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One afternoon in 2008. I was opening the package that had arrived that day from Amazon and had begun to examine the contents. The Austrian seller, in addition to the ordered CD, had enclosed a couple of brochures with recent music releases: flipping through those little pages distractedly, I only looked at the cover images, not reading German. At a certain point, two names well known to me, two passions from distant decades: and I couldn't believe my eyes. An album by Klaus Schulze and Lisa Gerrard: he, from the early '70s, a champion of (German) electronic music; she, the voice of Dead Can Dance from the mid-'80s, a voice that, like few others, has sunk its nails into our subconscious.
Klaus Schulze and Lisa Gerrard together. Possible?
This music is the testimony of their artistic meeting. "Farscape": a landscape seen from afar, whose boundaries are destined to remain undefined. A double album, which, like every work by Klaus Schulze, requires considerable commitment from the listener: 78 minutes long the first CD, 74 minutes the second. Seven tracks, all with the same title: "Liquid Coincidence" (1, 2, 3, etc.). Aseptic cover image: neon lights, blinding white, an impending sense of cold.
Klaus Schulze's keyboards are soft, muffled. More than usual. The beginning of the album cradles with soft sounds, perceived as if inside amniotic fluid, and this feeling will accompany the listener for all 152 minutes. It doesn't take long for a gradual intensification to arrive, the sound carpet transforms by layering, but the dominant idea is to lay out a compact layer of electronic sounds on which to place a dense percussive web or cutting synth sequences. Leaving space, this time, for the voice of Lisa Gerrard.
Lisa Gerrard's singing is sound offered to Schulze's alchemies. No lyrics to sing, nor messages to launch. Phonemes, syllables, vocal archetypes. Hers is a improvisation-meditation, a voice that can be cavernous or rise to heights where it can no longer be reached. Both protagonist and at the same time at the service of the sound mix, now in the foreground, now in the background, always with a collected poise that is able to dissect the substrate of our emotional reactions the more it becomes ascetic and speculative.
The challenge of "Farscape" was to combine two strong personalities, celebrating the marriage between Schulze's synthesizers and a very particular female presence. The result is open because this music, more than others, lends itself to subjective reactions. Perhaps not everything works perfectly, the crucial point is the understanding between the two protagonists: sometimes it seems not entirely successful, as if Schulze and Gerrard were proceeding along the same track but each on their own. Yet the "Farscape" experiment had a follow-up in some live concerts, which would seem to contradict what has just been stated, and in further releases (2008 and 2009) that partly document those evenings.
There is an unusual charm emanating from the tracks of this double CD, making it a work out of the ordinary. As if the sound dimension of a long dream of ours was being returned to us, snatched from us at the moment of awakening. Or as if one day, without warning, we were confronted with the enigma of a liquid coincidence.
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