Klaus Schulze |
As both a solo artist and as a member of groups including Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Temple, Klaus Schulze has emerged as one of the founding fathers of contemporary electronic music, his epic, meditative soundscapes a key influence on the subsequent rise of the new age aesthetic. Schulze began his performing career in the 1960s and has since produced more than 40 albums. Famed for his contemplative, brooding arrangements, which introduced elements of jazz, rock and psychedelia, it is Schulze's unswerving interest in the synthesizer that has made him stand out as one of the pioneers of synth. The groundbreaking style of some of his most famous albums - Irrlicht, Moondawn, Mirage and "X" - precipitated the synthesizer explosion of the 80s, and wedged open the door for many of the genres that were to follow - predominantly ambient music. Few have matched his creative flair for sculpting extravagant and avant-garde recordings in electronic music. The re-release of Schultz's entire back catalogue provides the perfect opportunity for fans of modern day electronica to revisit his work, while a new album in the spring suggests there is still plenty more to come. We caught up with Klaus to find out more about his inspirational career and his plans for the future.
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When did you decide to choose music as a career path? I didn’t know it would become a career (laughs). We were playing in Germany, let’s say music from England and America, we copied them you know. But at a certain time we thought we should do something of our own, not wanting to be copycats. At this time I worked with a band called Psy Free and we just improvised, jamming stuff, psychedelic. But it was a conventional group that had drum, bass and organ and a guitarist later on when the bass player went and then by accident we met with Tangerine Dream so we used the same rehearsal venue, so Edgar (Froese) asked me to join and we tried to do unconventional stuff. It was also drums, guitar and Steve Jollife from Steamhammer, the English band, played flute and saxaphone. It was weird, but I wanted to do something on my own, and in between I changed over to Ash Ra Temple, and we did the same thing with drum, bass and guitar and I wanted to change instrument, not drums, and I had an organ and tried to modify it so that it sounds different. Then by accident, although somebody said, “there are no accidents” (laughs), the whole synthesiser area started and I had a good connection to Putney, the English company, and there I got my first synthesiser, the EMS VCS3; I still have the old synthesiser, and still using it on stage. So this is after you left Tangerine Dream, although they’ve obviously got a big name for using a lot of synthesisers? We didn’t know then that they existed y’know? Because in America I think there was already Buchler and people like Morton Subotnick, but they did avant-garde stuff, which we didn’t like. We wanted to be somehow in pop music, but with special ideas. And then I heard the album A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968) from Pink Floyd and I thought, it’s not really the music I wanted to but it’s the way to do it, the direction where we could go. And when the synthesiser came up, it was a perfect mélange, or coincidence. Since then I went 100% on synthesiser and no regular instruments anymore, and this was the beginning when I started to release the first CD. Did you not feel you could achieve your goals with Tangerine Dream? Edgar was the leader of Tangerine Dream, and at a sound festival where Pink Floyd and Deep Purple were playing; I played on tape an organ in reverse. And Edgar couldn’t change it because I put an organ on stage but there was nobody sitting with the organ and the tape was running over the PA system. And I was playing drums, and Edgar didn’t like it at all and he said, “either you play drums or you leave the band”. “Then I leave the band”, I said. You have collaborated with others over the years, but do you miss the spontaneity of working in a band like Tangerine Dream? Not really, because I did some projects, like Go with Stomu Yamashta and Steve Winwood, but I do the same actually with the computer in the studio. I play on tracks on tracks and improvise with virtual musicians, if you want to call it this. I don’t miss it so much, but from time to time I am always jamming with other people, which did not always become records afterwards. So what was the first synthesiser that you actually bought? Synthesiser was the VCS3 from EMS, and then it was a cheap Teisco organ, which is the main instrument on Irrlicht (1972). And then afterwards I got the ARP Odyssey, and then I had a custom-made sequencer from a little German company called Syntanorma (laughs), strange name that I still don’t know what it means. And afterwards I got a lot of endorsements and so I got my first Minimoog. When I heard this instrument I stayed totally on Moog and had then the big modular system from Moog, the Polymoog, and all this moog analogue stuff. There were some very expensive ones around, such as Synclavier and the Fairlight as well. I had them afterwards. At the beginning of the eighties I had the Fairlight