stinging radiation of rock from across the Channel and the Atlantic. A widespread climate, as we said: not least because there was no uniformity of styles and intentions. Still, at least for its most forward-looking exponents, one could speak of a shared avant-garde drive; iconoclastic, often extremist. Kraut-rock (the name, tinged with irony, chosen to label German rock of the time) set out from Stockhausen's experiments; it took its cues from certain strands of free jazz; it fell in love with psychedelia; it dusted off expressionism. At the same time, it was turning its gaze upward; very far upward. It was the prelude to the birth of "cosmic music", where that adjective denoted both a style and a universal aspiration.

At the origin, Tangerine Dream (the band that codified the genre), initially lost in a vain attempt to sail offshore in the wake of the earliest Pink Floyd ("Electronic Meditations"). Then came the turning point: "Alpha Centauri", "Zeit", "Atem"… that is, enchantment, wonder, ecstasy before the vastness of outer space. But, how to put it, a surrender, a drifting, that was not free of subtle inner nuances, truly tormented and dramatic ones.
Klaus Schulze (Berlin, 1947), who had served in Edgar Froese's band, after a stint in Ash Ra Tempel (Manuel Göttsching, another cosmic wanderer…), recalls that moment when, having set aside his hesitations, in 1971 he decided to explore space on his own terms. He would later say he was looking for a way to give vent to his imagination. Musically, Schulze's project took shape in a distinctive use of synthesizers, moogs and sequencers, aimed at creating long, liquid suites, built on a few but evocative chords, immersed in dreamlike atmospheres.
In the universe of Tangerine Dream, sounds piled up in clusters, each often following its own slow spatio-temporal evolution. But the man from Berlin was thinking of Wagner. He had in mind an "Endlose Melodie", a kind of "exponential" melody, feeding on itself and drawing from itself boundless visions.

The debut is explosive: Irrlicht (1971), the highest peak from which rock has ever gazed at the stars.
The work, divided into three movements ("Ebene", "Gewitter" and "Exil Sils Maria"), is one of the great masterpieces of "kosmische musik" and of rock history. Schulze plays organ, guitar, percussion, and conjures the sound of an orchestra through various electronic instruments. "Quadrophonische Symphonie für Orchester und E-Maschinen" reads the subtitle. In practice, it is the orchestration of a torment, an unease, an icy spasm that sets mind and heart trembling before the mystery of the boundless, which, even as it pushes toward sublimation, fleetingly exposes the finitude of humankind. The enchantment reveals the tragedy of a wandering with no direction. "Disorientation" might be the right word. A disorientation that demands shifting, elusive forms.
The first movement, "Ebene" (23'25"), opens with a hiss of keyboards, needless to say, an "astral" one. A magmatic, fluorescent vibration unfurls a thriller-like atmosphere, while violins begin to crackle in the distance. The imaginative, descriptive power on display is staggering. The "Orchester", filtered through the tortuous recesses of the "E-Maschinen", is responsible for a frightening intensity, a telltale sign of the clash between man (his "Sehnsucht") and the cosmos, with its silent, motionless unfolding. The synth's thread-like chords loom over an empty backdrop. Hair-raising drones sway menacingly across the surface of silence. The sound stretches to the point of disbelief, dizzyingly, in a terrible delirium of fear.
Schulze condenses it all into a mystic embrace between ambient music avant la lettre and cosmic tremors. But it is a "totalizing environment" he must come to terms with. For this reason, he cannot possibly describe its atmospheric qualities with simple brushstrokes. He also needs, then, metaphysical, impalpable tonalities at his disposal. Thus, the continuums and the sounds stretched out to infinity shift the centre of gravity of this "astral symphonism" even further toward parallel dimensions. Space, then, just like time, ends up transposed, reconfigured on an expressionist matrix.
At 9'56", heralded by dazzling trails plunging from some incinerated constellation, the pipe organ stretches out, desperate, in a solemn flight, set within a lake of terrified vortices. Like a modern Ulysses, Schulze casts aside every hesitation and sails past pillar after pillar. The progression grows ever more unbearable and measured, until it collapses, released in a catastrophic explosion.
The music crumples in on itself ("Gewitter – Energy rise energy collapse"; 5'38"), mercilessly reduced to synthetic reverberation, no longer burning with the ardour to "synthesize" the thrill of ascending, intergalactic, otherworldly flight. What follows, then, is stasis: enveloping like a nebula. Its incandescent daring now spent, the organ weaves micro-vibrations that wilt, exhausted, like strangled flames.
In the third movement, "Exil Sils Maria" (21'27"), the cosmos has already become a hell shadowed with glimmers of paradise. The prodigious titanic force of "Ebene" gives way to the despair of nothingness. Space is definitively downgraded to a mere heap of crazed asteroids and dying pulsars. As though eroded by an inner de-structuring, the cosmic mimesis seems at this point to turn into a pure apology of the negative. In this "psychic spatialization of sound" (to borrow a phrase from Iannis Xenakis), the unbroken emotional flow of the psyche finds its fullest expression. Then, just as hypnotic rarefaction is set against the intensity of the first movement, the dazed lingering of the music — amid threatening vibrations and the continuous sidereal noises produced by the synthesizers — turns into an obsessive spiral. But it is a subdued obsession, truly resigned. At 12'48", an unsettling light (the wandering light, the "irrlicht"…) rises from the edge of eternity. There are likely superhuman scenarios radiating its restless splendour. But by now the Sound carries more than a premonition of death. Amid incinerated galaxies and echoes reverberating from ancestral abysses, it lets itself be swallowed by that polyphony of the void which is the true essence of the sublime magnificence of Irrlicht.

