Pioneer who inspired the rise of ambient and electronic music
KLAUS SCHULZE, who has died following a long illness aged 74, was a musical pioneer who was at the epicentre of the movement that became known as Krautrock. His relentless experimentation and freewheeling creativity has exerted a profound influence on electronic music in the decades since.
But he was an all-round musician, and did not worship synthesisers: “Please understand that I use these instruments, but they are not a fetish to me.”
Klaus Schulze was born in Berlin on August 4 1947; his mother was a ballerina, his father a writer. In his teens he played drums, bass and guitar with various bands. “My interest in the pop music of the day was not so much the songs or the singers, or rock’n’roll, it was the sound,” he said in 2014.
Towards the end of the decade he drummed in a rock trio, Psy Free, then was briefly Tangerine Dream’s drummer, making one album with them, Electronic Meditation (1970), before they moved on from freeform heavy rock into the blissed-out electronica that made their name.
Schulze left to form Ash Ra Tempel with the guitarist Manuel Göttsching and bassist Hartmut Enke. Their 1971 self-titled debut album opened with a 19-minute track, Amboss, which Julian Cope, a passionate authority on Krautrock, described as “power-trio playing as meditational force … a methodical breaking-down of all your senses until you are crushed and insensible”.
His stint with Ash Ra Tempel also only lasted for one album, and in 1972 he bought his first synthesiser, although he did not use it for that year’s debut solo LP,
Irrlicht, depending instead on a clapped-out electric organ and musique concrète to build up a mighty wall of sound. His 1973 follow-up,
Cyborg, added the VCS 3 synth to the mix.
Schulze’s subsequent career planted seeds that bloomed for others later on: his dreamy soundscapes helped to establish ambient and new age music in the public mind, while his fascination with rhythm and tinkering with sequencers prefigured the electronic dance music revolution of the following decades.
In 1980 he released Dig It, his first album to be recorded digitally: he gave his label a slogan to market it: “The era of analogue wheelchair electronics is
over.” An ever-willing collaborator, in 1976, he joined the Japanese percussionist and composer Stomu Yamashta in a short-lived “supergroup”, Go, which also featured Steve Winwood, the Santana drummer Michael Shrieve and the jazz guitarist Al Di Meola. They released three albums in 1976 and 1977.
But another collaboration did not go down well with Schulze. In 1973 the producer Rolf-ulrich Kaiser organised a series of wild parties in a studio at which the musicians, Schulze included, played in exchange for a nominal fee and all the LSD their bodies and minds could stand.
He went on to release several albums of material – without the musicians’ knowledge – under the “Cosmic Jokers” banner. “Some people highly regard these silly recordings,” Schultze said in 2011. “It says a lot about their musical taste and knowledge.”
Schulze made more than 60 albums, several under the name of Richard Wahnfried. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he released a series of albums with Pete Namlook, The Dark Side of the Moog, inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. In 2000 he issued a 50-CD retrospective, The Ultimate Edition, and into the 21st century he worked with the Dead Can Dance singer Lisa Gerrard on albums and live dates.
In 2010 he retired from touring but continued to record. One of his final projects was collaborating with Hans Zimmer on his compatriot’s Oscar-winning soundtrack to Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the science-fiction classic Dune. His album Deus Arrakis (Arrakis is one of the planets that feature in Dune) is due for release in June.
Klaus Schulze was married to Elfi; she survives him with their two sons.