and the Krumar G.D.S., but that was ten years later already. But weren’t they incredibly expensive? Did you have to think twice about buying them? Oh yes, about £35,000 at this time. For me it was a new dimension. At this time, Fairlight was a very small Australian company, and they couldn’t afford endorsements so I had to buy this. Was there a sense of excitement that you were creating a new and original form of music? I knew that it was original and new, but it was not concious for me and I found it very normal. In the beginning we had a lot of misunderstandings because people said synthesisers are cold, mechanical and electronic, and it’s not warm music like guitar. I always told people, a violin doesn’t grow up on a tree y’know. They’re all artificial instruments working with minerals from the earth, like silicon, the chips are from the earth, the same as wood or iron for the guitar. But in the beginning they said this music is terrible, it’s cold and doesn’t entertain because there’s no human warmth. And also, when we started with the music, most of the journalists and the press didn’t even know what is a synthesiser. It was always a question I heard, “can you explain, what is a synthesiser?” I couldn’t hear this question after years anymore, but now it’s very natural. It’s nearly more popular than an organ. It’s stranger that people should resist it, as a synthesiser is so much more flexible than drums, bass or guitar? Yes, but I think they were focused on seeing what people were playing. So, a piano a player was real, but suddenly they saw somebody sitting on stage with a keyboard, but it was not a piano, even though it sounded like a piano. I think they couldn’t handle that, to see a different thing to what they hear? But were machines like the Polymoog and Minimoog particularly difficult to use? Not really. The only thing was that the oscillators were so unstable that you always had to tune during a concert or in the studio sessions. Because as the lights went on at a concert the tuning went down y’know. When there was a lot of light it went up, and when the light goes away the oscillator went down, and then not every oscillator does it the same way, one goes about 10%, one only 6%. At certain points you get used to it. Did you have many meetings with Bob Moog at all? Not so much, we had a lot of talks by telephone, and now via email. The first time we met was in Linz, 1980. I said thank you Bob, you made my career possible with the synthesiser, and he said thanks Klaus, because listening to your music made it worth inventing. For him it was also not an easy start, because he started in a garage doing soldering himself and whenever you ordered something from him, he needed half the money before to buy the parts and then half a year later he would finish the instrument and you would pay the rest. He wasn’t a musician himself was he? Not really, but it was very nice when we did the show in Linz, he was there to give some explanations to the audience. And then he did a jam session with some other musicians, and he went on stage with a Casio, a small pocket keyboard, and I found it so funny that the inventor of Moog plays on a pocket Casio keyoboard. And he said to me, “Hey look at how much it can do, look how many sounds is has”. Once you started getting involved in electronic music, were you looking around at some of those emerging, like Kraftwerk? Not really because in Germany it was quite a different scene y’know? We had the scene in Berlin, which was, not really dirty, but a little bit punky. Kraftwerk, Cluster, and La Dusseldorf, were around Dusseldorf, which is a very fashionable area. So, they did very designer stuff, and we were just punks and went on stage smoking dope and played for three hours or whatever we felt at the moment. So there was no real connection. Then later on, of course, we met at festivals and I got friendly with Florian Schneider but the happenings became about 10 years later. The majority of work you do consists of lengthy compositions. Why do you prefer to write like this instead of short, song-based tracks? I tried it a couple of times but I never succeeded. I cannot do it. Kraftwerk can do five/ten minute pieces but for me, just the introduction with the synthesiser takes just as long as a normal song you know? I tried to make it shorter but it lost all its imagination, I am not a man for these short pieces. I don’t know why, but it happened like that. Is this because you’ve had a classical background? Not really, but somehow the music does somehow classically structured. It’s a feeling that to put someone in a certain condition, whatever it is, when the audience or listener comes in, needs more than just five minutes. He comes in from the street probably, just from his business or whatever, sits down and you play a song for five minutes, which might be a good release from the daytime, but to create to your own feeling, or to ‘chill’ as we say today, I don’t think a five minute piece can help that. When you were recording albums like “X” and Mirage, did you envisage that electronic music would become commercialised to a pop format? At this time, no way - in the beginning it was not the music it was the instrument that was so frightening for the people. I