Poised between Wagner's most majestic symphonies and the spatial psychedelia of early Pink Floyd, Schulze composes a double album, Cyborg, which gathers four new twenty-minute-long suites, performed by a fifty-piece "cosmic orchestra". It is a new odyssey in space in which the electronic textures grow ever more psychedelic, from the solemn "Synphara" to the hypnotic "Chromengel", from the pulsating "Conphara" to the bleak "Neuronengesang".
According to critics, Schulze's fundamental innovations are two: chords sustained into infinity (achieved by weighing down the keys) and the metronomic pulse of the sequencer. The result is a revolutionary turning point in electronic music, one that would be absorbed by countless "cosmic" groups who, throughout the Seventies, especially in Germany, would give rise to the spatial variant of that sprawling progressive rock movement in Britain (King Crimson, Genesis, Gentle Giant) and France (Gong, Art Zoyd).

Starting with Picture Music in 1973, however, Schulze softens his experimentation, favouring more pronounced rhythms and flirting with electro-pop. This new, "lighter" course yields a classic like the propulsive "Totem" and brings his electronic devices closer to those of Jean-Michel Jarre.

Blackdance (1974) marks a sort of "return to Earth". While further expanding his technological arsenal thanks to new synthesizers, Schulze sets out to give the machines a human dimension, and it is no coincidence that he decides, for the first time, to use a human voice, that of Ernst Walter Siemon. Hence the twenty-two minutes of "Voices Of Syn", where Verdi arias and tenor vocals pair with cold, percussive electronics; "Some Velvet Phasing", a kind of ambient music avant la lettre with its isolationist stasis; and finally "Ways Of Changes", a thunderous raga and a very rare showcase of guitar playing on a Schulze record.

