Klaus Schulze
By John Diliberto
May 1983
 
 
 
     Muted lighting illuminates plush armless couches that
encircle a large-screen video projector. A 24-track recording
console provides a gateway into a cockpit of wires, switches,
patch cords, video screens, computer terminals, and keyboard
instruments.  A tiny EMS 'suitcase' synthesizer hangs on the wall
like a trophy next to an imposing Moog modular system, which
looms over the smaller, fleeter GDS digital synthesizer like a
lumbering 747 jumbo jet next to a fighter plane; both are still
flight worthy, but evidence of the progress of technology.
     The mass of hardware, softened by dim lights and natural
woodwork, forms a suitable environment in which to envision a
music that doesn't seem to be played by human beings.  Like the
best music of Bach, the sounds here seem to exist on their own,
untainted by human intervention, as if they have materialized
directly in the listener's head.  This is the studio and music of
Klaus Schulze, a German musician and composer who has been
assembling tone poems described as space, trance, cosmic,
celestial, and simply electronic music for the past 13 years.
     Though Schulze has recorded 16 albums under his own name in
ten years, and sells out such large European concert halls as the
Hippodrome in Paris, he remains little known in the United
States, where only one of his albums (Body Love) has been
released.  He hasn't capitalized on the successes of Vangelis or
Jean-Michel Jarre, yet his reputation has grown steadily in
Europe, where he is regarded not as a pop artist but as a
classical composer.  His 1975 LP Time Wind won the French Grand
Prix Du Disque award as a classical recording.  And he has
influenced a whole generation of musicians who are sometimes
referred to as his disciples, on both sides of the Atlantic and
Pacific. The music of Michael Garrison, Mark Shreeve, Kitaro,
Michael Hoenig, and, though you won't get him to admit it now,
Jean-Michel Jarre, would not have occurred if Schulze hadn't been
there first.
     Schulze's music hasn't always been plugged-in and switched-
on. When he was born in March 1946, synthesizers were still a
glimmer in the eyes of people like avant-garde composer Edgar
Varese.  At age 7, Schulze began studies on classical guitar,
which he kept up until he was 14, when the temptations of
American and British rock and roll diverted him. Germany had no
original rock music at the time, and Schulze played drums in
cover bands doing the usual Rolling Stones tunes until the
liberating winds of the psychedelic era allowed him to experiment
with his own music.
     Taking the music of the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and
Pink Floyd as a starting point, Schulze was among the first wave
of German artists to begin defining a sound that merged
electronics, rock, and a classical heritage from Bach to
Stockhausen in the crucible of LSD.  A number of groups emerged
at this time.  Among them Can, Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh, Amon Duul,
Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra Tempel.  Schulze, still playing
drums, formed an acid-rock trio called Psi- Free, an avant-garde-
version of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Edgar Froese saw him
perform and signed him up as a member of his fledgling trio,
Tangerine Dream, and in 1969 they recorded their first album,
Electronic Meditation.  With Froese's heavily processed guitar
and overdriven organ, Conrad Schnitzler's cello, and Schulze's
free drumming, Electronic Meditation was a wandering
improvisation of electro-distortion that sounded more than
anything else like Pink Floyd playing the Stockhausen song book
     Electronic Meditation was followed by a feverish batch of
recordings from the so-called Berlin school.  At the height of
the psychedelic frenzy, several space-jam-party sessions were
recorded under the name Cosmic Couriers.  The resulting LPs,
Galactic Supermarket and The Cosmic Jokers, provide an insight
into the frenetic activity and self-indulgence of new discovery,
and would remain to provide fond but embarrassing memories years
later. Schulze began moving from drums to organ and synthesizers
at this time with the group Ash Ra Tempel, formed with
guitarist/synthesist Manuel Goettsching.  Here the psychedelic
excursions became more introspective and shifted to a droning
Eastern sound.
     In 1971, Schulze recorded and released Irrlicht, a
quadrophonic symphony for orchestra and electronic machines.  It
was the first realization of the drone style of electronics, with
long sustained tones and organ clusters that occasionally broke
to open a window on the real orchestra, which sounded as though
it had been recorded off a short-wave broadcast. It was a
complete departure from conventional rock structures. and lacked
any rhythm, harmony, or melody to speak of.
     The electronics of Irrlicht and its successor, Cyborg, were
primitive but they set the tone for Schulze's work which eschewed
the three then-current trends in electronic music: The avant-
garde bloop-bleep approach, the glorified organ style of Keith
Emerson and Rick Wakeman, and the imitative orchestral synthesis
of (at that time) Walter Carlos.  On later work. such as Black
Dance, Time Wind, and Mirage, Schulze was involved with careful
tone control and textural interrelationships with either static,
or totally absent rhythms.  His recordings tend toward side-long
compositions with slow, meditative developments that create a
total ambiance. like a Gothic cathedral.  He implies a classical
presence without copying licks and forms outright, and without
directly imitating an orchestral sound.
     Schulze also has an aggressive side, reflected in Moon Dawn,
the Body Love LPs, and X.  On these LPs he uses the driving
sequencer rhythms that he is often noted for, augmented by
acoustic drums in pulsing rhythmic forays, while he solos on
synthesizer against the twisting  electronic backdrop.  But
unlike Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, who infuse their music with
rock rhythms and other melodic structures, Schulze's music
remains at the fringes of traditional sensibilities, appealing to
our feel for contemporary electronic sonorities and rhythmic
pulse, but using these elements in the way Indian musicians use
pulse and drone as a basis for extended inward development.
     Unlike many of his electronic colleagues, Schulze has always
been an active touring artist.  He performs his music in a solo
context, controlling most of the parameters of the sound in real
time: sometimes the performance is augmented with other
instrumentalists, such as drummers, guitarists, and cellists.  In
1976 he was a participant in percussionist Stomu Yamashta's
monumental conceptual piece Go, which also included Steve
Winwood, guitarist Al DiMeola, and drummer Mike Shrieve. Yamashta
ambitiously attempted to merge rock, jazz, classical, and funk
over the course of three albums.  Go, Go Too, and Go Live In
Paris.  Of the three, it is Go Live that gives the best
indication of Schulze's ability to create environments for
soloists and to interact freely with traditional
instrumentalists.
     Despite the renowned company, Go did not bring Schulze's
music to a wider audience (nor Yamashta's, which hasn't been
commercially released since Go Live).  Yet Schulze continues to
progress in the same directions, to the delight of his devoted
following.  In 1979 he began his Innovative Communications label,
initially distributed by WEA ( Warner-Elektra-Asylum ) in Europe,
but now wholly independent.  Originally intended to record the
music of other electronic artists like Robert Schroeder and Baffo
Banfi, the label has since expanded into German pop and new wave
and has racked up its first German platinum record with the group
Ideal.  Innovative Communications also gave Schulze the chance to
form a music laboratory called Richard Wahnfried, a loose-knit
group consisting of Schulze and other musicians he chooses to
record with.  Some strange alliances have come from this,
including one with vocalist Arthur "Fire" Brown on Time Actor
and, according to rumor, another with an uncredited Carlos
Santana on Tonwelle.
     Today Schulze is at the forefront of electronic media.  In
addition to his home 24-track studio, he has 3 combination
multitrack and video studios in a small West German village where
he now lives with his wife and son.  His new work is done almost
exclusively with digital synthesizers, notably the GDS [from
Music Technology, Inc.], with which he recorded his two most
recent LPs, Dig It and Trancefer.
 
