Klaus Schulze
Irrlicht

"Quadriphonic Symphony for Orchestra and Electronic Machines" is 1972: Klaus Schulze bursts onto the scene of the German rock avant-garde with his solo debut. He has numerous past experiences as a drummer in the underground scene of those years: in the psychedelic Psy Free, for the debut of Tangerine Dream "Electronic Meditation" (a sort of jam session between kraut, psychedelia, and rudimentary electronics of the 70's) and again behind the drums in the eponymous debut of the pioneering Ash Ra Tempel, also in 1970.

None (or very little) of this could have suggested that in his debut as an electronic solo artist, Schulze would create a work of such depth and sonic scope, stunning, hallucinatory and abstract visionary projection of the otherworldly. Few artists before him had ventured into such experimental and challenging electronic territories. Schulze, mindful of the lessons of avant-garde composers of the previous two decades like Stockhausen, Xenakis, and above all Gyorgy Ligeti, creates and constructs a work of capital importance for electronics (and beyond); kosmische musik has just been born.

The extraordinary German scene of those years, among the most extreme and innovative of all time, with musicians often engaged in avant-garde and disorienting "sabbaths" between prog, psychedelia, contemporary avant-garde, and "free" experimentation (Amon Duul II, Neu!, Can, Faust) and a flourishing, visionary, and experimental scene more distinctly electronic (Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, and Schulze himself). Until 1972, in the purely electronic krautrock scene, only the Cluster of the chilling, shocking, and pioneering "Cluster 71" and "Cluster II" had ventured in such extreme and "cosmic" directions, as had Tangerine Dream with "Alpha Centauri" (although still too tied to non-electronic rhythmic canons) and especially "Zeit", a gigantic cosmic-electronic monument, contemporary with the solo debut of their former colleague Schulze. While Tangerine Dream's music boasted an expressionist electronic approach to the cosmos, Schulze's approach is instead totally abstract.

"Irrlicht" is divided into three entirely electronic movements, devoid of any rhythmic pulse, icy and immobile, yet vital and tense, in constant expansion, immersed in a continuous dualism between static immobility and movement. "Ebene": the first of the three movements of the work is a relentless continuous flow, a minimal and synthetic floating in interstellar orbits, between dream and nightmare, life and death, rarefied sounds of an electronically filtered string orchestra and artificial beams modulated through infinity; the entry of the organ explodes into a radioactive supernova, a titanic and colossal crescendo, blinding and dazzling in its luminous and majestic propagation. The remaining two movements, "Gewitter" and "Exil Sils Maria," echo repeatedly through remote galaxies, flowing sounds in a constant circular motion, between the illusion of immobility and movement, beyond the deepest space, to the end, beyond the human being.