Klaus Schulze
Picture Music

This is Klaus Schulze's third album in order of recording chronology (autumn 1973) but the fourth in order of release: for contractual reasons, it was preceded by "Blackdance" (May 1974) and was released in January 1975 (later re-released on CD with bonus tracks and a different cover). The solitary prince of German electronics gives us another successful work, one that manages to emancipate itself from the granite-like and insurmountable compactness of the first two albums, "Irrlicht" and "Cyborg", to take on a more airy tone, in some respects less challenging to listen to.

As almost always happens in Schulze's records, at least those from the '70s, "Picture Music" is also composed of two long tracks: it opens with "Totem", over 23 minutes that present the same sound image: the pulsing of a synth - used in a rhythmic-percussive function - in the foreground, plus an underlying melodic backdrop, that is the sounds of two or three keyboards drawing delicate melodic arabesques intertwining with each other, emerging briefly then fading back into the background. We're in 1973, yet it seems like ambient music ante litteram; Autechre will arrive twenty years later, but here they seem already visible in the distance.

The second track is "Mental Door", another 23 minutes of music, in this case more animated and lively compared to "Totem". Fascinating is the dialogue between the drums (for a third of the track almost only cymbals, for a third almost only toms) and the keyboard solos, solos so long that rather than being the virtuosic climax of the composition, they become a structural element, almost a framework that spans horizontally through the music and holds it together.

After so many years, this is music that retains its charm intact, the backdrop of a mental image that the listener is to sketch. And, if listened to at night, when darkness has fallen and the noises have subsided, this record makes the task easy for us.