said in the late seventies that the synthesiser will become very important, but that even a folk band would have a synthesiser on stage I couldn’t know before. With short pieces, most of the people are doing this. My way of music only 1% of people in the world are doing it and 99% are doing normal song structure music. But, I knew the instrument would become very important, because when I fiddled around for the first time with a synthesiser I felt incredible power. For every mood you could make a sound, but like you said before, with a guitar you can do certain things, but it always somehow remains a guitar. And then came the second generation in the early times, which used synthesisers in the wrong way, like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, who tried to make a synthesiser sound like an existing instrument, like a trumpet or a flute. But it’s not the way of a synthesiser; you should treat it as an independent instrument and use it as a synthesiser? Do you mean those big keyboard solos they used to play? Yes, they tried to imitate things and, for example, use the Polymoog like an orchestra. Of course it will not work like this. Ok, the Mellotron was a nice invention at the time, and I still love the Mellotron because it has a certain flair - even though the sounds are not perfect. But a synthesiser is there to do its own part, and that as nothing to do with traditional instruments, and so in the 70s it was very often misused. But later on came the experimental phase of synthesising, which I call the preset players – the Korg M1, Roland, and all these companies. And because people were not used to editing sounds, a lot of records sounded the same – you could hear a record and just say “oh, that’s program 135 on Roland JD800”, or something, which was a bit boring. But at the beginning of the nineties came a very interesting thing, through House, Dance and underground Techno, which is already nearly over, they treated the synthesiser really like a synthesiser, very weird and I like very much what they did with that. When the synthesiser explodes in the early eighties, were there any artists that interested you musically or visually? Ultravox, and Midge Ure, did some nice things. Also, the techno pop people, Pet Shop Boys, it was really funny what they did. In Germany we called it techno pop already at this time, but maybe the expression comes from you. So over the 30 years you have been involved in the industry, what artists have you admired or enjoyed listening to when you wanted to unwind? For example Pink Floyd, and Depeche Mode I like very much. They did very good work on the synthesisers, but it was most probably not the band that was the technicians behind it, but it doesn’t matter. If you are a musician you don’t listen to different music too much, it is like a director of a movie doesn’t watch TV. Our audio lives are already overloaded with studio work and sessions and things. Musicians are the worst customers for buying music you know? Many artists have told me that they can’t listen to music subjectively. No, because when you listen to a record you start analysing it, you don’t listen to it. You say, “oh this is a bass line, ahh very nice - now comes the drum, oh …too early”. Before you have finished your examination the song is over. I think a musician cannot really just listen, unless you are drunk (laughs). You’re now viewed almost as a Godfather of electronic music, is that a term you are comfortable with? I find it very honourable to be called that. I think it is a question of development in time you know? In the beginning when I did electronic music, the German press said we are all crazy. And then when we became famous in England and France, when we were with Virgin Records, so then if it comes from England the Germans believe it. So we became famous in Germany, but electronic music had spread over quite late. Then, their own development, called Berlin-school, or German electronic music, came to rise and became a known name. Later on, in the eighties we had our devoted fans, but then at the end of the eighties came Techno, which was a very fast phase in Germany, and they remembered the 15 or 20 years before, so suddenly we became the Godfather or the Pope of electronics, or Godfather of Techno, or whatever. The young people, who wanted to do something uncommercial, but still powerful, were looking for roots, and so they found us. When you’re recording yourself, creatively, do you use sounds to spark ideas or do you work on a more premeditated fashion? The way of composition is always the same, you start with one track before you go on the 24-track, or now I go on the Mac, and then comes the second track, which is maybe sequences or drums, or you start from long chords. Then it builds up from track to track, up to 20, 30, 50 tracks, and then in the mix down you start the reduction. Now on the computer it’s much easier than on tape, you move the sequencer 20 bars further or back and then when you listen to it you say I can’t use this sound because it’s covering all the sensitive sounds of the sequencer so you just delete the track. And in the end, when everything is transparent, and there are only things that are helping the composition, you start to arrange a bit more. The drum could come earlier, or the bass should come later, and finally you come to the end of the mix. It’s never that I start it with an idea that I want to do this thing now. There’s no atmosphere or mood that you want to start with? It depends, sometimes I start with just abstract sounds to create a very neutral base that the listener can somehow drop into and fall asleep (laughs) or whatever, and then it depends on which mood or which condition I am in if I start something rhythmical or soft out of these abstract things, it changes from day to day. Probably
