Albums
One record at a time, in depth. Not reviews.
Dune: A Cello Walks Into Schulze's 1979
The sleeve is a Tarkovsky film photographed off a television screen, thin string and all. Before that, a letter arrived saying Frank Herbert had no objection to the title.
Picture Music: Recorded First, Released Late, 1975
The only Schulze solo album where you can hear him playing a drum kit. It also carries more sleeve designs than anything else he made, and that is part of why its place in the order was wrong for decades.
Blackdance: The 1974 Record Where a Voice Walks In
A human voice and a proper synthesizer both arrive here, and six English local papers covered the record inside a month. Which number album it is got corrected later.
Cyborg: The Record Where Klaus Schulze First Used a Synthesizer, 1973
A label handed a double LP to an artist on his second record. Schulze filled it with an organ, one borrowed synthesizer and the long tones of nearly fifty players.
Revolutions: Jarre's 1988, and two nights on a London dock
Jean-Michel Jarre's 1988 album Revolutions and the Destination Docklands concerts at London's Royal Victoria Dock that October. Hank Marvin's guitar, a lawsuit over a Turkish flute, and two nights of wind and rain.
China: the country Vangelis had never visited, 1979
Made almost single-handed at Nemo Studios in London in 1978, it was Vangelis's first album under his new Polydor contract after leaving RCA. He said he had never been to China.
Astral Voyage: Kitaro's First Solo Album, 1978
Kitaro's first solo album, recorded on eight tracks in Tokyo in 1978. Released as 天界, subtitled Astral Trip. It became Astral Voyage in 1985.
Irrlicht: Klaus Schulze's First Solo Album, 1972
Schulze's first solo record, made without a synthesizer. He asked a university orchestra to hold a single note, ran the tape through broken gear and played it backwards.
Tangram: Tangerine Dream in 1980, and a new man's first album
Three months after the theatre sound engineer Johannes Schmoelling joined, an improvised night in East Berlin fed into this record.
Blade Runner: the Vangelis soundtrack that took twelve years
The 1982 film promised a soundtrack album in its credits. The music Vangelis recorded in London finally came out in June 1994.
Rendez-Vous: the saxophone Jarre meant to send into orbit
Ron McNair was to play its last track on saxophone aboard Challenger. After 28 January 1986 the album was dedicated to him and his crew.
Thinking of You
Kitaro has been up for a Grammy 16 times and won once, with this album. A quiet 1999 record on Domo, with a photo of a piano in the snow on the cover and Andean flutes inside.
Body Love
The film was already shot when Schulze got the call. No dialogue meant he could play for 30 minutes without stopping, and the fee bought him a Mellotron. A soundtrack from February 1977.
Force Majeure
Tangerine Dream down to two, plus a drummer and a cello, at Hansa in Berlin in 1979. A mixing-desk accident left on the tape, an 18-minute piece that ends in Corelli, and fragments that went on to Hollywood.
Opéra sauvage
Vangelis's 1979 music for Frédéric Rossif's television documentary series. A Yamaha CS-80 at Nemo Studios in London, Jon Anderson on harp, and a record that reached the American chart seven years later on the back of a wine commercial.
Zoolook
In 1984 Jean-Michel Jarre loaded speech and song in 25 languages into his samplers and played them as instruments. Words picked for their sound, Laurie Anderson asked to sing like an alien, and a band gathered in New York.
Kojiki
In 1990 Kitaro, who had played sixteen instruments alone on Silver Cloud, brought a string section into George Lucas's studio. Seven pieces on the Kojiki, the eighth-century book of Japan's myths.
X
Schulze smeared an orchestra past recognition on his first album. On X, his tenth, in 1978, he let the strings sound like strings.
Stratosfear
Berlin, August 1976. Machines broke down and tapes vanished, and a harmonica brought in as a joke ended up on the record. The album where Tangerine Dream turned towards melody.
Heaven and Hell
Vangelis called the studio he was still building Hell. The 1975 record he made in six weeks on that building site, and the four minutes Carl Sagan's Cosmos took from it.
Spiral
The first Vangelis record with the Yamaha CS-80, a synthesizer that weighs close to a hundred kilos. A 1977 album with a line of the Tao Te Ching on its sleeve, and the unlikely place one of its tracks ended up.
Albedo 0.39
On the last track, the recording engineer reads out the numbers of the Earth. Vangelis's 1976 space record, every instrument his own, drums included, and what became of the number in its title.
Les Chants Magnétiques
A French pun that loses half of itself in English. The 1981 record where a Fairlight sampled trains and cogwheels, and the door it opened into China.
Équinoxe
Jarre wanted to throw out a cassette sketch. Michel Geiss talked him out of it, and it became Part 7. A 1978 record that follows one day from waking to sleep.
Oxygène
An album that sold eighteen million copies got some of its beat from two rhythm-box buttons held down with sticky tape. Jarre's kitchen record from Paris.
Silver Cloud
In 1983 the obi counted four years from Oasis. Recorded in a Nagano workroom, sixteen instruments, one name: Kitaro at the peak of his Japanese years.
Oasis
In 1979 the sales copy on this record named its cover painter before its musician. Kitaro's third album, made alone in a Kamakura workroom.
Silk Road
In the spring of 1980 a documentary composer insisted his music go out in stereo. That demand made the record, and it made Kitaro.
Mirage
January 1977: two pieces with no drums and no driving sequencers, subtitled an electronic winter landscape. The winter Schulze set the beat down.
Moondawn
A Moog bought from Florian Fricke three days before Christmas, and drummer Harald Grosskopf. Frankfurt, January 1976: Schulze's pulse becomes a beat.
Timewind
One night in June 1975, thirty minutes recorded in a single take in the space of two hours. Schulze's first record with a sequencer, and his dedication to Wagner.
Ricochet
The sleeve says live. More than half of it was rebuilt in a studio. Tape from the autumn 1975 tour became two pieces and thirty-eight minutes.
Rubycon
A year after Phaedra the same three men went back to the same country house. The power kept failing. The most complete record they ever made.
Phaedra
Calling it a classic undersells it. The record that gave the Berlin School its sound: a country house, a Moog that drifted, a tape left running.