Pete Namlook & Klaus Schulze
The Dark Side Of The Moog

Among the side projects in the extensive discography of Klaus Schulze, the series "The Dark Side of the Moog" must be mentioned: eleven albums released so far between 1994 and 2008. You read correctly: the series takes advantage of the title of the great Pink Floyd classic, distorting it with a reference to the early analog synthesizers, the Moogs, launched in the USA at the end of the '60s.

And in each of these eleven albums, the track titles are in turn humorous distortions of the English band's titles: suffice it to say that the first volume of the series consists of a single track, "Wish You Were There", with a duration of 51 minutes (the CD, however, is divided into 10 tracks of 5 minutes each). In the subsequent volumes, you can find other delightful parodies, and I invite you to browse their list in the Namlook & Schulze discography.

Another characteristic of this project is the collaboration with musicians: the German producer Pete Namlook, co-author of all the albums, and the versatile Bill Laswell in volumes 4 through 7. The music heard in the first album of the series does not stray much from the usual stylistic coordinates of the German: vast electronic soundscapes, slow evolution of musical material, a sense of disorientation in a gigantic vortex that engulfs the listener. But in this album, thanks to Pete Namlook's contribution, both soft ambient shades and harsher techno sounds are interwoven in certain passages.

The music is nevertheless not difficult to listen to; after the first 20 minutes of "introduction", a very marked beat reminiscent of Aphex Twin (the one from "Selected Ambient Works 85-92") emerges in certain sparse reverberated percussion sounds: it's a roughly 7-minute episode followed by a 10-minute pause, then the resumption of this rhythmic episode with a sequencer backdrop continues for another 10 minutes before reaching the finale.

Those familiar with Klaus Schulze's forty-year journey in electronics will have already had the opportunity to appreciate this particular series, "The Dark Side of the Moog", and the first work I've now mentioned. For others unacquainted with Schulze, it would be better to familiarize themselves with the solo albums of his main discography.