reflecting your particular mood? Yes
of course, you only can reflect on your mood because you have nothing
else. |
"People said synthesisers are cold, mechanical and electronic... a violin doesn’t grow up on a tree y’know? They’re all artificial instruments working with minerals from the earth." |
Are you a keen programmer, do you like to dig in to get some unusual sounds, or do you use a lot of preset sounds? I am not a heavy programmer, but I never like to use presets unless they’re really beautiful, then I’m not too proud to use them. There were certain Pizzicatos by Roland in the D50, and if you can’t do it better why should you change them? And an example where I really do nearly nothing is with Atmosphere – the Virtual Instrument? With this one you can just choose from all good sounds, but it’s probably only good for me because sometimes it takes so long with the morphing that you cannot do it for a pop song. Also I like the Stylus RMX. But I would like to say for example, that complicated things like Reakor from Native Instruments, I don’t want to sit there for two and three hours to find totally great sounds because then I forgot why I was looking for this kind of sound. I think that’s the reason why I still like simple instruments, which can do a lot, because then you have quick access to different sounds via editing and I can work further on the composition. Unless you sit down for two or three days just making sounds, and have no composition in mind and save them, and then when the next composition is going ahead I use these sounds. But sometimes, during a composition you’re looking for a sound, and then I must have very quick access, and that’s one reason for example that I like Alesis Andromeda, because, ok, it is old fashioned with the knobs, but I still love it you know? And you can have quick access to sound that you’re looking for, with virtual instruments you need a bit more time, but you don’t want to be doing 10 minutes music and editing 5 weeks. And some days I have no creativity, I’m just sitting there and I’m not really hungry on doing music, then I sit down and create sounds, as that can inspire you too, because if you hear nice sounds, it also triggers your ideas to make a new copmposition. Do you ever think of your audience? And does that affect how you write or what you write? Never. No, I can’t you know. Because if you do a composition the audience has hundreds of opinions, so you cannot fulfil all their expectations. In the eighties they said it was just crash and noise and terrible, and today it’s one of the classics, like Audentity (1983). But the only thing you can take as a measurement is yourself, the artists has really to decide, because afterwards when the record is finished you know that a lot of people will say “shit’… I mean my music is more or less polarising, there’s nobody who will say, “oh it’s quite nice” they say it’s great or it’s shit. So the only thing that you can do is follow your own expectations, and just hope (laughs) that people will like it. Having listened to many of your albums, and especially the long compositions, are the parts played spontaneously, all in one go? Yes, mostly it is like that. Let’s say I play some chords, and then I record what I call ‘idiot rhythm’, which won’t be in the composition later on, but at least gives you a basic rhythm feeling and through the chords you get harmonic feeling. Then I loop this and I play as long as I like, and when I feel it’s getting boring I stop – and then I am looking at the watch and saying “oh it’s already 25 minutes” (laughs). Then you go back and re-edit? Exactly, then I say as far as this is ok I play a sequence through it, do the transposition and then if the ‘idiot drum’ is ok I’ll add the bass drum and probably the snare or whatever. But the basics inspire you to do everything on top of it, and give you the feeling that it’s moving. Do you find it difficult to finish the work without over scrutinising? Not really. If there are two or three chords in it that are mistakes then I leave it. But if there are seven or eight things, I will not edit it, I will delete the track and play it again. When I’ve finished a composition, or a song (laughs), long song, and I’m not really happy with it I just drop it, put it somewhere on the hard disc and forget about it. This is quite good now, because with the new editions, we have some bonus tracks where I have been looking on old tapes from the early days and found things that were not 100% but quite nice, and so I changed it a bit and then we have a nice bonus track. Obviously you have used analogue and digital equipment, what’s your attitude towards the differences