Klaus Schulze: Are you sequenced? (1996)

Klaus Schulze - Are you sequenced?

KS Canon 52

Track Listing:

1.	Welcome to the Moog Brothers	06:28
2.	Vocs in the Dark I	04:23
3.	Vocs in the Dark II	10:04
4.	No Frets, No Bass	09:39
5.	Valle de la Luna	09:00
6.	Are you sequenced?	03:14
7.	Moogie Baby Goes Solo	07:18
8.	Moldanya	10:21
9.	Vidanya	02:11
10.	The Wizard of Doz	10:22
11.	Are we getting lost?	06:50

Track Listing (Original Bonus CD):

1.	SQ 1 (Essentials)	17:25
2.	Voices in the Dark I (Lite Mix)	08:13
3.	SQ 2 (Extended Mix)	08:10
4.	Flutish Baby (Humate Mix)	07:38
5.	SQ 3 (Subsonic Affair Mix)	07:43
6.	Voices in the Dark II (Chill Mix)	08:32
7.	SQ 4 (Short Cut)	04:29

Track Listing (New Bonus CD):

1.

Vat Was Dat

77:35

Rating: 5 Stars
Old Bonus Tracks: 5 Stars
New Bonus Tracks: 5 Stars

This is the 32nd solo album recorded by Klaus Schulze. There's a reason for the big jump of the official (canon) number from the last solo album I reviewed, "In Blue", which was numbered as the 41st album. In 1995 a second big box set was released called the "Historic Edition". It was a 10-CD set that contained six CDs of live recordings from 1975 to 1981 plus four CDs of unreleased studio recordings from 1970 to 1982. These 10 albums were included in KDM's official numbering of the Klaus Schulze canon, even though it was only a limited release. The music from these CDs has all been rereleased as part of the "La Vie Electronique" series, which I'll review later.

There was a story behind the release of this album which I didn't find out until it was rereleased in 2006. Klaus originally recorded the album in the studio in early 1996. He handed the tape to a record company to be prepared for release. Then he performed a concert in Derby, England, in which he performed the album live. When he listened to the recording of the concert afterwards he thought it sounded better than the studio recording, so he asked the record company to release the live recording instead of the studio recording. The original CD release makes no mention that it's a live recording in the liner notes, and I didn't suspect it, because it sounds too perfect to be live.

I take Klaus Schulze's word for it that the live recording is better, but I'm still curious about the studio recording. I'm sure it's on a tape sitting in a box in KDM's office, so I hope he'll publish it one day, for the sake of comparison. I have a suspicion that it sounds very different.

The original album was released with a bonus CD of remixes, four of them by Pete Namlook. I can recognise a few themes in the remixes, but the tracks sound so different that I have to ask what was being remixed. Is it possible that the various other musicians were remixing tracks from the unreleased studio version?

When the album was rereleased in 2006 the original bonus CD was omitted and replaced with a new bonus CD containing an unreleased studio recording from 1993. I complained about the omission of the remix CD, to which KDM replied "Schulze bleibt Schulze" ("Schulze remains Schulze"). He claimed that the remixes weren't real Schulze music, and no one liked them anyway.

I certainly enjoyed the remixes greatly. Judging by comments in fan forums I wasn't alone in my views. It seemed that the ones who liked the remixes were in the vast majority. I had lost my original copy of "Are you sequenced?" after it was stolen by Thomas Kuzilla of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, so I had to buy another copy of the original album on Ebay. The remix tracks are all very powerful interpretations of Klaus Schulze's music. In the liner notes of the new release KDM quotes people who didn't like the remixes, but he must have known that these are minority voices. It's one of KDM's foibles that when he has an opinion on something he assumes that everyone agrees with him. In this case I suspect that his bias against Pete Namlook has clouded his judgement.

Having said that, the track on the new bonus CD is phenomenal. It exceeds even the high quality of the main CD, and it could have been released as a solo album in its own right. I rate music from 1 (poor) to 5 (great). If the main CD has a 5, the new bonus CD deserves a 6.