Klaus Schulze: La Vie Electronique 2 (2009)

La Vie Electronique 2  (1972 to 1975)

Track Listing (CD 1):

1.	North of the Yukon	20:43	1972-73
2.	Nightwind	16:14	1973
3.	Minuet	11:38	1973
4.	Signs of Dawn	22:38	1973
5.	Study for Philip K. Dick	08:31	1972-73

Track Listing (CD 2):

1.	Das große Identifikationsspiel	41:53	1973
2.	Titansee	27:07	1973
3.	Electric Love Affair	10:47	1973

Track Listing (CD 3):

1.	Land der leeren Häuser	11:14	1973
2.	Studies for Organ, Keyboards and Drums	14:51	1974
3.	Memento Mori	09:08	1975
4.	Blaue Stunde	37:52	1975

Notes: Hans-Jörg Stahlschmidt plays guitar on the tracks "Nightwind", "Minuet", "Signs of Dawn" and "Land der leeren Häuser".

Rating: 5 Stars

The music on LVE 2 was recorded only shortly after the LVE 1 music, but the development of Klaus Schulze's style is already apparent. There's less monotonous droning and more melodic organ pieces.

In the notes I mentioned Hans-Jörg Stahlschmidt. I know almost nothing about him, except that he and Klaus intended to record an album together. The album never came about, but at least we have these four tracks to remember their collaboration. I find the first two tracks ("Nightwind" and "Minuet") less appealing, because the guitar sounds out of place. The vocals on "Land der leeren Häuser" are annoying. On the other hand, "Signs of Dawn" is an outstanding track, the equal of anything Klaus released on his solo albums at the time. These four tracks obviously belong together, but they're separated on the box set. Why? The answer is obvious to anyone who knows KDM. When he was compiling the album he arranged the tracks in such a way as to pack as much music as possible onto the CDs.

"Blaue Stunde" is a powerful piece of music. Klaus is developing ideas that are moving towards "Moondawn". But how could a 37-minute track be released on an LP? It was necessary to compress his ideas. It's been said more than once that Klaus Schulze didn't make albums, he made music. He used to sit playing for hours, recording his music without knowing whether anyone would ever hear it. Every now and then a recording was so good that he decided to release it on LP. Or maybe it was his friend and publisher KDM who made the decision for him. I don't know. Later things got easier when CDs were invented. Tracks could be recorded that lasted 79 minutes instead of the previous 30 minute maximum.

The overall quality is amazing for old analogue tapes. I could only make out one brief tape error in "Das große Identifikationsspiel". It could easily have been corrected, but KDM chose not to change the original recordings. There are arguments for and against his decision. All I can say is that if he'd fixed the error nobody would ever have known.

Despite the lesser quality of the three Hans-Jörg Stahlschmidt tracks, the album still deserves a five star rating.

The liner notes for LVE 2 are written by Darren Bergstein. He's an American, so not many changes were necessary when I transcribed them. I only needed to make a few corrections of spelling mistakes. The inlay also contains Bergstein's words translated into German by KDM. It isn't a strict translation. At several points KDM adds his own thoughts. For this reason I recommend the German text to anyone who can understand both languages.

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La Vie Electronique 2 Liner Notes

"Cosmic Music" it might very well be, but Klaus Schulze makes no effort to mask his disdain for the term. It's not so unreasonable for Schulze, throughout his nearly forty years as an electronic musician, to harbour such feelings regarding the catch-all phrase coined by music writers astute and otherwise. He's been there from the beginning: engaging the post-psychedelic birth pangs of the 70's, shaking off the vestiges of what was once labelled Krautrock, weathering the corporate mandates that ushered in "new age", and being branded by a generation of computer cowboys who have dubbed him "the godfather of techno/ambient/space music." Terminology aside, much of the aforementioned bears the air of truth.