In 1975 the Berlin cosmic courier embarks on another daring gamble: a concept album dedicated to his idol Richard Wagner. For Timewind (1975), Schulze's spacecraft thus finds itself in some way forced to change course once again, drawing back closer to the more austere, glacial scores of his first two albums, but now equipped with a hold full of instruments (guitars, percussion, sequencers) and melodic solutions accumulated along the way. The use of the sequencer, in particular, forges an incredibly airy, enveloping, futuristic sound, well ahead of its time, so much so that it would echo considerably in later landmarks of electronic music such as Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygene" and Vangelis's "Blade Runner".
The pinnacle of the work is the colossal opening suite "Bayreuth Return", which refers to the Bavarian town where the Leipzig-born composer chose to live. A spectral cosmic wind sweeps through the track from the very start, seeping in like fine dust among the synth's liquid textures. Then, around the third minute, comes one of Schulze's classic twists (think of the crescendo of "Ebene"). The sequencers begin to paint celestial melodic phrases, overlapping in various keys, radiating into the cosmic void, in an ever more hypnotic, enveloping spiral, in which the listener ends up literally swallowed, like a spaceship sucked into a black hole. Within this nebulous magma of hisses and synthesized strings, of modulations and synthetic pulses, where one rhythm gathers momentum while another fades amid the lapping of the keyboards, the wonderful main melody makes its way forward, as in a gradual ascent toward some remote, perhaps unreachable galaxy. This panic-stricken terror of space, this sense of losing all sensory control — as in an Indian raga projected into the cosmos — permeates the track, lending it a genuinely Wagnerian sense of drama.
The second movement, "Wahnfried 1883", takes its name instead from Wagner's residence in Bayreuth, combining the words Wahn (illusion) and Fried (peace), while 1883 is the year of the Leipzig composer's death. Slower and more meditative, with pulses and reverberations now gone, firmly on course toward ambient music, the track rests entirely on organ drones floating in the immense solitude of cosmic darkness, pierced by electric discharges from the synths and surrounded by melodies as static as they are contrite and solemn, like a kind of stellar requiem for a celestial body. Another electronic wall of sound, another monumental suite, one on which some — the Orb, for instance — would build almost an entire career.
For a long time Schulze's only album released in the US, Timewind is indeed the perfect entry point into the Berlin master's sprawling discography, as well as one of his most cinematic works (almost an ideal soundtrack for a Tarkovsky film). In 2016 it was remastered in a lavish edition, accompanied by an unmissable booklet — with photos, handwritten notes and contemporary testimonies, including one from the artist himself — with the addition of a second disc containing three bonus tracks.

In parallel, Schulze keeps up various collaborations with Cosmic Jokers, Richard Wahnfried and Stomu Yamashta. Then, in 1976, he recruits Mike Shrieve, former Santana drummer, who heightens the rhythmic component of his sound. Moondawn (1976) thus turns out to be more accessible and sunnier.

This new course is interrupted, however, by Mirage (1977), one of the German composer's coldest and least approachable works. A decidedly darker mood dominates. Klaus's brother was dying, and the heaviness of that period is reflected in the album's sound. "Velvet Voyage" is a cold scenario, perpetually suspended, sustained by the spiralling developments of an alienating sound that is indeed a direct offspring of the freer, more introspective Tangerine Dream experiences, but filtered through the solo Schulze's sensibility into broad sheets of glacial moog. The epic of "Crystal Lake", on the other hand, is a slow, muffled gaze upon slender, fragile forms of ice, as if to underline human transience, across twenty-nine minutes of hypnotic reiterations and sonic backgrounds. The 2005 reissue would add the liturgical sacredness of "In cosa crede chi non crede?", a track that completes the snapshot of a particular and unrepeatable personal and creative period for Schulze, describing the method of an artist who doesn't build on an idea but lets the initial inspiration guide the piece through its spirals.

Klaus Schulze's distinctive trait is precisely that of pouring only and exclusively his own soul into the sound, handing the listener the active task of attributing new meanings and new identifications to his compositions: a pure, uncontaminated approach, at times genuinely idealistic. Without frills, without pretension, without any arrogance whatsoever. To quote Schulze himself: "I wish everyone a pleasant exploration of themselves, I can't express it better in words, because I'm not a poet but a musician." In this writer's view, of inestimable worth.

What follows, however, is a work of a completely different character: the highly sensual soundtrack for the porn film Body Love, by the Dane Lasse Braun. Then comes the baroque X, a collection of suites dedicated to celebrated figures of the past, including Nietzsche, von Kleist and Ludwig II of Bavaria. On this latter work, Schulze manages to combine minimalism and noise, wild percussion and ghostly arias, giving a demonstration of the most dramatic qualities of his music, to the point that the German magazine "Sounds" names him "musician of the year".