 
 
     "You started out as a guitarist and drummer, didn't you?
 
     Actually, I started with classical guitar training, finger-
picking Bach and things like that, from when I was seven till I
was fifteen.  But this kind of teaching never  allowed me to play
pop or rock music, and I wanted to play that.  I had no chance at
this time, because with acoustic guitar you can't play rock.  But
my brother at this time was playing free jazz, and he had a drum
kit, so I just switched to drums and played that for about ten
years. I was never a really good drummer, but I always had a very
special way of playing drums. After working with Mike Shrieve [ex-
Santana], I would never dare say I played drums before.  The
thing that was very good for me that I got from the drums was the
sequencer stuff, the rhythmical feeling.  I think every musician
should play at least a year or two of drums to get the feeling
and the physical expression of rhythm.  That helps me a lot in
composing and playing live.  When I play with a drummer it's
never a problem, because I know how he will play.  When Mike and
I recorded Trancefer and the Wahnfried stuff, it was always done
on the first or second take.  We never spoke about titles or
composing, we just played, and it worked because we had that
understanding.
 
     "Do you think you can get the rhythmic flexibility with
electronics that you can get with drums?
 
     Not really.  I would never try.  If I wanted to have a
swinging rhythm I would never try to do it with a drum machine,
even a very sophisticated one.  Drum machines have incredible
facilities, but they'll never replace a live drummer.  Its the
same as with synthesizers, which will never replace violin or
brass players because the human playing is always different.
Sometimes I might want robot-like rhythms, and the drum machine
is good for that.  I normally use it for that because Mike
doesn't like to play basic rhythms.  So I play the drum computer
and Mike does all the spice [accents and fills], because a
computer could never do that. It's also an expression of the
artist to play drums, and a computer has no expression.  Whatever
you program into it, it can only repeat. Even if you program in
2000 steps, a drummer is not programmed to do 2000 pre-calculated
beats or syncopations, and he will always be a little ahead or
behind the beat.  You can't tell a computer, "Okay, that's your
clock, but don't always play on the clock pulse, push it a bit
sometimes."
 
