Conrad Schnitzler
Blau

THE REVIEW

A preface is needed to approach this music; we are in the early '70s, and the technical supports of that era for creating experimental electronic music were truly rudimentary. The wild and frenzied escapes were a consequence of the political moment being lived then, and this must be understood to enter into this music that carried with it a great revolutionary force. This is why these records are a true musical manifesto of breaking boundaries between genres and classifications. Conrad Schnitzler, with his infinite discography, was born in Düsseldorf in 1937, to a German father and an Italian mother, and passed away in Berlin in 2011 due to stomach cancer. He is rightly considered an absolutely prominent figure in the krautrock scene of experimental music; he was the founder of Tangerine Dream and Kluster, then dedicated himself to solo works and various collaborations with fellow musicians, always in the electronic realm. Balu is raw and abstract experimentation produced by disused robots abandoned and wandering in timeless dreamy darkness, abandoned to an eternal existence without human contact (try to think of the flesh market in the film A.I.). These are looped tapes cut and pasted like in a cinematic blob, all cold and not very catchy, repetitive mechanical fragments of sounds coming from the spectrum of minerals. A synthetic and lysergic listening is required, with a propensity for the hypnotic—fragments of future cities constantly under atomic rain and immersed in perpetual darkness à la Blade Runner, a Hopper in a poor and semi-destroyed neighborhood, sounds of galactic storms that only computer ears can capture, emanating from planets vanished millennia ago. Immerse yourself with caution, a challenging record; you might be contaminated.