Continuing his work of research and experimentation, Schulze moves on to using computers and sound synthesis, shifting from analogue to digital signal. His move towards classical music manifests itself in a particular passion for Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Rachmaninoff, without forgetting, however, the spatial psychedelia of Pink Floyd and the "colourful" sounds of John Coltrane.

After the work Dune (the first time a voice appears, that of Arthur Brown, in one of its suites) and the experimental Dig It, Schulze returns with a grandiose album like Audentity, able to combine more accessible sounds with bold experimentation. Meanwhile, though, cosmic music has been rediscovered and reworked in a new-age vein. And Schulze's ambient atmospheres thus become a precious treasure for a new generation of enthusiasts, seeking a union of music and spirituality. Not always, however, will the quality of his albums live up to his talent.

But the German artist will still show signs of resurgence with spectacular works such as the Dresden Performance, the Royal Festival Hall recordings, or the work Das Wagner Desaster-Live. Meanwhile, his vast output is enriched by some monumental collections, such as the ten-disc sets Silver Edition and Historic Edition, and by a work for the theatre, Totentag.

Klaus Schulze's activity would continue throughout the Nineties, poised between flare-ups of old magic and tired exercises in style, between more classic albums like In Blue and experiments like Midi Classics, an unreleased double album intended as a tribute to the great classics, reread through the sound of the Moog, percussion, and improvisation. Unpredictability itself has always been a decisive component of Schulze's sound: "Music," the German musician maintains, "must be an element that frees the imagination, and so it can only be conceived in mental images, which are perceived differently depending on how one listens and where one is. When I record in the studio, I start with a 4/4 tempo over which I play a sequence on the Moog, which I complete with percussion. Then, once I'm satisfied with the base, I add chords and melodies. When I start something I never know where I'll end up, so you could say I've improvised."

While Jubilee Edition (1997), a monumental package of 25 discs containing outtakes from previous albums (for a total of almost two thousand minutes of music!), and the The Dark Side Of The Moog series (1994-2005), recorded with Pete Namlook, disappoint expectations, the two monumental sets Contemporary Works vol 1 (2000) and Contemporary Works vol 2 (2002) instead condense some of the best insights of Schulze's output from the Nineties.
The second volume, in particular, sees Schulze joined by his longtime partner Wolfgang Tiepold on cello, Thomas Kagermann on flute, violin and voice, Audrey Motaug on voice, Tobias Becker on oboe and English horn, a certain Mickes on guitar and Tom Dams on "some groove loops". Compared to the previous volume, the overall mood of the work is decidedly more relaxed, more homogeneous, the rhythmic parts are less dominant, though the beauty reached by some parts of the four "Ballett" CDs with Tiepold is not matched here: the mood of the work leans more towards the classic Schulze, with a strong emphasis on passages with an oriental-leaning atmosphere, especially in the use of voices. Five CDs, with extremely long tracks ("The Theme: Rhodes Elegy": 65 minutes, "They Shut Him Out Of Paradise": 41 minutes) and others as short as 1-2 minutes, in which Schulze celebrates his usual pagan rite, now in dialogue with his fellow officiants (some parts with oboe and acoustic instruments are particularly beautiful), now painting solitary grand frescoes but also childlike sketches, now simply providing mere background accompaniment.
Between great emotion and great tedium, between immeasurable art and upper-middle-class lounge-bar chill-out, six hours of music flow by so cold and polished that in the end it warms the heart. Misery and nobility. Or perhaps, more simply, two intersecting ways of reading it.

Also worth noting is Live@Klangart, namely two CDs recorded live at the KlangArt festival in Osnabrück on 9 June 2001. Liquid improvisations, smooth and melancholic melodies, the sacredness of an organ, sequencer and Gregorian chant, the grandeur of a symphony, the physicality of driving rhythms, an anguished stillness, the pictorial abstraction of a cello. This (and more) is still what Klaus Schulze can do. The music here does not stylistically differ dramatically from that offered on the monumental box set Contemporary Works vol 1, although the classic Schulze clearly prevails over some of the new tendencies that had surfaced on the previous work. Wonderful is the central part of the second CD, featuring Tiepold's cello, and anyone who appreciates Schulze's work will find in these two CDs all the elements that made them love his music, even though one cannot help but notice how some parts have an air of déjà-vu, of an already-absorbed musical archetype, how notes of banality crop up here and there, how at times one finds oneself facing craftsmanship rather than art. And yet there is always a passage, a sequence, a chord that reveals the talent, the genius.

