KLAUS SCHULZE
Dig It

In the intricate jungle of recordings, reissues, rehabilitations, and the like, Klaus Schulze's album Dig It (Brain, 1980), like much of the most interesting and less 'digestible' music, hasn't received the attention it deserves from record labels, except for a CD release enriched by an (unnecessary) bonus track, but with lesser sound quality than the almost unfindable original vinyl. Yet it is an unmissable work, recommended not only to devotees of electronic music or to the pasionari of kraut and post-kraut sounds, but to all who love to listen and 'feel', patiently ready to await the emotions and visions that such music inevitably generates.

Dig It is a wonderfully dated album: although it's Schulze's first work entirely produced with digital equipment, the compositions manage to build a rich and vivid magmatic texture, where an omnipresent, poignant melancholy intertwines with more unsettling and contemporary echoes, within a framework coherent to a melodic type of dictation. Listening to Dig It also brings to mind that caravan of splendid artists like: Edgar Froese, Manuel Gottsching, Labradford, Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh, Neu!, Faust, etc., whose innovations have allowed the very modern Sunn O))), Loscil, Fennesz, William Basinski, Alva Noto, Tim Hecker, Matmos, etc., to continue experimentation on a base that now looks a lot like a real tradition.

Let's get to the album in question: the work opens immediately with a masterpiece: "Death of an Analogue" (note the subtle irony of the title) unfolds its thematic rosary starting from an extended note onto which a perfect drum timing is grafted; it is indeed from the rhythmic material that simple harmonic molecules emerge, in a crescendo we might call post-Mahlerian that combines a sort of solemn march with a series of syncopated interruptions from which emerges, almost like a face from the mist, Schulze's transcendent, intangible vocoded voice; remarkable once again is the work of percussion and bells that accompany the cadence. A compelling and slow gallop towards territories where vision and ecstasy magically coexist. You haven't quite recovered when another gem bursts forth, like "Weird Caravan": here the bass weaves a very "sixties" harmonic architecture on which the synthesizer's action, explicitly treated 'à la Hammond', evokes certain wonders of Brian Auger, together with the most convincing insights of the very first Tangerine Dream; here too the soundscape allows the imagination to slip, and, if willing, it can lead, without the need for chemical artifices, to a journey.

Side A of the vinyl closes with "The Loope isn't a Hooker": eight minutes and twenty seconds characterized by a series of loops that build a bridge between the different materials of which the two sides are composed; to the looming rhythm, here add, multiplying, "spatial" interventions and interferences with which the track unfolds; curiously, the melodious leitmotiv is produced precisely by the web of percussion, until Schulze’s keyboard arrives to clarify the overall scope of the entire track.

A few minutes of decompression, the time to place side B onto the turntable and we fly towards the long "Synthasy" with which the album concludes: a complex suite far more experimental than what has been heard so far. From the very first bars, Schulze projects us into a cosmogony where angst and wonder are equivalent (but how much inspiration do the soundtracks of the last thirty years of science fiction cinema owe to Schulze!); our space and digital shuttle sails among sobbing nebulas, pre-drone filaments, harmonic deconstructions; from the percussive fragments (gong reverberations, barely touched congas, episodic snare drums) emerges, with the slowness of astral thoughts, an incredibly sweet thin melodic line: six, seven stretched notes, then even more expanded, until they become rings without continuity solution. In a multicolored and stratified wandering, the track seems to find the harmonic solutions simultaneously with its own development: broken voices in rarefied crystals delve—as the title would suggest—into a thematic abyss, whose height Schulze may have only reached in the essential Irrlicht. The dance gradually fades out in a declining and moving finale.

Spending forty-five minutes with Dig It is a true privilege: the luxury of being subjected to very intense emotional stimuli; the pleasure of dedicating a corner of the Universe to oneself; the rare opportunity of being witnesses to an art that, using cold electronic and digital matter, just because manipulated by a genuine artist, transforms into a lyrical act, into suggestion, into song and, at worst, into well-being.