between the two? You can say that, but finally you end on CD you know? I think that it’s the way that you progamme synthesisers to make them sound warm. I mean, the analogue stuff of course sounds warm, and the oscillators are not 100% stable – they’re a bit more alive. The thing that serves me on digital synthesis is that it stays forever, and with analogue there is always a kind of movement within the sound. You can programme that also, but you have to know it, why analogue sounds different. How to understand the waveforms? The waveforms on digital synthesis is frozen, and on analogue the oscillator is unstable and this altogether makes a fuzzy, warm image, but this can also be arranged in newer digital synths. So it’s fine if you don’t know why an analogue sound is warm, you can programme digital to be warm. But doesn’t analogue have a certain depth to it, a deep, booming sound? This is a general problem with digital - I think the bass sounds are more or less calculated. I think if you have a digital desk, the bass is there, but it’s not anymore the bass, which once you wanted, it’s once step too much. I say, you go digital on the hard disc which is ok, with a high resolution, and then you go through the analogue desk to the mixing. How closely do you follow the music that comes out of Germany? Is there anything interesting coming from it? Is it (laughs)? I don’t know, I don’t find anything interesting at all. The thing with Kraftwerk and Tour De France is that it’s still original, but they did it more or less before. But if you are a German, you find it sounds too German you know? So I think there’s not really much interesting stuff coming out from Germany now, but it was interesting in the eighties when we had German new wave, we called it, which was sung in German with funny lyrics and exotic keyboard works. But it was very commercial, which was surprising for everybody in Germany, but it was never really successful in England or other countries because they were singing in German, and at this time I was producing Idea and we tried one gig in London, and of course if you don’t understand the lyrics, which also explain some of the funny breaks in the music, they couldn’t grab it, so it worked only in Germany. But then we have Alphaville, which I also produced, and for them it was easier to work with because they were singing in English, but in percentages it is nothing. I remember I asking Holger Czukay if he found the term Krautrock irritating, and wondered it the term irritated you ever? I say you know, we are the Krauts, you are the Limeys, but there was never Limey’s rock or anything like this. I think Kraut sounds certainly bad for Germany, but who cares anyway, I have nothing to do with Krautrock but it’s quite un-understandable etiquette. One journalist said they’re Krauts, they’re all eating kraut and it’s rock so it’s Krautrock. Is it important to you how the media perceives you? Yes, but afterwards. When I’m doing the music I don’t care about anything, but later on it’s not really important but it hurts a bit if they write that a composition is terrible, is boring, but over 30 years you get used to it because most of the journalists who are writing about electronic music have no sense of this kind of music. The normal, I say normal not in a bad way, but normal music journalist who deals 90% with rock music, or pop music, and suddenly has to talk about the new Schulze album is after 20 minutes probably skipping through the record, nothing really changing, it’s too subtle you know? But still it hurts a bit, but when you have good journalists who know about it and they write that it’s bad then I think about it. But there are only about 10% of the people who have this kind of fundamental knowledge to really talk about this kind of music. Of course, this kind of music that we are doing, like Tangerine Dream or me, although they are now doing short songs so it’s probably easier for them, but I still have the length of my compositions which makes it very hard for them. Sometimes I understand it, I know exactly why they say this and this; they cannot listen to a box set, which is about 12 hours long, and then write it in about 20 sentences. And also, with your compositions being longer, it goes against the modern view of entertainment, where everybody wants immediacy? Of course, and when you see the video clips I think what they have in it is an entire movie compressed into three and a half minutes. And especially the Americans you know, they’re already bored when for 20 seconds they see the same picture, they say it’s a boring film – it’s avante-garde or whatever (laughs). The whole of time is compressed through the Internet and information is available within seconds to another continent, it’s so fast everything, and when you do this kind of music it stops it all. But I don’t want to complain, I choose it and I like to do it. |
"It hurts a bit if they [media] write that a composition is terrible, is boring, but over 30 years you get used to it because most of the journalists who are writing about electronic music have no sense." |
From
the synth's earliest days to using Logic and Macs, the Godfather of
electronic music is still going strong after more than 30 years in
the business.
