Irrlicht

Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht

Irrlicht
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CD Details

Artist: Klaus Schulze
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2006-06-06
Music Label: Revisited Records
Soundtracks:
  1. Satz: Ebene 23:23
  2. Satz: Gewitter Energy Rise Energy Collaps 5:39
  3. Satz: Exil Sils Maria 21:25
  4. Dungeon (bonus track) 24:00

Music reviews of Irrlicht

Music Review: Great debut from one of the big names of electronic music
Rating: 5 Stars

After appearing on the debut albums of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, he disembarked on a solo career. He was getting sick of what he felt was more time trying to get everyone in a band to decide on what to play than it was to actually play the music. Also he was losing interest in drumming so he switched to keyboards. Irrlicht was his first solo offering, and although he did periodically appear in other groups up until 1974, including The Cosmic Jokers (an unintended project with Wallenstein and Ash Ra Tempel members whose material got released behind their backs), Code III, and let's not forget the one-off reunion of the original Ash Ra Tempel at the end of 1972 that made up the album Join Inn (1973).

Irrlicht was originally released on the Ohr label with artwork by Schulze himself, but when he moved to Brain (thanks to the Cosmic Jokers fiasco that brought an end to the career Rolf U. Kaiser, head honcho of Ohr/Kosmische Musik, which went under thanks to the lawsuits), the album featured new artwork, the more familiar artwork by Urs Amman (who also did the covers to the Brain version of Cyborg, plus Blackdance and Timewind). It's interesting to note that Irrlicht was not recorded with any synthesizer. Schulze was on a limited budget and basically used whatever he could at his disposal. The organ is one, but he's also credited to guitar, voice, percussion, and zither, which, aside from the organ, you can't tell because it's so electronically processed. He hotwired the amplifier and rigged the organ to get it to do things they would not normally do, no surprise that doing this fried his amp in the process of recording the album, but that gave him enough material for an album. He also had a four piece orchestra helping out, which sounded so distorted you could get fooled for a Mellotron.

Schulze had a career very much parallel to what Tangerine Dream was doing around the same time, very highly experimental space music, and like TD, started going for synthesizer-dominated electronic music by 1974. With Irrlicht he was experimenting with extended drones, as demonstrated on "Satz: Ebene". Here it's lot of strange droning. Not the kind of stuff for people with short attention spans, to say the least. There's some pulsing later on in this piece, which leads up to the more spacy "Satz: Gewitter", which reminds more of the more mellow moments of Ash Ra Tempel's debut album (but of course, without Manuel Göttsching's guitar). The final piece "Satz: Exil Sils Maria" is a nice early experiment in ambient, it's one of those pieces that you'll be guessing what made those sounds. The whole album is quite tripped out. Then for a bonus, you get "Dungeon", which sounds like a later recording (perhaps 1974) because synthesizers are quite dominate, plus an Elka Rhapsody. But it has that same droning quality of Irrlicht, so it only made sense it should be included as a bonus cut here, even if it likely existed around the Picture Music or Blackdance time-period.

Really, Irrlicht is by far my favorite of the early Schulze albums, and it's little wonder how he became such an innovative figure in the worlds of electronic and Krautrock. Newcomers probably should try one of his electronic albums like Timewind, of course, but this is a great album to have to, to see how Schulze started off as a solo artist.
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Description of Irrlicht

Irrlicht is the solo debut album from Klaus Schulze (originally released in 1972) and is an absolute masterpiece in cosmic, space music. Schulze omitted the use of synthetics for this recording, relying on organ with various electronic effects to produce an absolutely mesmerizing and minimalist body of sounds that transform the listener into a total abstracted world full of mysteries within its almost never-ending spiral. With no electronic pulse and rhythms, just a gloomy and distorted atmosphere this record can easily haunt and hypnotize. Considered by many to be his finest and purest body of work, the new and definitive Revisited Records version contains the 24 minute bonus track, Dungeon and comes packaged in a deluxe digipak with new liner notes and rare photos.

Klaus Schulze first attracted attention as a member of the German progressive rock band, Tangerine Dream. Following the release of their debut LP, Electronic Meditation, he departed for a solo career. Klaus' recorded work typically features extended pieces sometimes filling an entire album built around computer-generated synthesizers and other specially programmed electronic effects. Klaus Schulze remains a cult figure in the United States, where the bulk of his prolific output has until now been available only through the import bins. He is widely considered an avant-garde mainstay as well as a founding father of both the new-age space music and electronica genres.

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