Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Klaus Schulze - Timewind (1975)
Klaus Schulze has always been a fan of the musician Richard Wagner. In 1975 he dedicated this Timewind, considered by many experts to be his masterpiece. Clearly this is one of his greatest albums, but this praise usually come from the United States, where he was the only one of his records published for many years, and had not compare it with. Could serve this Timewind, stepping back to observe Schulze's career, as his staff to move the hinge to the call Krautrock Berlin school style that is the second heir to the first, but with a more cosmic and refined.
Again we are, as always with this kind of record, with the countless reviews that focus on the technical side, that was the first album by Klaus Schulze in using a sequencer, there is a Moog synthesizer to create melodies scattered , etc. But I prefer to talk about what sounds each work, and this is a hard Timewind me, say, three-dimensional sound. Like a movie in 3D it were, the album's sound effects (especially the effect of "wind" Bayreuth Return) seems to emerge from somewhere between the listener and the speaker, stretching to maximize the already amazing possibilities of sound in stereo. Other tracks on the album abound in this poignant sound quality because at some point the music seems to become something we can physically touch hands.
Bayreuth Return is a piece improvised in the studio, based on a rhythmic pattern imposed by the aforementioned sequencer, with some string sounds and sound effects spatter. Wahnfried 1883, meanwhile, is a more complex issue and deliberate, with overlapping layers of music and a shade slower.
What Richard Wagner paints in all this, if it was a classical composer who had little or nothing to do with delusions of Krautrock and electronic space? Well first topic titles: Bayreuth is where Wagner was born and where there is the audience that he conceived as the perfect setting for opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Wahnfried is the name of the musician's home in Bayreuth, which rests precisely since 1883. And secondly, Wagner is alive in Timewind that the second topic contains an example of "leitmotiv", a theme which Wagner used to identify musically a feeling or even a character, which is undergoing minor changes throughout the piece but in general, all the composition chairs. Do not think this is easy to appreciate, especially considering what these people German electronics seventies meant by melody. What I think is the idea more tangible presiding Timewind: make the listener feel that has been frozen in time, that the universe is static around, at least for the duration of pieces.
Note that the first two pieces that pointed up Timewind were part of the original, and Klaus Schulze added three more to his double CD reissue: Echoes of Time, Solar Wind and Windy Times. Apart from the resemblance of Echoes of Time with Bayreuth Return, not just find more reasons why the musician got the three pieces in the package, but neither is exactly why it should not. It's a great album, much more bearable than earlier proposals from the German.
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