After spending the Eighties producing a multitude of records, including some resounding flops, the Schulze who steps into the new millennium is a composer in full artistic expansion, torn between thinly veiled hints of classicism and sharp rhythmic tendencies. In his music it is always possible to detect a soul, a dramatic anguish over existence and becoming, a romantic tension in the literary sense of the term.

In 2005, a new album comes out, titled Moonlake. The sidereal spaces of Kubrickian memory inaugurated with Irrlicht undergo a kind of irreversible contraction. In place of the boundless, dark, sinister, icy interstellar voids, the composer now seems to prefer the intimacy of a nearby sidereal space. The Moon, then, the astronomical object closest to the Earth, and, by extension, the Earth itself. A reduction, a narrowing of the field of inquiry that nonetheless does not cheapen the canons proper to kosmische musik. Because it is still a journey, albeit one of fewer light years.
"Playmate In Paradise", split by an unsettling Pink Floyd-like break into two independent fragments, takes shape, at least in its first half, as a long oriental-flavoured ride à la Jarre. The laments intoned by shadowy desert raiders (created in collaboration with singer and violinist Thomas "Fiddle Michel" Kagermann) give way, at the 14th minute of the suite (30 minutes long), to a sinister logical passage that leads into the second part, where the exotic motifs of the prologue turn into genuine space music. "Playmate in Paradise", at least in its ending, is probably one of the tracks closest to Tangerine Dream across the whole of Schulze's "solo" output of the last fifteen years. No surprise there: Schulze's music faithfully reproduces the laws of ambient without any contaminating compromise. The aspiration tends towards linearity, cyclicality, a single-minded path. The sense of rhythm becomes now variable, now constant, within a hypnotic, disorienting groove.
A certain mathematical rigour instead seems to be the common denominator of the following track, "Artemis In Jubileo", built upon a vaguely world-music exoskeleton. The two remaining tracks, recorded live in Poznan, Poland, for Gert Hof's light and illusion show on 5 November 2003, fall in line with the substrate of Cyborg (1973) and Dig It (1980). In "Some Thoughts Lion", the nagging refrain devoured and revisited from the tensions of Blackdance (the historic 1974 album) is enriched with interpolations and paradoxes, incorporating, in its second half, the psychedelic, misleading power of the mini-Moog. Thick, primitive sounds, vibrating with space-time echoes that are anything but contemporary.
Kraut reverberations dominate the very opening bars of "Mephisto", a track that allows the former Ash Ra Tempel member a carefree use of beats and synthesizers in pure "Dune" (1979) style. However, the track's formula mixes elements typical of the Oldfieldian universe of "Amarok" or "T3es Lunas" with the soundscapes of Wendy Carlos's "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer".

While his long string of releases and collections continues (rather wearily) — the latest, the Ballet series, now up to its fourth volume — Schulze keeps up his live activity, with evocative concerts, enhanced also by the choice of venues, including old churches and theatres.

In 2007 comes Kontinuum, and Schulze surprises everyone. Master at work, in the finest sense of the phrase. We had left him amid a string of ultra-limited box sets (Contemporary Works), from which he had then extracted part of his output: some good (Vanity Of Sounds and The Crime Of Suspense above all), others frankly out of form and tired (the 4 Ballet volumes). At the same time, the fruitful collaboration with the late Pete Namlook continued in homage to Pink Floyd (The Dark Side Of The Moog), along with reissues from another mammoth fifty-disc box set, "The Ultimate Edition", under the name "La Vie Electronique", and many highly praised live shows.
Schulze never really stopped, but Kontinuum is truly the most striking surprise. A record in which, after years spent flirting with technology, he went back to wrapping himself in warm layers of sequencer and synth, as in the days of the never sufficiently appreciated Mirage. The Schulze who sculpts architectures halfway between the cosmic and the ambient, the one who, between a gamble and a flow of sound, has always known how to touch listeners' hearts with delicacy.

