Klaus Schulze
Timewind

Having reached the milestone of a fifth album as an electronic solo artist, the cosmic courier Klaus Schulze, after making his electronic music more accessible in the two previous albums, "Blackdance" and "Picture Music", rediscovers his roots and returns to the sounds of his first two solo works, universally recognized as milestones in music history.

A return to origins, then, but not a forced copy of the sounds of the first two works. The times of orchestras of over 50 elements synthetically filtered and immersed in torrential artificial walls of sound are over; what remains are the powerful echoes and his immense visionary strength. Between '74 and '75 Schulze's electronics are paired with various percussion (both electronic and not), electric guitars, operatic voices, and a general tendency towards greater musicality compared to the recent past, thus losing much of its mystical visionary frenzy.

In "Timewind" Schulze brings his music back to more abstract and properly "cosmic" territories, while taking into account his journey towards melodic exploration that he had embarked upon some time ago. The German's electronic instrumentation had expanded; the album is dedicated to one of Schulze's heroes: Richard Wagner, the great Teutonic classical composer. However, it is not a simple dedication because the two compositions of the work are dripping with Wagnerian influences, especially in the shadowy, grandiloquent, and dramatic atmospheres of the tracks.

"Timewind" consists of two long fully electronic suites, each about half an hour long. The opening entrusted to "Bayreuth Return" pays homage to Wagner even in the title, as Beyreuth was indeed the German city where the composer chose to live and compose his works. The intense and majestic alien initial sounds soon join with the pulsations of a melody created with the sequencer, crystalline and brilliant, propagated into the void, among magmatic sound oceans and mantras of modulated, meditative, hypnotic synthetic pulsations.

With this album, Schulze returns to darker and more contemplative atmospheres, yet always projected towards abstract and magnificent spatial depths; the second movement is "Wahnfried 1883", one of Schulze's best compositions and of electronics as a whole, the title derives from the name of Wagner's residence in Bayreuth, combining the words wahn (madness, illusion) and fried (peace), with 1883 in the title being none other than the year of the great composer's death.

An evocative synthesized symphony, the drones hover and expand until they dissipate, echoes spreading faint light in a still and silent universe. Schulze initiates the space-time odyssey with livid and majestic synthesized melodies, very slow, static, a sound wave composed of monumental crescendos and striking electronic discharges, the Berlin musician's synth textures echo mournful and wonderful, a supernatural, disconsolate cry of an astral body condemned to eternal solitude and infinite wonder in the face of the unknown.