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Klaus Schulze - Klaus Schulze, Rainer Bloss ‎& Ernst Fuchs: Aphrica CD (album) cover

KLAUS SCHULZE, RAINER BLOSS ‎& ERNST FUCHS: APHRICA

Klaus Schulze

 

Progressive Electronic

1.71 | 30 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

tony the pixel
2 stars This album has a strange story. Widely regarded as a hic-cup in Klaus Schulze's long, prolific and acclaimed career, it appeared, very briefly, on vinyl in 1984 before being withdrawn due to a dispute with vocalist Ernst Fuchs, on the grounds that Schulze's record company had "forgotten to do a contract with him," and implying that Fuchs never intended it for release (so what was he doing recording it with them in the first place?) The album has never been issued on CD and never will be; Schulze has no love for it and neither has his manager, Klaus Dieter Muller, and both men fell out with Fuchs over its creation. It's not difficult to see why.

As a visionary painter Ernst Fuchs (Austrian, and aged 54 at the time of this recording - he's nearly 81 now), is quite something, but this musical collaboration was ill-advised. It's a pity that a purely instrumental version of this album cannot be issued, because musically it stands up alongside Schulze/Bloss's other work pretty well (Dziekuje Poland, Drive Inn). Some of it we've even heard elsewhere, on the Angst soundtrack. It's when Fuchs begins singing that it starts going pear-shaped.

He doesn't waste time - just 11 seconds into the 20-minute "Aphrodite," he's in there with his first three words, sung at a fairly low pitch, and well-recorded and mixed with the music - there's a richness of tone that at first makes you think this man actually has a voice and that the piece is going somewhere, the experiment is working. Unfortunately, from there on it all proceeds on exactly the same level - Fuchs' vocal range and dexterity are quite limited; there's nothing else happening to make the piece stretch out and give it greater impact, and the instrumental passages make you wish that vocals were absent altogether. It just goes on far too long, and finishes leaving you with a frustrated feeling. "Aphrodite" could have been an epic, but ends up much ado about nothing.

Perhaps the two other tracks, being much shorter, would have given all concerned the opportunity to be more focused and give things a little more bite. Unfortunately they go the opposite way, even more rambling and directionless. Sadly, at the end of the day, the experiment has to be deemed a failure, and Schulze is right to want to distance himself from it.

tony the pixel | 2/5 |

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