Klaus Schulze: En=Trance (1988)

Klaus Schulze - En=Trance

KS Canon 20

Track Listing:

1.	En=Trance	18:53
2.	α-Numerique	16:26
3.	FM Delight	17:28
4.	Velvet System	17:47

Bonus Tracks:

5.

Elvish Sequencer

08:02

Rating: 4½ Stars
Bonus Tracks: 3 Stars

This is the 20th solo album recorded by Klaus Schulze. It's a completely solo album, the first album on which no guest musicians appear since "Mirage" in 1977. After "Inter*Face" this is the second album title with a non-alphabetic character in the title. This offends my sense of aesthetics, but Klaus never did it again, so I can forgive him.

If we ignore the equals sign, the album's title is a word play. It can either be an entrance, or it can be the French expression "en trance", which means "in trance".

In case the second track's title is too small for you to read, the first character is the Greek letter alpha. This means that the title is pronounced like alphanumeric.

The album was released simultaneously on LP and CD. Unlike "Dreams", both versions were identical. In the liner notes Klaus refers to the album as a double LP, not a CD. It was recorded over a three-week period, but the track "FM Delight" was recorded in a single take on the night of his 40th birthday. Anyone else would have gone out for a drink.

My rating is the average of 5 stars for "FM Delight", 4½ stars for "Velvet System" and 4 stars each for the first two tracks. The last five minutes of "Velvet System" is absolutely brilliant, but the previous 12 minutes don't live up to it.

The bonus track is a strange choice. Usually KDM picks music recorded at the same time as the album, but in this case it's an old track from 1975. He says that he picked it because he couldn't find any other tracks that were short enough to fit on the CD. If I understand correctly, the track is experimentation with the sequencer of the Big Moog, shortly after Klaus bought it from Florian Fricke.

This album was remastered in 2017, but today I listened to the 2005 version. It's strange for an album to be remastered that was originally released on CD. I've read reviews praising the new release, saying that it has a smoother sound that's more pleasant to listen to. Not having listened to it yet, I'm worried that it might be a corruption of the original album, not what Klaus intended.