Klaus Schulze
Beyond Recall

What does a Spanish title that sounds like a spaghetti western, ""Gringo Nero"", do at the beginning of a work by the Teutonic Klaus Schulze? Simple, it announces the change, the courageous evolution of a musician who, with "Beyond Recall", released in 1991, reaches the twenty-third album of his impressive discography. When you listen to this ""Gringo Nero"", you encounter other surprises, like the flamenco guitar tone featured in four solos throughout the piece’s mere 27-minute duration. Naturally, it's not an acoustic guitar but a sampled tone that the electronic Schulze delivers to us through his keyboards.

Divided into about ten episodes, this successful piece alternates the recurring theme offered by the sampled guitar with atmospheric synth solos, with interludes where male and female voices in the grip of heated eroticism make their fleeting appearance, and a rich percussion in which tom-toms, cymbals, hi-hats (or rather: their digital simulacrum) and nervous squeaks punctuate the sounds; finally, with a nocturnal and jungle-like effectism populated by elephant trumpets and chirping crickets.

The constant variation and continual alternation of themes, musical ideas, and sounds are the main features of the entire work, not just the opening track. Indeed, four other tracks, ranging in duration from 11 to 14 minutes, confirm the happy inventions present on this album: the last record released on vinyl for Schulze, without ""Gringo Nero" which is a bonus track on the CD edition. Thus, we range from the digital piano of ""Trancess", a true showcase of the German's exuberant imagination, to the almost jazz atmosphere of ""The Big Fall", to the cello and percussion glimpsed in "Airlights" and its noisy finale. Only one track recalls Schulze of the '70s, and it is a crystal-clear arpeggio realized with a sequencer and consequently titled "Brave Old Sequence".

But the times when the German musician would construct a harmonic substrate and keep it there, improvising solos for half an hour per track, are long gone. With "Beyond Recall," Klaus Schulze pushes his creativity forward again: beyond the memory of himself.