Nevertheless, Schulze still remains something of an enigma. Yet, the works here, recordings rescued from obscurity, illustrate the sound of Schulze finding the necessary technological vocabulary to work out new ideas within his system. Of the tracks that comprise this three-disc set, it's probably no surprise that some of the more innovative moments occur during Schulze's prescient early 70's material. Works like the exquisite "North of the Yukon" steal your soul through yawning pauses as much as through its twenty minute-plus ambient pings. Electronic music's appeal for most lies in experiencing the unearthing of new sounds, of textures heretofore unheard of by the human ear. Enamoured with and availing himself of the technological breakthroughs occurring in the early 70's, accumulating vast banks of then state-of-the-art synthesizers and other devices, and extolling a near-fetishistic zeal for where such technology might take him, Schulze helped lay the groundwork for an entirely new aural lexicon, making what was first conceived as avant-garde simply garde. Though not adverse to using the tropes of "melody" when it suited him, Schulze generally trucks in epic noises of such tantalizing natures that they often beggar description. From the beginning, his is an approach that conjures vaster attainable utopias, and more unbridled mystery, beyond the "cosmic".

So why is it that Schulze seems to maintain his status as a cult figure among aficionados, collectors and enthusiasts of electronic music? Why is he not held in the same esteem, except by insiders and colleagues, as his shared-era brethren Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk despite a monstrous catalogue of recordings that rival the former's in depth and the latter's in style and substance? Why does Schulze remain a mythic, even mysterious, let alone nearly "unknown" (though, paradoxically, a casually referenced) figure within Western music journalism? Why is it that a legion of marginal copyists have grown entire cottage industries around his trademark sound, effectively neutering its original doctrine?

Thanks to volumes like this one, the problem can now be immediately redressed: the ear can become reacquainted with the Schulze catalogue and its many innovative tonalities. Despite the music's technological carbon dating here, there's nary a wasted sequence, motif, or idea through-out; some of Schulze's exploratory beginnings are in fact witnessed in full bloom. Pieces containing Schulze's warbling vocal scatting and naive guitars ("Land der leeren Häuser") charmingly express the pastoral lilt typical of experimental German music of the dawning 70's, while "Studies for Organ, Keyboard and Drums" displays a fiery, improvisatorial vigour that presaged similar hybrid musics by nearly twenty years. Now that the musical climate has changed – thanks to the casual, disparaging manner in which many now consume, collect, distribute and archive recordings – Schulze's music is ripe for re-evaluation. Quite true. there is no better time than the present to absorb his dense canon, particularly by those who might have heard the artist's name respectfully referenced yet failed to make the necessary connection or put his work within its rightful context.

In a 1994 interview I conducted with Schulze, he spoke fondly of the genius of Mozart, of how his approach to electronic composition reflects the modes inherent in classical structures; he noted that "the setting up of my music has always been 'classical' because of the (track) lengths, how the pieces build up themselves. But I don't feel limited by classical settings the way a symphony is". Nevertheless, unlike Tangerine Dream's move towards a high-tech pop style, Schulze's integrity has remained intact, his sound never diluted or sabotaged by marketplace trends or stylistic hiccups. What lies at the core of Schulze's recorded history is that he never lets the listener forget, even when his synths mimic acoustic instrumentation, that his sounds are intentionally rendered by electronics, designed to be experienced thusly. By marrying the two environments together, Schulze truly sings the body electric.

Schulze never lost his dogmatic approach to synthesis, and whether every record rocked your world or not, it remains difficult to fault Schulze for denying himself the path of least resistance. In deep love with the alchemical results born of synthesizer and sequencer, allowing torrential, intricate rhythmic lattices of notes to spiral across vast alien landscapes wrenched from the artful bending of circuit and frequency, Schulze and TD shared approaches but realized different iconographies. Schulze stayed a course that if anything mirrored the lone classical composer happy enough to labour intensely in private honing his craft, experimenting, progressing, negating compromise and ceaselessly working. Like the most complex symphonies, his music engulfs the senses, and, above all else, fascinates, even when it is at its most relentless. If one dispenses with the countless series of Schulze clones that have come and gone, or if one is hearing the man's sounds for the first time, a clearer picture emerges that details where his muse has led him over his long career.

With his catalogue now in print and widely available, Schulze's work may finally break out of the ghetto of "genre" music and into the "mainstream" of modern electronic composition. In the mid-90's, he expressed concern about his musical systems getting absorbed into the bowels of rock or stranded on the fringes. The subsequent "legitimization" of electronics eclipsed geographical limitations and got his influential balance right. Numerous emerging artists were zapped into service by his future shocks; others languished, mere flashes in the proverbial pan. It is comforting to know that in this age of software pushers and lap(top)dogs, Schulze's legacy remains as empowered as ever.

(Darren Bergstein, August 2008)