     "So you don't think computers will replace human musicians?"
 
     Computers will never replace the human touch in music,
they're a great help for taking care of the basic stuff, like
[storing strings of notes in] sequencers, which I really can't
hear anymore. You can set up basic rhythm patterns that are great
to build on, but you can't leave it at that.  Even if you could
program a computer to add that human variable element, it
wouldn't be the same.  Otherwise, you could just program a
symphony, and it would always sound the same.  But if you hear an
orchestra conducted by two different people, like Leonard
Bernstein  and Karl Boehm doing Beethoven, it may be the same
piece, with exactly the same beat. Everything seems the same, but
it sounds totally different, so you prefer one version over the
other.  It may be basically the same, but still there's something
different, and this is the creativity that the computer can't
replace at all.
 
     "You said you can't hear sequencers anymore?"
 
     Yes, the normal stuff.  Normally they just go one-two-three-
four, or up to 16 or 32 steps, or whatever.  In my view this is
overdone, especially in new-wave electronics and electro-pop.
These bands use the most basic kinds of things, anyway.  It goes
on and on and it becomes like Muzak, because the sequencer is
being used in such a superficial way, just going dang-dang-dang-
dang while the metal drums go danga-dinga-danga-dinga.  This goes
on for three minutes and it's a new-wave hit.  I have nothing
against it, because it was very necessary for new-wave
electronics to come into the field.  But they haven't gone any
further with it yet: they're just repeating the same thing all
the time. It's strange to hear sequencers on TV spots, because
when we started working with sequencers it was something
different to us.  Now suddenly you switch on and hear a Porsche
advertisement with my music, which I did for them.  The music has
changed the advertising, and that should be a reason for me to
change.  You hear it too much, so l just don't like it anymore.
 
     "How did you make the transition from drums to synthesizer?"
 
     When I was playing drums we were all copying the English and
American bands.  Otherwise you would never have a gig.  You were
not even allowed to sing in German.  Now it's the biggest thing
over here, to sing in German, but at that time if you had a
German song they would not accept you.  If it is was even your
own composition they would tell you to forget it, play the Stones
or the Kinks.  But I had the feeling to do something else that
was me and not somebody else.  The biggest compliment was, "you
played it great.  It was exactly like the Stones."  For an
artist, that's the worst thing you can hear.  I wanted to do a
new music, so I thought I'd take an instrument that I had never
touched before.  If I had stayed with guitar or drums I would
have played the same things I had been playing before.  So I
thought if I played a new instrument I would jump in very
naively.  I didn't want to play organ, because they always sound
the same.  I was looking for new sounds, which I had started
doing on drums, using different metals, pickups being run through
echo and phasers and all that.  But it was still that bang-bang-
ssshh stuff.  I listened to the guitar and the sound just filled
the hall while the drums would just go bang and finish.
 
     "So you got a synthesizer."
 
     At that time synthesizers were not available.  But I had a
friend who gave me an organ, and I modified it.  I  just opened
it and looked at the plugs and contacts and said, "Okay, what
happens if l put this here and switch all this around?"  You
couldn't play chords anymore, but when you touched the keyboard
something strange would happen.  It was a great sound.  All the
electronics on Irrlich are just the short-circuiting of an organ,
which broke down, of course.  But is was my first attempt to
escape the pressure to do Anglo-American music and just do
something that I created.  Then, of course, you find out what the
machinery will do, and your brain is asking for more.  You ask
for new technology, and the technology gives you new ideas to go
further, and it becomes kind of a feedback situation and you
can't get out of it.  Now we have the whole digital and computer
area, and suddenly you can do things you couldn't do before.
Probably I could have gone to a flute or something, but at this
time I was very affected by these indescribable sounds. No matter
how you play a flute, it is still a flute. But now, you could
play an instrument whose sound stands on its own, without any
tradition.
 
     "But if you call up a violin sound on your GDS, then people
will still associate it with the tradition of violin playing."
 
     You know, they've done experiments to see if people could
tell the difference between the sound of a synthesizer and the
sound of a violin. They put a violin player on stage [pretending
to play], and behind a curtain somebody was playing a
synthesizer, and everybody said, "That's a violin." Then they
turned it around and put the violin player behind the curtain and
the synthesizer up front, and of course people said they were
hearing a synthesizer, but it was just the opposite. The eye told
the brain it was hearing a violin.  But it's not only seeing that
causes you to think you're hearing a violin, it 's the whole
tradition of violin playing, that goes through the memory box of
the brain.  This switches on and says the music was done by
Mozart, or Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky. So the violin is no longer
just transporting [presenting] a tone, it's also transporting the
image of a violin.
 
     "And you didn't want to tie yourself to that tradition."
 
