Klaus Schulze
Irrlicht

Emotions...

Dark whistles emerging from nowhere. Bursts of synths that intensify more and more, endlessly repeating their pattern. Ebene, indeed.

Klaus Schulze. The solitary German prince. The most influential man for the development of electronic music alongside Kraftwerk and Neu!, the one who, together with Tangerine Dream, laid the foundations, even if still in the embryonic stage. Small steps made by great men. In 1971, after Tangerine's Electronic Meditation with Schulze, Alpha Centauri was released, one of the first German albums that revisits the lesson of A Saucerful Of Secrets and reworks it in an impressive manner, effectively starting the Cosmic movement in Germany. A point, or rather 1000, for the development of this genre.

But Irrlicht is different - it’s a journey, at times seemingly without return. Irrlicht, Klaus's debut on the German market (1972), a few months before the legendary Zeit by Froese's Tangerine.

Sighs and vibrations that flee into the infinite pulsing of keyboards and various electronic gizmos; a dark and austere road, with a tight atmosphere. The introduction laying out the red carpet, of blood, for the violins. Gloomy, almost blanching. The orchestra of dead waves and in the background, some voices are heard, disappearing into the electronic fog of synthesizers before finishing their disjointed phrases; they seem like placid pleas for help. Everything closes in more and more, the air you breathe becomes tight.

It implodes into itself - the organ.

Ebene alone would suffice to delineate the entire cosmic music movement. 23 minutes of continuous disappearing and appearing sounds, a whirlwind of emotions that few records can offer.

We were speaking of the organ. The focal point of the entire album. Music has never sounded so gloomy as in Ebene. Or maybe it has, but here it is literally distressing. When you expect the note to change, no, it persists, it doesn't allow itself to be manipulated, it remains. The ocean created by Schulze is so well-controlled that everything seems perfectly normal. He changes, by the gracious concession of his genius, the rules of music. He makes it tactile, perpetual, not temporal, unaware of what minutes, hours, days, months are. It repeats infinitely, like a track on loop, but here it is meant to be. Out of nowhere, the very essence of sound is created, and from the transparent veil of this sound emerge fears, anxieties, disturbances. Emotions, indeed.

Music is like water - to the touch, it is mobile, flowing without stopping. Immersion in the new world is not difficult; just close your eyes and let go, have a visionary mind (as someone said before me). Because in the end, Schulze's debut is like the highest peak challenging man to reach it, aware of being unreachable and mysterious. As if it were closed in on itself, impenetrable. But slowly, it unfolds. It implodes a thousand times and each time it is as if it were the first, from the silent depths comes a menacing, dreamlike scream, towards the glory of the constellations so dear to cosmic travelers like Klaus.

Irrlicht enchants like few others because it is all based on impressions, the listener’s fears. Just try listening to the organ of the first movement in the dark, alone, in some distant country house. Ethereal, the ancestral sound that recalls Wright's part in A Saucerful..., but more evolved and spectral. If in Meadow Meal (Faust) the organ comes after the rain and explosions, and has a sound that tries to travel to reach the illusion of happiness, here in Ebene, the organ is the explosion, it is the rain, the sound is nihilistic as never before.

After these dark supernovae, we move on to the play of shadows - Gewitter. Like a white wall at night, with the wind moving the branches of the trees which in turn project shadows on the wall itself. They disappear, they leave. Then, sometimes, they return.

I would define Schulze as the most important impressionist in music, at least with his first albums. His brush transposes in notes the most nefarious human fears and the deepest dreams, as if by magic. If in Cyborg (built on the pattern of Zeit but much more successful in my humble opinion) Schulze best experiments with the technique of placing weights on keys to create the ocean of sounds, infinite chords that give rise to a mystical echo, here in Irrlicht everything is born by chance, the still-genuine invention of the Prince becomes the supporting pillar of the three journeys. The complexity behind such work is enormous,
theoretically and musically almost impossible; yet, it exists.

The man, alone, in a dark studio, experimenting with these techniques and applying them to his musical journeys; chilling. And everything is born by chance, without having reached this result through a previously planned project.

And most importantly, it is born from nothing.

Then Klaus leaves us like this, with the flashes of the last suite, Exil Sils Maria, in the depths of the dark. Aware of having just created the human soul in its most perfect completeness, and having put it into music. Cosmic, religious, kraut, electronic; in the end, it doesn't matter, as long as it's known it exists. That some visionary dreamer thought of it. That someone dared to go that far.

And then one is surprised listening to those little games with the VCS3 by Waters & Company on On The Run...

...Absolute.