Klaus Schulze: La Vie Electronique 7 (2010)

La Vie Electronique 7  (1975 to 1979)

Track Listing (CD 1):

1.	People I know	40:24	1977  Live
2.	Avec Arthur	37:34	1979  Live

Track Listing (CD 2):

1.	Crazy Nietzsche	43:16	1978-79
2.	The Future	28:19	1978-79

Track Listing (CD 3):

1.	My Virtual Principles	62:53	1978
2.	Die Erde ist rund	11:56	1979  Live

Notes:

(1) Arthur Brown sings on "Avec Arthur".

(2) Harald Grosskopf plays drums on "Crazy Nietzsche".

(3) Wolfgang Tiepold plays cello on "My Virtual Principles".

Rating: 4½ Stars

"People I know" was recorded at a concert in Brussels, Belgium on 17th October 1977.

"Avec Arthur" was recorded at a concert in Liège, Belgium on 25th October 1979.

"Die Erde ist rund" was recorded at a concert in Koblenz, Germany on 22nd October 1979.

The seventh LVE album is a mix of live and studio recordings. KDM is certain that "Crazy Nietzsche" is a studio recording, but Klaus Schulze himself says it must be a live concert recording because of the instruments used. Whenever there's a difference in opinion between KDM and Klaus, I always trust KDM's judgement. Sorry, Klaus.

"Crazy Nietzsche" is an alternative version of "Friedrich Nietzsche", the opening track of the 1978 double album "X". It starts very slowly, but once it warms up it's just as majestic. There's nothing crazy about the music. It's just a crazy KDM title.

"My Virtual Principles" was recorded in 1978 as the soundtrack for the film "Barracuda". This version wasn't used. Music recorded in 1970 and 1972 was mixed into the track. This is the weakest track on the album, in my opinion.

The recording quality is excellent throughout. There's a lot of audience noise on "Die Erde ist rund", which is unusual for Klaus Schulze's live recordings. The microphones must have been set up in the hall somewhere.

"People I know" is my favourite track on the album. It's a typical Schulze track from the mid-1970's, deep and emotional. It stands in stark contrast to the other track on the first CD, "Avec Arthur", which is brutal and aggressive.

As was the case with the previous albums, the playing surface of the discs is black.

The liner notes for LVE 7 are written by the journalist Lars Fischer.

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La Vie Electronique 7 Liner Notes

1978: a heavily armed special force unit of the German police rushes into a motel near the town of Saarbrücken in the early hours of October 12th. They find five guys with long hair who had been regarded as deeply suspicious in the eye of the woman at the motel counter, and had reported them. One of the five is Klaus Schulze who had gained a reputation as a revolutionary musician, but hardly a bomber! Earlier that decade a pamphlet had appeared proclaiming, "Music is a weapon"; it was written by Berlin "agitrock" band Ton Steine Scherben in the autumn of 1977, perhaps the height of German left-wing terror activities, the hippy dream of Love, Peace and Happiness was long gone. In this age of paranoia the hyper-nervous state authorities might well see each guitar as a possible MG and each bunch of young people not conforming to the outward appearance of bourgeois respectability quite probably as the next Red Army Fraction commando unit. Had the "good citizen" from the reception glimpsed the strange electronic equipment the five suspects had inside their truck, she might have suffered a sudden death induced by the fright. This would have given the police something real to investigate. Luckily she did not, and soon after their dramatic arrival the young task force disappeared without trace or so much as a word of apology. They had, however, left the infection of fear behind them, and this was now deeply rooted in the hearts of the five young men.

So what "crime" could Klaus Schulze possibly be accused of? At the same time as Hanns Martin Schleyer was being kidnapped in September/October 1977 (the so-called "German Autumn") and just six weeks after Elvis had passed away, Schulze was sitting on his flokati rug each night playing concerts, One such performance took place on September 30th in the Robert Schumann Saal in Düsseldorf. A section of the show, entitled "People I Know", is the opener of this seventh CD set in the LA VIE ELECTRONIOUE series. KS himself regards song titles to be little more than "smoke and mirrors" - he said as much in a later interview - and most of those titles did not originate from him, but his publisher, kdm [which has been tradition in music since Beethoven. kdm]. Nonetheless, they serve to demonstrate how little political circumstances influenced his art.

"It is possible, that at an unconscious level such influences are there", says Schulze, "but up until now I believe that this has not happened directly. It is like when a film impresses me. Of course there is some influence on me, but not in any obvious way. Nor has there ever been any musician or composer who has directly inspired me. However, everything that I get as input may be subtly processed and be part of my output at some later time. For example the experiences (in the Saarbriicken motel) may have been expressed in subsequent concerts, but not too literally, otherwise I would have started blowing things up! Later it turned into aggression, of course, but at that time I was simply shit-scared".

So it is his companions and friends such as Manuel or Hartmut, who we meet in the subtitles of "People I Know", rather than Andreas (Baader) and Ulrike (Meinhof).

On the studio recording from this era, "X", we find titles such as "Georg Trakl", "Ludwig II von Bayern" and of course "Friedrich Nietzsche", which appears here as a "crazy" version and is twice as long as the recording on the original LP. Chronologically, "My Virtual Principles" belongs between "People I Know" and "Crazy Nietzsche", another title into which a deeper significance might have been read than was actually the case. This simply refers back to the years 1970 and '72, when KS originally recorded the drums and organ parts that he uses in it.

A joyful nod to the present is to be found in a collaboration with Arthur Brown entitled "Avec Arthur". Electronics and vocals have always been a controversial combination. Once Schulze became open for such musical dialogue he chose to work with unorthodox and exceptionally gifted singers. A recent example is Lisa Gerrard. Of Mr. Brown, Schulze says today: "His vocal style is absolutely unconventional, his phrasing wired and twisted and his lyrics improvised. Unlike Lisa Gerrard, who sang in a constant and spontaneous flow, he recorded shorter segments when we were in the studio doing 'Shadows Of Ignorance' for the DUNE album. He was unlike her in that he sang real text, but as far as content is concerned everything was really crazy. On stage it was different every night, because he improvised without any upfront rehearsals. The strangest thing in that situation was that his voice was completely different to all his other recordings!"

But walking down memory lane is not Klaus Schulze's style. He is forward looking, and archiving his art is something he leaves to others: "All these recordings were chosen by Müller, he knows more about them than me. Of course it is something that I have created, but it was part of a progression, and after so long I am really done with those old days. If I want to know something about what I was doing back there I have to ask him. Most of the things I don't remember any more. I can more or less put the albums into the right sequential order, but usually I am wrong by about a year or so".

We can provide some hints: A couple of days before the first recordings of this triple CD set took place, the space probes Voyager I and II had taken off. Almost two years later, and three months ahead of the tour on which "Avec Arthur" and "Die Erde ist rund" were recorded, the two probes had reached Jupiter. Less successful was the Skylab mission in July1979. This space laboratory just burnt up in the atmosphere. Clearly all cosmic comparisons should be avoided for good reasons! But in any event, "Star Wars" was on every cinema screen, and it was Arthur Dent (not Brown) who was using "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" for the first time on BBC. The "Apple II" first saw daylight, although Ken Olsen could not imagine why any private person might want to have a computer at home! Other headlines from those years: NATO Double-Track Decision, nuclear meltdown in Harrisburg and power failure in New York... but in Hambühren the pilot lights kept burning!

(Lars Fischer)