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Klaus Schulze, pioneer of electronic music, in 2008 at the Schiller Theater in Berlin
Photo: POP-EYE/Peng / POP-EYE / IMAGO
When Klaus Schulze talked in soft Berlin slang, nothing seemed to faze him.
Only when someone once again wanted to know why electronic music sounded so cold and emotionless did the artist flash his skin and explain that a synthesizer could depict every imaginable feeling if you only knew how.
And then amusingly adding that violins don't grow on trees either.
Few musicians were able to elicit highly emotional sounds from electronic instruments with such virtuosity as Klaus Schulze.
Even if his name doesn't sound like world fame, the German is revered around the world as a pioneer of electronic music.
The list of colleagues who referred to Schulze is as long as it is dazzling, ranging from David Bowie and Brian Eno to Aphex Twin and Damon Albarn to Steven Wilson and Kanye West.
DJ Shadow, J Dilla and Future Sounds of London sampled his tracks.
And directing titans such as Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola and most recently Dennis Villeneuve used his melodies for their blockbusters.
David Lynch once ordered a remix from him.
Schulze seemed only moderately impressed by such expressions of respect, he rather took note of them.
The fact that his records were more likely to be found in well-stocked stores in London, Los Angeles and Tokyo than in Germany didn't seem to dampen his mood.
Presumably, over the decades he had simply gotten used to the fact that his art found much more euphoric listeners outside of Germany.
On the drums in the hip basement shop
His career began in Berlin, where he was born in 1947.
After graduating from high school, he delivered telegrams and studied German at the Technical University.
The fact that at the end of the 1960s many of his fellow students took to the streets to protest against the establishment didn't impress him: "I was more of a passive type," he once recalled.
His anti-establishment revolution began in the legendary Zodiac Club, which for a while attracted the young, adventurous creatives of West Berlin.
The hip cellar shop under the Schaubühne am Hallesches Ufer particularly attracted musicians who wanted to try new things.
Schulze, who was still playing drums at the time, ran into Edgar Froese one night, who steered him into his band Tangerine Dream.
He had noticed Schulze because he could hold unusually long melodies on the drums.
In Berlin at that time there was an “exciting and destructive romanticism” (Schulze), and Schulze wanted to depict this in music.
On Tangerine Dreams debut album "Electronic Meditation" (1970), a joyfully improvised art rock record, Schulze still sets the beat.
A visit to the »Electronic Beat Studio« in Berlin Wilmersdorf proved to be life-changing for him, because there the Swiss avant-gardist Thomas Kessler and his students sounded out the possibilities of compositional structures and practiced the dissection and stretching of melodies with relish.
One day he presented a synthesizer, the "Synthi A" from EMS, to the astonished youngsters.
which he had brought to the city from London and which was probably the first specimen of its kind in Berlin.
He left this magic box to Schulze and the others to freely dispose of, so that they could advance into new musical universes.
The electronic sound is called the "Berlin School" and was to cause a worldwide sensation with musicians such as Tangerine Dream, Ashra Tempel, Michael Hönig and Klaus Schulze from Wilmersdorf.
Just like in Berlin, a young generation all over Germany was trying to overcome the past and dare to make a new start in art.
»Krautrock« is what experts call the music that bands like Can, Tangerine Dream, Faust or Neu!
conjured up, which is nonsense, since it has hardly anything in common with rock.
Schulze also found the term »horrid«.
Music that had never existed before
“We were, however, shaken by all that English and American music.
If you wanted to be successful in Germany back then, you had to copy them, but we didn't want that.
We wanted something independent!« Klaus Schulze once said.
His goal, too, was music that was reminiscent of nothing that had existed before.
And Klaus Schulze quickly realized that synthesizers seemed perfect for this.
He was one of the first to recognize the possibilities that lay in these magic boxes, which were still new and expensive at the time.
It was also clear to him that commercial success was not an issue in these musical adventures: »We wanted to make underground pop music and not this normal pop music.«.
It was a "musical liberation" back then, he later recalled.
On top of that, it also dawned on him
that he could best carry out his bold ideas alone.
He quit Tangerine Dream after the first album and got involved with the band Ashra Tempel for a short time before becoming self-employed.
His solo debut album »Irrlicht« was released in 1972 and pointed the way to a musical future.
However, Schulze's music also polarized constantly.
Their artistic substance was repeatedly debated, preferably in Germany.
Were his sprawling, predominantly instrumental melodies, which sometimes stretched out for up to thirty minutes, a radical stroke of genius or just »bubbly music«, as some critics grumbled?
What is certain is that Schulze has recorded more than sixty albums, some of which, such as "Timewind", "Moondawn" or "Dune", have long been regarded as electronic music classics.
On top of that, he even managed to successfully bring these shimmering melodies to the stage and to complete successful tours all over the world.
The fact that he was always given much more applause and success abroad than in Germany did not affect him.
However, he never moved away, he only left Berlin at the beginning of the 1970s, when it had lost its magic for him, and moved “to the country”, as he called it.
He gave his last concert far from home in 2010, in Japan.
He then retired to private life, but continued to produce new music.
Just a few days ago he released the album »Deus Arrakis«.
Klaus Schulze died on Tuesday after a long illness.