Then, in 2008, comes the unexpected collaboration that shakes up the Schulze universe: with the voice of Dead Can Dance, the magnificent Lisa Gerrard. The first fruit is the album Farscape, wrapped in an elegant white sleeve. It is a single 155-minute composition, divided into 7 parts and spread across 2 CDs under the title "Liquid Coincidence". It is a work that adds nothing to Schulze's career, nor to Gerrard's: it draws on the entire electronic arsenal available today to the maestro and his musical mastery, as well as on the undeniable evocative qualities of Gerrard's voice, but it is a repetitive composition that, given also its length, severely tests the listener's patience. There is no shortage of touching moments, such as the first part, but often the music abandons any point of reference and drifts aimlessly, barely guided by the singer's chant-like melody.
But Schulze and Gerrard have nothing to prove to anyone, and, all things considered, it's a sublime pleasure just to imagine them playing together.

Klaus Schulze & Lisa Gerrard: Dziekuje Bardzo – Vielen Dank is the recording of the concert held in Warsaw in November 2008 (the eponymous DVD, on the other hand, is dedicated to the documentary “In The Moog For Love”).

The new project Shadowlands, announced in early 2011, finally comes to fruition only in 2013, after a thousand setbacks. From the outset the album seems to want to sound “different”: setting aside retro leanings, Schulze tries to pick up the more recent threads of his career and give them continuity, both in terms of duration (which once again stretches out incredibly) and sound. In the forty minutes of “Shadowlights” we find ourselves back in the climates explored alongside Gerrard: layers of analogue flows and polyrhythmic sequencers meeting voices with an ethnic flavour, before gradually merging with the lulling rhythm of the percussion. “In Between” carries us through luminous tangles and gentle flashes closely recalling his digital phase, before turning more crepuscular and once again embracing à-la-Farscape textures in “Licht Und Schatten”. “The Rhodes Violin” hides away for fifty-five minutes in the ambient ups and downs of Moonlake, while the closing “Tibetan Loops” is perhaps the only genuine small step forward: a clear, hazy pièce that accompanies the chanting of monks and a fine array of traditional instruments.
Schulze once again proves himself an unsurpassed master at evoking images and sensations through his music. It's a gift he has honed above all in the last decade of his career, in which his synthetic sculptures have increasingly drawn closer to cinematic scenarios, abandoning the frontier of the mind in favour of that of the senses. Shadowlands is an album that flows by without ever growing tedious, but which — in total contrast to its splendid predecessor — sounds exactly as one would expect in toto, without for that reason showing any sign of fatigue.

In 2013, a tandem recording with fellow musician Gunter Schickert finally sees the light of day for the first time — Schickert being a musician who spent years wrapped in obscurity but who is now enjoying a second youth, thanks to the reissue of “Überfällig” (2012), soon to be followed by that of his debut “Samtvogel”.
The Schulze-Schickert Session was born in September 1975, between a tour of Italy and Switzerland and the production of the second Far East Family Band album, “Parallel World”. In both cases, first as a roadie and then as a studio assistant, accompanying the former Tangerine Dream member was none other than Schickert, who at the time had just released “Samtvogel”, produced by Schulze himself. And in the midst of all this, in Schulze's studios near Hannover, the pair also found time for a four-handed recording.
Synthesizers, sequencers and keyboards from one, and a twelve-string guitar (with metal strings) from the other, in instinctive symbiosis, sketch out an epic cosmic ride that, besides recalling the Schulze of that era (those were the days of Timewind), anticipates — albeit in a more dramatic mood — the Ashra (no longer Tempel) that was to come, thanks to Schickert's playing, which on more than one occasion recalls Manuel Göttsching. In fact, it's practically his exact counterpart. And it's perhaps no coincidence that it's him, and no one else, on guitar.
A single track divided into six movements (somewhat as happened with Göttsching's own “E2-E4”) for a total of 45 minutes; to which must be added, on the CD release, the bonus tracks “Spirits Of The Dead” (solemn and dark) and “Happy Country Life” (liquid and pastoral).
In any case, strictly for completists.