     What I was looking for was an instrument that you couldn't
tell what it was.  That means you have to listen to the tone
without associating it with your memories.  That was the idea
when we started with electronic music.  Today you can't even play
the synthesizer that way, because there is already a tradition.
But for us when we started it was a very naive thing, like the
first time you see daylight.  There were sounds involved that we
couldn't describe and didn't really want to describe.  But then
the whole perfection thing started, and it continues up to now.
I don't like the electronic music that's happening at the moment,
like Tangerine Dream.  Kraftwerk is different - I always like
them, and they'll always be good.  But the  others, like Jarre,
Schulze, whoever, I don't like.  We haven't done anything new in
two years.  We're just repeating ourselves.  For me this is an
absolute breaking-point situation.  My new album is totally
different from anything else. I'm really just fed up with the
whole "Berlin school."  Since '78 none of us have done anything
new, we just perfect what we did before.  We make more
complicated sequencer patterns or more string things, whatever.
But if you look at the music, it's still the same. That's why I'm
happy to hear this new-wave stuff, because they did something
new, from my point of view.  They started like we started,
without caring about any tradition.  As Eno said, "I don t want
to know what note I'm playing.  I don't want to know that that's
an A or a C, I just want to play it."  But now he's done all this
music, and he's in the same situation we are.  But if you look at
the beginnings of the Human League or the Residents and see how
they went into synthesizers, they bought a synthesizer for $300
and in my opinion make more interesting music than we do.  For
them the synthesizer is not already an existing thing with a
tradition, so they have a different attitude toward it. For us
there is nothing new.  You can say that technical perfection is
also a development, but l don't want to sell hardware.  I think
we've progressed with the hardware, but not with the musical
feeling. So there has to be a change.
 
     "The newer instruments do open up new musical possibilities,
though."
 
     Certainly the computers give you many more possibilities,
and your brain has to work out new things. You can't say the
technology has stopped.  The current technology for synthesis is
much further ahead of what people are doing with it.  Nobody is
doing it, and the electronic scene is very boring.  You look
surprised, but I include myself in this too.
 
     "When synthesizers first came out it was all very new to us,
so there was a freshness just because it was new.  The electric
guitar had that freshness when it was new, but now it has a
thirty-year tradition.  It seems almost inevitable that some of
the freshness is lost."
 
     I know what you mean.  But even within a tradition there is
room for something new.  If you think about rock music, nothing
has really happened there either-especially in the last few
years.  The only development in the music is the clothes they
wear on stage. Frank Zappa did something new, and Jimi Hendrix is
really the last guitarist I would talk about as having created
something new.  Al DiMeola became a hardware guitarist.  I played
with him, and he's brilliant. Just watching how he's running over
the fretboard, I said, "Goddamn."  But sometimes I think he's
getting paid per note per second, because he plays so quick.  We
were in the rehearsal studios at Island Records when we did the
first Go album, and Phil Manzanera came in.  I had set up my
equipment, and he came in and plugged his guitar into my echo
unit and played two tones in a minute.  It was so much more, and
so nice. Then Al came in and [imitates high-speed playing].  I
said "Stop it.  You're making me nervous."  But there's nothing
new happening there.  It's the same reason classical music is so
dead.  They went into a form that limited them so much they can't
get out of it.  The only route that's open to them is the avant-
garde, but that's like a child trying to break out of his
kindergarten.  A decent mixture of both would be nice, but that
never seems to happen.  Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart created a
style, but then the style became a music of its own, which was
apart from the composer, and then it was dead, because it was
such a strong form that it couldn't be developed by anybody
later.
 
     "So you feel the same thing has happened to electronic
music?"
 
     Definitely.  We went into certain forms, and the only way to
jump out of it may be to forget the synthesizers and play flute
or something.  It's not our fault as much as the fault of the
media, who put people into a certain frame so they can talk about
them. They think people need the frame to understand art.
 
     "Are you looking for something completely new, or for a
synthesis of the past and present that looks to the future?
 
     A little bit of both, but not like symphonic rock or
electronic versions of Beethoven.  The idea is to create the
feeling of Beethoven or Wagner or Karl Orff without it being
their music.  The feeling comes out in your music, but it's not
them. It's something new, because you're living in a different
time. But still you have a common feeling that has nothing to do
with names or styles of composition.  Every art can be reduced to
feeling; artists just use different media to express it.
 
     "Before ore you leap further into the future, I 'd like to
take a step back. Was Tangerine Dream the first experience you
had with going beyond imitative music or was that with Psi Free?"
 