Well I wasn’t thinking so much that, more wondering what your opinions are on how the industry can survive the downloading of music? I think, how you say, they overslept at the beginning, or didn’t take it seriously. Because still the companies were working, the shops were working and distribution. It’s their own mistake, it’s not the mistake of quick development – they just thought, “oh yes, it will take another 20 years”. Ok, maybe from 1970 to 1990 it would probably be like that, but in 2000 it can change within half a year, and a new invention crosses the world within days. And now they try of course to catch up with the new development, and that makes a lot of confusion because the people who are trying to catch up are not really aware of the power of the virtual industry. This virtual industry is done by youngsters’ y’know, and these young people know exactly what they want and they also know exactly what their friends, who download the thing, what they need. But the people who are in the record companies are nearly 50 or 60 don’t know, and this is the reason why iPod is suddenly incredibly famous and a monster in terms of making money. But I think the record companies didn’t realise that it would become so powerful, and now when they’re trying to catch up they’ve got a problem because in this case the whole structure of a record company doesn’t work anymore, the distribution doesn’t really work anymore, the shops are probably more or less useless. In Europe we’re probably not yet so far as the Americans, but I guess that within the next 10 years we have only some record shops where people go to buy records because they have no computer. I today order records, DVDs, books or even computers via Amazon or whatever, I don’t leave my house. I can see it on the screen, I can go to the specification, I can read exactly what it is, what it can do, what it can’t do – even the guy in the shop cannot explain it as exactly as on the Internet, and if you’re not sure you go somewhere in a chat room and ask who has this computer and you get help. I now get CDs to review that you can only buy on the Internet, and labels are now trying to promote CDs that are not physically available. I was thinking that could force artists to write better albums if they want to sell every individual song on it. I don’t think a serious artist thinks in these terms. I think that even if the consumer maybe thinks that one song is better than the other ones, the artist himself has thought they all have the same worth but with a different idea behind it. I don’t think an artist is doing five good songs and saying we can sell this and the rest we can do on a lazy Sunday afternoon or whatever (laughs). Which albums have you made that personally really stand out? Oh, that’s hard to say. If for example you go back to the time of Moondawn, Mirage, “X”, Audentity, In Blue, En=Trance, or Dig It, they all have a different feeling. The only thing I can say is that the Blackdance album of mine is not the real standard. I don’t know why, it has not had the impact of the other albums, but it’s the only one. But then to decide which one is especially good is also a question of mood, I listen one day to Dig It and say it’s great and on another day I listen to “X” and say it’s not so good, it is also when you listen to it, at which time, in what situation. And now your entire back catalogue is being re-issued, how closely involved are you in the process? I’m very close with a guy from Insideout in Germany, Michael Schmidt. I do special interviews for each record and then it comes down to a general statement without the questions. I listened to the masters which came direct from analogue tapes so sometimes they have clicking and things like that, but I said don’t edit it, don’t put enhancing or filtering on that. At this time it was the standard and tradition, it should be in the historic time, because when you try to make Moondawn or “X” sound like 2004 I’d rather do a new album. To mix it new won’t give my fans the same feeling that they had when they bought it the first time on vinyl. Even with going back from analogue to digital now, of course you can copy the first CD releases in the eighties, but the digital transformation was not so good, mostly it was 12-bit and the machine needs just to adminitrate it. Today, we can really go on 60-bit and 80-bit to handle all the other stuff, and that’s the reason why we start from tapes and go directly to the new things. Of course, after 30 years you have some little drop outs there, and we try to edit it a bit when there’s a really bad scratch on it, but if there’s a really small thing then juts leave it so people know it’s an original tape, 30 years old, and they will like and understand it. Is that one of the reasons why you’re releasing it now, because technology has allowed you to transfer the format in the best format? Yes, and the second is that I’m very happy that one company is having the back catalogue and I’m really surprised with how much love they go into it. They make the covers nice and make booklets with a vinyl feeling on the label It’s not cheap, and they put a lot of money and love and time in it, and before every record comes out they send the graphics to me, the liner notes and when I say it’s ok then they start working. It’s very respectful. My favourite one is Mirage, which sounds