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A founding member of such notable Krautrock ensembles as Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, and Cosmic Jokers, Klaus Schulze is genuinely deserving of the oft-assigned "father of modern electronic music" title. The drummer-turned-master-of-a-million-synthesizers did not remain with any single unit for very long. Instead, Schulze embarked on a bewilderingly prolific solo career that seeded the fertile paths of new age, ambient, trance, and techno music.

1972's IRRLICHT is where it all begins. Over three lengthy tracks, saturnine string motifs are pitted against surging drone and sheeting downpours of synthetic organ. It's a dense, often blisteringly dissonant clash of orchestral crescendos and synthesizer swells with little in the way of conventional melody, but texture and tonal complexity to burn. "Satz Ebene" sounds like one of Bach's magisterial pipe-organ works performed on a distant planet's barren surface. "Satz Gewitter" is a harrowing coda fortified with sci-fi sonics. The contemplative "Satz Exil Sils Maria" encroaches like a lunar dusk as Schulze slowly draws a curtain of cosmic shadow over the event horizon.

Klaus Schulze's solo debut is a masterful album featuring some of the most majestic instances of space music ever recorded, all the more remarkable for being recorded without synthesizers. "Satz Gewitter," the first of two tracks and the highlight here, slowly progresses from oscillator static to a series of glowing organ lines, all informed by Schulze's excellent feel for phase effects. [The 2006 edition features the 24-minute bonus track "Dungeon."] ~ John Bush

Irrlicht is the solo debut album from Klaus Schulze (originally released in 1972) and is an absolute masterpiece in cosmic, space music. Schulze omitted the use of synthetics for this recording, relying on organ with various electronic effects to produce an absolutely mesmerizing and minimalist body of sounds that transform the listener into a total abstracted world full of mysteries within its almost never-ending spiral. With no electronic pulse and rhythms, just a gloomy and distorted atmosphere this record can easily haunt and hypnotize. Considered by many to be his finest and purest body of work, the new and definitive Revisited Records version contains the 24 minute bonus track, Dungeon and comes packaged in a deluxe digipak with new liner notes and rare photos.



                1.Satz Ebene
2.Satz Gewitter
3.Satz Exil Sils Maria
4.Dungeon - (Bonus Track)