Klaus Schulze: Le Moulin de Daudet (1994)

Klaus Schulze - Le Moulin de Daudet

KS Canon 37

Track Listing:

1.	The Beginning / The Delegates	04:04
2.	Mother Sadness	03:00
3.	The Loss of the Factory	01:59
4.	The Youth	01:46
5.	Friday's Departure	00:49
6.	The Mill of Maître Cornille	01:47
7.	Maître Cornille in the Fields	01:08
8.	Folk Dance	01:28
9.	The Discovery of Maître Cornille's Secret	01:49
10.	Joy of Maître Cornille / Garden & Youth	03:15
11.	Landscape / Way to the Old People	02:38
12.	Old People's Piano	03:24
13.	Old People's Farewell	02:01
14.	Exodus	04:52
15.	Le Petit Dauphin I	05:27
16.	Le Petit Dauphin II	01:34
17.	First Church Sequence	01:57
18.	Second Church Sequence & Organ	06:56
19.	St. Pierre	02:16
20.	Paradise & Inferno	05:54
21.	Finale	04:56

Bonus Tracks:

22.

The Ion Perspective

15:58

Rating: 4 Stars
Bonus Tracks: 5 Stars

This is the 27th solo album recorded by Klaus Schulze. And yet the album is numbered 37, as you can see from the KS Canon listed above. The last album that I reviewed, "The Dome Event", was the 26th album. There's a reason for this discrepancy. In 1993 a 10-CD box set was released, "The Silver Edition", which consisted of eight newly recorded studio albums and two live CD's from the 1970's. This box set was limited to 2000 copies, never intended to be re-released. I was lucky to get a copy, because I didn't hear about it until 1995. I rang up KDM to ask about it, and he told me it was sold out. When I expressed my disappointment he added, "But I still have three copies lying on my desk. If you send me a cheque for 200 Marks I'll send you one". I breathed a sigh of relief. A few days later I had it in my hand.

I only had it for a few years. In 2000 Thomas Kuzilla of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, stole all my CD's while I was in hospital. He offered to sell them back to me for an extortionate price, but while I was in hospital I had almost no money. At the time in my life when I was at my lowest ebb he did everything he could to make me suffer more. I've never known such an evil person.

Luckily the 10 albums in the Silver Edition have been re-released as part of the "La Vie Electronique" series (2009 to 2015), so I finally have the music again.

But getting back to the gap in the numbers, KDM has given the Silver Edition CD's the numbers 27 to 36 in the Klaus Schulze canon. Maybe he'll renumber them one day, but until then I'll stick to his numbers.

After writing so much about "The Silver Edition", I don't have much to say about "Le Moulin De Daudet". It's the soundtrack for the film with the same name, and it's a very untypical album for Klaus Schulze. He's never recorded an album with so many short tracks before. The pieces are pleasant to listen to, even though they're hardly recognisable as his music. Unlike his previous soundtrack albums, "Body Love" and "Angst", the music actually sounds like a film soundtrack.

The album was released on CD only, even though the short tracks could easily have been packed onto a double-LP, or even a single LP with a few omissions.

The bonus track is from the promotional CD "Ion", which was given away free at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 2004. On the one hand, it's better than nothing. On the other hand, purists are complaining that it's not identical to the original release, it's been slightly remixed. This is typical for Klaus Schulze's music. Re-releases are often different to the original versions. KDM's argument is that the tracks have been improved, which may be the case, but purists would still prefer to have the original version.