Schulze flees from so-called modernity. His is a time without events, a cold and rarefied dimension, chronologically out of step. Beneath all this dust, the iridescent darts of the legendary cosmic music still shine. His trekkie-like excursion into the hidden sidereal depths, for the moment, is not yet a journey back.

After a long illness, Klaus Schulze passed away on 26 April 2022. The news was broken to fans by his son Max in a brief note: the pioneer of German kosmische musik died at the age of 74. The announcement, addressed to fans, came from his son Max with a short statement: “It is with deep sorrow that we must inform you that Klaus passed away yesterday, 26 April 2022, at the age of 74, after a long illness, yet suddenly and unexpectedly. He leaves behind not only a great musical legacy, but also a wife, two children and four grandchildren. On his behalf and on behalf of the family, we want to thank you for your loyalty and support over the years: it meant a great deal! His music will live on, as will our memories”.

2022 also saw the release of his final work, Deus Arrakis, the effigy on his tombstone, the posthumous glory and the conclusion of a discography that laid the foundations for all the electronic music that followed. It is a revisiting of some old recordings from the days of his album X, at the time inspired by the work of Frank Herbert; they were originally conceived as the soundtrack for the film “Dune”, and indeed released in '79; later, once the idea of using them for the film was dropped, they remained tied only to the literary theme. It was a phone call from Lisa Gerrard, together with the prompt of Denis Villeneuve's remake of “Dune”, that pushed the German composer to revisit those pieces.
Divided into three parts, the album is solemn and colossal, in all its pharaonic splendour. The first suite, “Osiris”, in four movements, draws the listener's mind into the mythological times of the Egyptian deities and the earliest dynasties, with a vintage sound that seems to recall his late-'70s phase: full, epochal, visionary sound. “Seth”, the second suite, feels like a series of ups and downs across desert dunes, with an introduction that sounds like a digital sandstorm, before settling into a pace that is both martial and calm, like the sailing of Ra and Seth's solar barque, which in legend towed the sun from dawn to dusk over the deserts of the Maghreb.
The final suite, “Der Hauch des Lebens”, “the breath of life”, closes the forty-seventh and final album by the master of the Berlin school. A faint woman's sigh echoes softly, beyond our understanding, over a sprawling “living requiem”, played on the master's keyboards. The pranayama that becomes sound, like breath that coagulates once more into lifeblood within, setting the organism in motion, returning to the physicality of rhythm, to our own perception of our limbs, of our bodies. It is his final shavasana, his eternal rest. A sarcophagus is sealed with its relics, made inviolable by its guardians, ahead of the journey into the afterlife; at the same time, a boat glides quietly along the Nile delta, among papyrus and bamboo canes; the waters of the Nile rock a newborn in their calm swaying. Here life and death find balance once more, complementary to one another. Sound of a moving and absolute visual force, always capable of conjuring images in the most grandiose and total way.

The choice to evoke mythological Egypt on his final, mammoth album proves a winning one, for an LP that closes, with great dignity, a career marked not so much by commercial success as by genuine creativity and experimental achievement. A synthesis as classic as it is flawless, if not for the fact that, by this point in his journey, there was very little left to add or innovate. Archaeology of sound, for the musical speleologists of today.
Ruhe in Frieden, Klaus Schulze.

Contributions by Marco Castagnetto – Musicboom (“Mirage”), Michele Chiusi (“Contemporary Works Vol. 2”, “Live@Klangart”), Emilio Saturnini (“Moonlake”), Gaetano LaMontagna (“Farscape”), Matteo Meda (“Kontinuum”, “Shadowlands”), Gianni Avella (“The Schulze-Schickert Session”), Matteo Ortenzi (“Deus Arrakis“)

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