     It was with Psi Free.  While I was playing with them, Edgar
[Froese] heard me playing and asked me to join Tangerine Dream.
It was the kind of thing where we were just beating around
everything trying to get away from the barriers.  It was kind of
electronic free jazz.  The drum kit didn't look like a drum kit,
and the organ player would turn the keyboard around so he
couldn't see the keys. The guitar player was Alex Kondegal, who
is very famous now.  He plays with Legg, which is a big band
here.  This guy was just total Hendrix.  These three things
together made mad music.  But you had the same thing in America.
The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane did it before, and it
was the same thing, to get rid of the barriers.  That's the thing
about Americans.  They are much more aware and ahead of us,
because they never had this stupid tradition.  They never had
concerts where you weren't allowed to play rock music.  When I
was in a concert hall in Sydney, Australia, I saw that one day
they had a classical concert and the next day there was a boxing
match in the same place.  In Germany people would die.  They
wouldn't even let the people in the hall. But in Sydney they have
an easier connection to this.  They're not so serious.  I hate
people who take their art so seriously. Suddenly they are not the
creator of art, but the result of their own art.  Suddenly they
say, "I can't drink, I have to be serious. I can't behave like a
bum."  You should never forget that art should be the most human
activity.  The worst thing is when a young person is interested
in art and thinks that they should therefore be educated as an
artist.  In that moment they cut off all the personal extremes.
Learning art should be like learning to walk. Nature made you
start walking on your own.  Nobody can teach it to you.  I saw
this with my son. He was just crawling around, and then one day
he stood up, and you should have seen his face!  Suddenly he's
looking at everything from a higher level, and he looked down and
immediately sat down again because he was so surprised.  Then he
stood back up and made his first steps, and I thought, "That is
the way human beings should express everything."
 
     "So you don't feel that artistic training is necessary?"
 
     It's a rare genius who can get rid of the traditions of his
educations.  [Violinist] Gidon Kramer, who I will be doing an
album with, said, "Klaus, you are so lucky to play a keyboard
having had no one tell you how to play it before.  You are so
free.  If I play the violin and I want to play a tone, suddenly
the finger is there even if I don't want it to be, because it was
educated like that." The way I play keyboards is untrained, so
the whole style of playing changes.  The biggest disadvantage
when you're creating something is that you've already been shaped
by your environment. I know this doesn't exactly answer your
question, but from my point of view this is the most important
question in art.  It's not what I started or did, or the prices I
get.  It's just what is art.
     The situation is becoming very bizarre in art, because we
had all the structures of tradition, followed by the free art
with all the happenings and everything.  But now it looks like
it's all going backwards.  In ten years the best new-wave band
will probably play Mozart or Strauss.  But there is something
that must go forward.  Everything turns in cycles.  It's the same
thing in politics.  We're going into a third world war.  We know
it, but we do everything just like before.  It seems we never
learn from the past-we always make the same mistakes.  You can
see the same process in art or economics or whatever.  There
should be some way out of that system.
     In Germany we have people called Aussteiger, people who  are
very successful but just drop everything and leave the system to
go to Australia or form alternative farming communities.  That's
a sign of the problem, but it isn't a solution.  Art can get away
from this because it is a manipulating medium.  If you look at
the home video stuff or the cable TV like you have in America,
people are suddenly getting new information that couldn't have
come to them before.  In the past, art has been used to soothe
people.  The worse things got, the more entertainment people got,
and the more decadent the entertainment became.  Art could be
really important, like politics, but there is currently no art to
do it. There is some political art, but that's not what could
change the situation. The Indian music we were talking about
before was always political music, or religious music, which is
the same thing.  In Europe music was always entertainment.
European classical music was the dance music, the disco, for the
kings.  Haendel and Beethoven would get a letter from the king
asking them to write a piece of music for a party they were
having.  That was where Haendel's Water Music came from.  He
wrote it and gave it to the Orchestra. who played it like a disco
band, took the money, and left.  All the musicians did that at
the time.  It was entertainment, but in India it's not like that.
That's why you can't really learn Indian music.  If you grow up
there and get the feeling of the religious, political, and social
life and learn the instrument, you can play.  Indians aren't
trained the way people here are.  You learn your instrument for
twenty years, and then you're allowed to play for people. You put
everything into your instrument and then you can express
everything with it.
 
     "Even before you got into electronics, though, when you were
still playing drums, you were going for sounds and forms that
were different from what had gone before."
 
     Right.  I tried to alter the instrument and modify the
playing.  It never got to a point where I thought that's what I
wanted to stick with for the next ten years.  At this time
everyone was looking for something new.  We wanted to get away
from what everybody was telling us.  The American and English
have a tradition and roots in rock and roll, but German rock and
roll has no roots.  It was surprising for me, the first time I
went to America.  I was in Washington in 1963, in a black area,
and the people were standing on a corner with just a mouth organ
and a guitar. and I thought, "Goddamn, they're great!" It was the
first time I had seen a musician who didn't have a record
contract or hadn't been on TV.  They were just standing around
playing music. In Germany it was never like that.  German music
is always in a concert hall, never on the street.
 
