Klaus Schulze
Everything we have written about Klaus Schulze: the listening guide, then each record in release order.
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Klaus Schulze: where to start
Sixty solo albums by one man, recorded across five decades. Five of them, in order, and the reason it has to be this order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moondawn
A Moog bought from Florian Fricke three days before Christmas, and drummer Harald Grosskopf. Frankfurt, January 1976: Schulze's pulse becomes a beat.
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.
Mirage
January 1977: two pieces with no drums and no driving sequencers, subtitled an electronic winter landscape. The winter Schulze set the beat down.
X
Schulze smeared an orchestra past recognition on his first album. On X, his tenth, in 1978, he let the strings sound like strings.
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.