Klaus Schulze

"Kraut-rock" was one of the most revolutionary musical movements of the 20th century. The quotation marks are necessary, since, strictly speaking, we should talk about a diffuse climate rather than a movement proper, 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 diffuse climate, as we said: also because there was no homogeneity of styles or intentions. Still, at least among the most forward-looking bands, one could speak of a shared avant-garde will; iconoclastic, often extremist. Kraut rock (the name, tinged with irony, chosen to define German rock of the time) set out from Stockhausen's experiments; took certain cues from free jazz; fell in love with psychedelia; dusted off expressionism. At the same time, it kept 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 the vain attempt to sail in the wake of the earliest Pink Floyd ("Electronic Meditations"). Then, 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 shades, indeed tormented, dramatic ones.

Klaus Schulze, who had served in Edgar Froese's band, after a stint with Ash Ra Tempel (Manuel Göttsching, another cosmic traveller...), remembered all this when, setting 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 voice to his imagination. Musically, Schulze's project took shape through a distinctive use of synthesizers, moogs and sequencers, aimed at building long, liquid suites, enclosed within a few but striking chords, and steeped in dreamlike atmospheres. The result was an explosive debut: "Irrlicht" (1972), 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 leaves the mind and heart trembling before the mystery of the boundless, which, even as it pushes toward sublimation, quietly exposes the finitude of humankind. The enchantment reveals the tragedy of a wandering with no direction. "Disorientation" might be an apt term. A disorientation that demands shifting, elusive forms.

In the universe of Tangerine Dream, sounds accumulated in clusters, each often following its own slow evolution through space and time. But the man from Berlin was thinking of Wagner. He had in mind an "Endlose Melodie", a kind of "exponential" melody, one that feeds on itself and from itself draws boundless visions.

The first movement of "Irrlicht" ("Ebene"; 23'25") opens with a hiss of keyboards that is, inevitably, "astral". A magmatic, fluorescent vibration unfurls a thriller-like atmosphere, while violins begin to crackle in the distance. The imaginative and descriptive power at work here is astonishing. The "Orchester", filtered through the tortuous mazes of the "E-Maschinen", is responsible for a terrifying intensity, a sign of the clash between man (his "sehnsucht") and the cosmos, with its mute, motionless unfolding. The synth's thread-like chords loom over an empty backdrop. Harrowing drones sway ruinously across the surface of Silence. The sound stretches to the point of the incredible, dizzyingly, in a terrible delirium of fear.

Schulze condenses everything into a mystical embrace between ambient music avant la lettre and cosmic tremors. But it is a "totalizing environment" he must come to terms with. That is why it is impossible for him to render its atmospheric qualities with simple brushstrokes. He needs, therefore, metaphysical, impalpable tones as well. Thus, the "continuums" and the sounds stretched into infinity further shift the centre of gravity of this "astral symphonism" 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 soars, desperate, in a solemn flight, set within a lake of terror-stricken whirlpools. Like a modern Ulysses, Schulze casts aside every hesitation and passes column after column. 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 reverb, no longer burning with the fervour to "synthesize" the intoxication of ascending, intergalactic, otherworldly flight. It is the unstoppable shattering of "magnificent and progressive fates" against the sacredness of the universe, against its icy autism. It is, therefore, stasis: enveloping like a nebula. Its incandescent recklessness now spent, the organ weaves micro-vibrations that wilt, exhausted, like strangled flames.

In the third movement, "Exil Sils Maria" (21'27"), the cosmos is by now already a hell shadowed by paradisiacal glimmers. The prodigious titanic force of "Ebene" gives way to the despair of nothingness. Space is definitively demoted to a mere heap of maddened asteroids and dying pulsars. As if eroded by an internal de-structuring, the cosmic mimesis seems, at this point, to turn into a pure apology for the negative.

In this "psychic spatialization of sound" (to borrow Iannis Xenakis's phrase), the uninterrupted emotional flow of the psyche finds its fullest expression. Then, just as the hypnotic rarefaction is set against the intensity of the first movement, the music's dazed lingering - amid the menacing vibrations and the continuous sidereal noises produced by the synthesizers - turns into an obsessive spiral. But it is a calm obsession, indeed a resigned one. 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 hint of death. Amid incinerated galaxies and echoes reverberating from ancestral abysses, it lets itself be swallowed, completely and definitively, by that polyphony of the Void which is the true essence of the sublime magnificence of "Irrlicht".

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09/11/2006