     "What was the first contact you had with a synthesizer?"
 
     It was in a studio in Strassburg.  Thomas Kessler taught us
everything about it.  It was the EMS, the one I still have over
there on the wall.  I also still have my  first tape recorder,
which I made the Irrlicht album on.  I'll never give that away.
The EMS was the first synthesizer in Europe because it was made
in England, which wasn't so far away.  The Moogs and ARPs came
later.
 
     "When you started playing synthesizer, did you see it as a
way of breaking with the traditions that had preceded you?"
 
     Yes, because there were two things you could do. You could
change the scale of the keyboard, so you were not locked into the
halfsteps of a normal keyboard.  And you could create sounds that
had no association with anything else.  You don't think of an
instrument when you hear a sound, so people have to listen to the
music and nothing else.
 
     "The liner notes on Irrlicht and Cyborg say that there is an
orchestra. But I honestly can't hear an orchestra?"
 
     You can't?  I mean, you can even hear the voice of the
conductor.
 
     "On the other hand, you claim there is no orchestra on X,
that everything is synthesized, but I can hear strings."
 
     Yeah. [Laughter]  I didn't say everything was synthesized.
The full credits are given on the film soundtrack.  The only
reason I didn't mention the orchestra on the album was that the
only thing they actually played was the fugue part of "Ludwig."
If I had written 'orchestra' on the album, people would have
thought that "Heinrich von Kleist" or "Friedeman Bach" was also
an orchestra, and those are all synthesizer.  So I left it off,
because I was so proud to find those good strings on a Polymoog.
But if you listen carefully to Irrlicht you can hear the
conductor.  This guy was so stupid.  I told him that the tape
recorder would pick him up.  We were in rehearsal, and he was
giving instructions to the musicians, and I told him to stop it,
because his voice was on the recording, but we didn't have time
to tape it again, so I had to use it with the voice.  That was
all recorded with one microphone into a Philips cassette
recorder.  For a microphone preamp I used a small echo unit with
no echo.  Then I recorded it onto a cheap Telefunken tape
recorder.  The sound got so modified that you couldn't hear the
difference between a cello and a violin, because the microphone
couldn't handle it.  But it's definitely an orchestra there.
 
     "At that time you were involved with what might be called
drone music.  It was very textural, and you seemed to be getting
inside the notes."
 
     That was a reaction against playing three-minute tunes with
the same drum break as the Stones.  That's why on those first
albums there are no drums.  I had played them for so long that I
didn't want to hear them.  If I'm doing an album on which I play
all the instruments myself, I would never  play drums on it.  The
first time I started using drums again was on Blackdance.  But
even then I didn't dare play the whole drum kit.  I just played
the percussive things, with a rhythm machine behind me.  But at
that time I still bad a distorted connection to the drums.  That
was a reaction to the things that had gone before; when you get
free of something, you tend to go over the top.  The first time
the drums really became part of the music was on Moondawn.  It
took me six records to get to that place where I no longer felt
that the drums were destroying or disturbing my music.  It's same
with music in general. Just because I didn't like what I played
on the drums before didn't mean that it was bad.  When I play
live, some of my music sounds a bit funky.  At first I said to
myself, " Klaus you can't play funky, you have to play floating
music."  But then you become open.  Why not play a good
Temptations song and add your own expression to it?  But before
if I told somebody I was going to do a funky thing, they'd think
I was joking.
 
     "When you were with Ash Ra Tempel and doing things like The
Cosmic Jokers and Galactic Supermarket, what was the
consciousness at the time?"
 
     [A series of grimacing expressions.]  The basic thing about
Cosmic Jokers was LSD.  That was the whole basis of the
compositions.  This was the influence of Timothy Leary.  The
feeling was, I think just like the hippie times you had in
America. It was just doing something nice and enjoying it.  There
was a guy who put it on tape and sold it later on. which was
quite nice-we got some money from it, and it was always nice to
go into a record shop and see an album you played on.  But it was
fun. We didn't take it seriously.  We figured we'd sell 300
albums, so it would be very private.  But suddenly you get all
these albums out, and they're just awful, I mean really terrible.
God!  If I could just pull them away and take them back.  And now
this idiot brings them all out again. I forbid him to put out
anything where my name was involved, but where I'm with other
musicians there was nothing I could do about it.
     It was a funny feeling.  On some albums I played bass and
never touched a synthesizer.  I'm standing there for five hours
playing bass with a wah-wah pedal, you know?  It was great.  You
know what it's like on a trip.  The next day they say they mixed
it, and I was playing bass on the whole thing.  I said, ''You
must be joking."  They said, "No, it was great."  "Well, if you
think so, okay, leave it."  It was like the San Francisco bands
who'd go on stage and play for three hours.
 