so ahead of its time, the sound of the synthesisers? Such a rich sound. I suppose this has given you an opportunity to listen to all your old recordings again? It’s really funny, when I listen to the old masters - like Picture Music, I hadn’t listened to it for 20 years. Sometimes you really think it’s unbelievable what you made with this pure equipment at this time compared to today with what you have. But I grew up with it, so you always get the maximum ouf it but today you don’t do it anymore because they have so many instruments that if one instrument can’t do it you try another one. With Picture Music, the main thing was done with the Odyssey, which made the whole rhythm. Do you have a favourite synthesiser, which you couldn’t live without? It is the Minimoog (laughs). And the EMS, which is just for abstract sounds, I never played it tonally from the beginning. And today I’m still using them on stage, and the Minimoog is the lead instrument for me, I run it through a fast pedal and have a filter pedal, but I cannot really work without them. I remember I did a concert somewhere in the eighties, with the Fairlight, and had no Minimoog with me, and in the middle of the concert I was desperate and I said “never again without a Minimoog”, it was terrible. I just though I don’t need it this time, as I had so many other sounds in the Fairlight and in the Roland and the EMU sampler, but suddenly onstage I thought where is the soul, and it comes out of the Minimoog. The Minimoog doesn’t have many preset sounds does it? Not really, but if you have 2 or 3 good sounds you can play them for about 5 or 10 minutes. And with a filter peddle, playing it with fuzz and without fuzz, you have quite a lot of possibilities, but you have to edit in real time, but after using it for 30 years you can do it blind. I have tried the Voyager, where you can store all the sounds, but I still have the old Minimoog from the beginning of the seventies, it’s very unstable but after so many years you know what to do when it’s out of tune. Do you listen to much modern-day music? Not really, some years ago I like very much The Orb, and Future Sound Of London, but today I’m not 100% informed what is happening at the moment. I liked a lot of Hip Hop and House, but they are repeating at the moment, there is a stagnation I’ve found. In the early days it was really interesting, but it hasn’t changed from my point of view and so I forget about it. That could be a mistake because there are probably underground movements that are doing good stuff, but at the moment I do not have the real access to it. I was wondering if anything could ever come along again with the same sort of impact as electronic music had when it first erupted? I don’t think so. The only think I could imagine would be a midi-plug in your brain. So you think a composition and it’s already there on the computer and you can listen to it (laughs). I don’t know, I can’t imagine what could have such incredible progress as the synthesiser in the early seventies because today we know all about technic. We can make it bigger, or smaller and smaller like a new Mac, which is no bigger than a cigar box, but it’s not a real question of quality. I cannot even imagine what you could invent to start a new kind of music with a new instrument; I think we know already too much. Ok, they’re coming out with instruments which are new but just do some more of what instruments did before, but they do nothing else. I understand you’re recording a new album for spring? Yes, I’m just in the middle of it, just missing about 15 minutes. Can you explain what the music might be like compared to others? It is quite sequencer based, not really floating, but more rhythmically oriented, energetic, powerful, with heavy breaks. It’s not like Mirage, which is very fragile. It’s in between. I don’t know how it will come out in the end, could be that I put another very soft piece in the middle to build the album up to the end. I’m just doing certain blocks of it, and finally there will be changes where piece 3 will go to 1, and 2 to 4, and it will come out as one long piece. And these days you’re using more software than hardware these days? In the studio, yes. Live, I don’t use a software synthesiser, I use Spectrasonic sounds in my hardware sampler and use this on stage, but in the studio during production I use quite a lot of virtual instruments and plug-ins. It should be released in the beginning or middle of April, but it’s always up to the record company. Using Pro Tools? No, I am working with Logic, because from my point of view Pro Tools has a lot of latency when you play virtual instruments live. I am not editing, I am still playing in my old years. At first I used Digidesign and I couldn’t hardly play the virtual instruments because there is always this delay in movement. Well, thanks for letting me take up so much of your time? Yes, it was very interesting for me as well; otherwise I would have stopped it earlier were it not interesting for me (laughs). |
The
industry is going through a transitionary process.
Yes,
the dino’s are dying (laughs).Klaus
Schulze interview, Future Publishing Ltd 2005 ©
This interview is the full, unedited version
of an interview that Barcode was commissioned to write for Future Music magazine
- issue 165 September 2005
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