Klaus Schulze: La Vie Electronique 9 (2011)

La Vie Electronique 9  (1982 to 1985)

Track Listing (CD 1):

1.	Ludwig Revisted	21:30	1982  Live
2.	Peg Leg Dance	39:21	1982  Live
3.	Die Spirituelle Kraft des Augenblicks	15:32	1982  Live

Track Listing (CD 2):

1.	Seltsam Statisch	21:32	1983-85
2.	Verblüffe sie!	34:22	1983-85
3.	Kompromisslose Inventions	15:50	1983-85

Track Listing (CD 3):

1.	National Radio Waves	53:05	1984-85
2.	The Midas Touch	20:12	1984-85

Notes: Rainer Bloss plays keyboards on the tracks on CD 1.

Rating: 5 Stars

The first CD was recorded at a concert in Budapest, Hungary on 21st October 1982.

With the exception of "The Midas Touch", which is a weak ending to the album, this is the most exciting of the LVE albums so far. It's a well structured collection, with one live CD and two studio CDs.

"Ludwig Revisted" is an alternative version of "Ludwig II von Bayern", which appears on two of the official Klaus Schulze albums: X (1978) and LIVE (1980). It was a standard piece during the concerts Klaus performed with Rainer Bloss in the 1980's. It's interesting to hear the variations in the live performances. "Peg Leg Dance" is a longer version of "Tango-Saty" from AUDENTITY (1983), which hadn't yet been released at the time of the Budapest concert. It's a very exciting performance containing a Mini Moog solo in the second half. In the 1980's Klaus was moving to digital synthesisers, but he always took his 1968 Mini Moog with him on tour, right up to his final concerts in 2010. My only complaint about "Peg Leg Dance" is that the track includes final applause that lasts three minutes fifteen seconds. 195 seconds! That's way too much! It should have been faded out after ten seconds. When "Die Spirituelle Kraft des Augenblicks" started I expected Arthur Brown to start singing. It begins with the usual harsh synthesiser sounds that accompanied his songs with Arthur Brown.

Apart from "Kompromisslose Inventions", the two studio CDs have strong rhythms. This is a new phase in Klaus Schulze's development. "Seltsam statisch" is an alternative version of "Spielglocken", also included on AUDENTITY. It's unknown whether it was recorded before or after "Spielglocken". I haven't yet listened to the two versions back to back, but my immediate impression is that I prefer "Seltsam Statisch". Usually I look at KDM's fantasy titles for the tracks and shrug, but "Kompromisse Inventions" annoys me. I don't like the wild mix of German and English.

"National Radio Waves" is possibly the best track on the album. It's difficult to decide, because everything is so good. In contrast, I don't like "The Midas Touch". The vocal moaning irritates me. On the CD inlay KDM writes that the voice is "certainly not Klaus". He needed to write this, because it sounds like Klaus.

This time there are no gimmicks with the physical CDs; the playing surface of the discs is the standard silver.

The liner notes for LVE 9 are written by the Dutch journalist Wouter Bressels.

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La Vie Electronique 9 Liner Notes

The sounds, rhythms, the controversy: that was mostly the talk of the town among Klaus Schulze fans during the eighties. Their musical hero was far beyond anything like TIMEWIND, MOONDAWN, and PICTURE MUSIC. He was not playing any more those wide sounding synthesizer choirs or electronic landscapes that could lead the listener into a far out space trip. The Schulze of the mid-eighties tried to be compatible with the fast going technical revolution. Like all main acts in electronic music in that particular era, each had to cope with the numerous possibilities in the digital age. Colleagues like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Yello and Jean-Michel Jarre transformed their ideas into short tracks and compact productions. And so did Klaus, but in his own style and tempo.

Schulze mostly stuck to his "classic" format and preferred long tracks, each with its own atmosphere and mood. Regardless of what his fans or critics had to say about his music, he just did his own thing, like he always did before. Some of those albums were artistically successful (AUDENTITY, ANGST), while others were directionless (DREAMS) or absurd experiments (APHRICA). And of course there was the Wahnfried alter ego; since the late seventies Schulze was setting up one-off projects under this banner and very rhythmically orientated. They were, so to speak, ahead of their time. For him, rhythm became more important than ever before, as he told a magazine in 1986: "Back in those days when I was working with Bloss, the audience loved to hear banging rhythms. Of course, that wears away after a while and heads off into another direction. It's like a wavelength. When you have worked with rhythms for some time, you realise you have enough of it at some point. Because of that, I don't do another TIMEWIND or MOONDAWN, just like I won't make another album like AUDENTITY or ANGST. I did that and it's good".

While his released studio albums represented one side of his output back in those days, it was the other half of the recorded studio works that was more based on experiments recorded mostly in one take. Some of those interesting tracks are featured on this ninth volume of the LVE series. And of course there were the inevitable live recordings... A large part of Schulze's performance in Budapest on 21st October 1982 is featured on the first CD. When he gave that one-off show that was part of the Chip festival (that also brought Tangerine Dream to that city), he was in the process of recording the double album AUDENTITY. Just like the few other performances he and keyboardist Rainer Bloss gave in late 1982 (in London and Gent), they served the audience with an attention grabbing impression of what the album was sounding like. The long and pulsating "Peg Leg Dance" continued from where Klaus' concert tour of 1981 with Manuel Göttsching had ended: heavy synth sounds, rhythm computers and sequencers and of course the ever legendary and well-balanced Mini Moog solo that is featured in the second half of the piece; something of which his fans were especially waiting for during concerts. Of special notice is his revised version of "Ludwig", the classic track from 1978's X album. Introduced by a piano solo from Bloss and Schulze's Mini Moog, it evolves into the original orchestrated version coming from a backing tape, before ending with some heavy and spooky playing on the Yamaha CS 80 and the EMS suitcase synthesizer.

After his long and successful tour to promote AUDENTITY, Schulze concentrates himself on studio recordings and business affairs. In 1984, and for the first time since he started his professional career, he doesn't do any gigs. While he sold his company IC (Innovative Communication) in August 1983, he set up a new one on his own, the somewhat risky Inteam. He recorded some long and lone tracks; "New Style", "Interessant" and "Ballet sounds" were some of the descriptions that Klaus gave to this material, of which some is featured on CD 2 and CD 3 of this set. What you hear are several experimental recording sessions, in which Schulze used the Fairlight, PPG Wave 2.3 and Yamaha CS 80 heavily, as well as some hypnotic drum programming on the EEH computer. Some of them, like "Verblüffe sie!" and "The Midas Touch", sound accessible and like a logical follow-up to the works on DRIVE INN and AUDENTITY, his first released studio collaboration with partner-in-crime Bloss. But on the other hand, there's Schulze's strong will to refine this particular style with the aid of the digital equipment. Sometimes he does, but at other moments his music sounds directionless and incoherent, for instance during parts of the long "National Radio Waves". And speaking about sound design, on "Kompromisslose Inventions" Klaus dwells on his CS 80 in search for an almost atonal sound that no one has ever heard before. During live performances, he sometimes played such parts to mixed audience reactions. "1985: soul-killing and hopeless. Klaus Schulze must have guessed wrong with the Orwell year", was one remarkable reaction from a fan written in a Dutch fanzine about a performance that year.

In retrospect, the works featured in this 3-CD set on one hand show the limitations of the digital instruments (in contrast to the warm and mostly less clinical analogue sound), but on the other hand they had their creative moments. A musical journey through a difficult era with some difficult personal problems this was, but nevertheless he managed to make some daring music, which is obviously a child of its time.

(Wouter Bessels, July 2008)