     "One thing that distinguished the German scene from the
American scene at that time was that the Germans seemed to be
getting into the whole space-travel consciousness, while
Americans never really got into that."
 
     Yeah!  Werner von Braun is back in town!  For us, Americans
are the space people.  NASA was very important.   We saw the
rockets and thought, "Goddamn, they're going to the moon now."
For us it was a symbol of freedom.  The hippie stuff came from
the whole Woodstock feeling.  But we didn't have that weather
here. The Americans had that sunny weather, which makes their
hippie music so light, while the German hippie music had a lot of
the same inspiration, but it's more depressing and heavy.  The
thing about space travel, though, was more something that was
done in the media.  We were not thinking about spacecraft when we
played.  We just felt in space like on a trip.
 
     "In many respects, the instruments you're playing today are
the result of space-age technology."
 
     Absolutely!  But even if you're in the kitchen and you make
a pot of soup in a microwave in three seconds, that's all NASA
stuff. It also comes from war technology.  All these data
terminals look futuristic, but if you go on a plane you see the
same thing.  It has nothing to do with feeling, it's a futuristic
image.  A guitar or a violin has an image.  And if you play a
waltz with computers on the stage, you have a cosmic waltz,
because the image puts you into that.
 
     "When synthesizers first appeared, a lot of people were
afraid they were going to replace traditional instruments.
Certainly the synthesizers of today can imitate traditional
instruments better than their counterparts could ten years ago.
But still, you don't really use synthesizers in that way."
 
     I think every instrument has a purpose.  The synthesizer was
not made to replace an orchestra.  You would never try to copy a
violin with a guitar.  The synthesizer is an independent
instrument, and should be played that way.  Of course, sometimes
I copied strings, because you can't always have an orchestra in
the room, and sometimes you'll want something you couldn't even
write down for an orchestra, because the textures are so
different.  But it's just to give the impression of an orchestra,
not to replace it.  The instrument just demands that you use it
differently.  A lot of people still play the Prophet like an
organ.  I also hate it when people use the Minimoog to make this
yowling sound, like Wakeman.  But if you want a perfect violin,
why not use one?  As long as it's not a question of using
synthesizers to save money, you should use them for their own
sound textures, because you can change the sound with filtering,
change the scale, use sequencers, and get all kinds of things you
can't get out of a piano, unless you go at it with a screwdriver.
     The industry probably wants to use the synthesizer to
replace the orchestra.  But really it is an instrument in itself,
just as a violin is. People always say that a synthesizer is no
instrument because it has knobs and cables all around.  But I
never saw a violin growing on a tree.  Imagine how much time
people spend to make a violin or build a normal acoustic grand
piano.  The synthesizer is exactly the same, except that it isn't
as familiar yet.  In fifty  years no one will say the synthesizer
isn't an instrument.  Even some musicians will say that the
synthesizer has no musical expression in it.  Of course it
doesn't have the same kind of expression as a guitar or piano.
But there is another dimension of expression in it.  You can
control the filtering and the tone color, which you can't do with
a piano.  Now they have synthesizers with keyboard velocity
sensing, but this is still totally different from a piano.  All
the techniques of humankind for the last 5,000 years are in the
synthesizer, so it must be human.  It didn't come from outer
space.  It's just like a car.  It was made by humans and has all
the facilities for a human to drive it.
 
     "You 're one of the few musicians from the Berlin school who
still performs live.  When you were performing during your middle
period, around the time of Time Wind and Moondawn, were you
controlling all the parameters of your sound in real time?"
 
     Yes.  The only thing I used, which I still use sometimes, is
drum tapes.  Sometimes now I use a drum computer, with some
additions by Mike [Shrieve].  I work with Mike so much I can't
stand working with other drummers anymore.  I play live because
it's thrilling to work without a net.  You make it or you don't
make it.  It's also educational, because it takes discipline, and
you have to deal with people.  It's not like the studio, where
you finish an album and think it's fantastic, and you bring it
out and that's it.  With an audience you have to get to them.
Doing a live concert is not like doing a record. A record I do
for myself, to fulfill my own demands.  I don't worry whether
people will like it, or what the trends are.  When I do a live
concert it's because I want to play for the people.  I use pre-
recorded things as little as possible, because they limit you.
If the drum track is going I'll sometimes stop it during the
concert if it's just not happening.  But if you have a tape with
harmonies and sounds on it, you can't stop the tape, because then
there's nothing.  So I just use the rhythm tape and fade it in
and out whenever I like.
 
     "On the video tape you just showed me, it seemed to me that
the only thing you were doing live was the solo line on top .
Everything else seemed pre-recorded."
 
     No.  One thing was that the EMS was playing sounds randomly.
And you probably didn't see that Manuel [Goettsching] was playing
a guitar synthesizer.  His top three strings were playing guitar
lines, and the three bass strings were playing a Roland
synthesizer and a Minimoog.  The sequencer stuff was prepared
beforehand, so that's  like a tape.  But what was actually on the
tape was the drums.  You probably also didn't see the rhythm
computer that Manuel was playing, and his ARP sequencer.  A lot
of people didn't think he was doing anything, because they were
listening for the guitar tones, but actually he was doing more
than me sometimes.  I was just playing CS 80 [Yamaha polyphonic
synthesizer] or the Minimoog.
 
     "Does using computer technology lock you into certain things
in a live performance?"
 
     No, in fact the computer things give me a lot of freedom.
You can program the background stuff and mix it with one of the
32 faders [volume controls on the mixer console].  So you have a
background that you can change with every situation.  It's not
like a tape, where you have everything or nothing on two tracks.
With computers you can change the whole musical style from
evening to evening.  The only thing is that on an analog system
you can change the tone quicker.  If you want to change the
violin tone on the GDS you have to program it differently.
During a performance it's not really possible to change it.
That's why I always have two Minimoogs and the CS 80 on-stage, so
I can change tone colors quickly.  On computers it's hard.
especially if you're playing alone, because you have to enter new
parameters and everything. When Tangerine Dream plays, they can
do this, because two guys are playing while the other is
programming a different thing, and then they switch places.
 
     "What differentiates Richard Wahnfried from Klaus Schulze?"
 
     The Wahnfried thing came from playing with Go.  The Go idea
in the beginning was like the Japanese board game, where you
always play the same game but with different people. When we did
the first album we had musicians coming from different countries,
but the personalities were so different that we couldn't really
make it together.  In the end Stomu just told us what to play,
but within the group we didn't really like each other's musical
ideas or attitudes.  Al [DiMeola] just came into the studio,
played his solo for three hours, and said good-bye.  In America,
when we did Go Too, he walked into the studio and said: "I can't
play if everybody is here," so he left.  It was not a band.  But
the concept that Stomu had was very good.  That's why I do these
Wahnfried things with different people.  You have people with
totally different ideas.  The group always exists but the
membership changes.  It's also so I don't get isolated doing solo
work.  It's dangerous if you lose the ability to interact with
other musicians.
     So it's something like what Stomu did, but not like what he
did where he tried to find the best on each instrument.  What I'm
doing is more a matter of having an understanding, of thinking
alike.  If the human thing is working, then the music thing
should work as well.  That didn't happen at all with Go except
maybe the live album.  It's a pity, because the idea Stomu had
was great. But also, Stomu's ideas are expensive.  Stomu has no
ideas that are less than $100,000.  When we played the Royal
Albert Hall, we had the Royal Symphony Orchestra with Paul
Buckmaster conducting, and five guitarists-Pat Thrall, Phil
Manzanera, AI DiMeola, and a couple of other guys-all standing
there in a row.  The manager way or we can't do it.   That's
probably why we didn't do another album.
 
     "Your compositions, with the exception of Time Actor, tend
to be very long.  Is it just a need to keep going, or is there
more to it than that?"
 
     I start like a model of an atom with the nucleus, and then
go to the first, second, third cycle [rings of electrons]. I
start with a sound, and you need time to hear the sound and feel
what it means, and then I add a bit more and build up.  You can't
do it in two or three minutes.  It begins from nowhere, and you
don't really know what it means, but when it's finished you see
the reason why. I always thought you should leave a tone the time
to breathe. Normally you hear very good composition but things go
by so fast that you don't have time to hold onto them.  I go very
slowly to give each tone a chance to build its mood and develop
through the whole piece.  Even if I do a short piece it comes out
of a long one, except for soundtracks.  There I don't have to
spend a long time with a tone because the picture is carrying the
message.  For a lot of people, a long piece is monotonous or
boring.  But if you listen to it a couple of times, every tone
has time to live, and your mind changes.  If you give the tones
enough time to establish themselves, you'll hear the whole piece
differently.
 
     "You seem to have a more Eastern perception of time."
 
     That's more by accident, I think. It's about the same.  They
have a long introduction by the sitar, then a solo part for the
tabla, but they also have long developments like movements.
Every movement expresses a certain feeling, like joy or sadness.
But they start with very basic things like a tone and build on
it.  I didn't realize this when I started doing it, but later I
listened to Ravi Shankar and I liked him very much and realized
it was similar to my music.  Reggae music, too, if they didn't do
songs, would be similar to my music.  It's very monotonous, with
a beat that falls into sing-song patterns.  If they extended
these pieces for half an hour it would be exactly the same.  It's
similar because it's relaxed and monotonous, but also very
hypnotic. That's another thing about this music - if you can go
into it, you can really get hypnotized.  I am almost hypnotized
myself while doing it.
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