IRRLICHT

Irrlicht is the debut full-length studio album by German progressive electronic music artist Klaus Schulze. It´s his first release after leaving the drummer´s seat in Ash Ra Tempel. Irrlicht was released on the Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Peter Meisel led Ohr record label in August 1972. The album was recorded in April 1972. The original album contained three tracks while the 2006 CD re- release adds the 24 minute long bonus track Dungeon. Klaus Schulze adds some really funny anekdotes in the booklet to the re-release. Especially the story about Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser´s girlfriend Gille Lettmann bringing LSD trips to the studio on several occasions in those early seventies. Klaus Schulze says that they would play for hours and sometimes afterwards they couldn´t even remember who had played which instrument. But Klaus Schulze didn´t only experiments with drugs and Irrlicht is certainly proof of that. His innovative and adventurous approach to composing and playing music is admirable.

The songs on Irrlicht are ambient, minimalistic, droning sound experiments. Very repetitive and the few times there´s anything resembling a melody or a progression of notes that could lead to thinking that now something memorable will appear the repetitive droning just goes on an on. There are next to no drums or percussion on the album as far as I can hear ( the booklet says that Klaus Schulze plays percussion so I guess it´s there somewhere) and the main instrument is organ. The instrumentation also include guitar, E-Machines ( I´m not sure what that is) and Zither and in addition to those instruments Klaus Schulze also had the opportunity to record a rehearsal session with the Colloquium Musica Orchestra which he uses somewhere on the album ( played backwards according to the booklet).

The production is allright.

At the risk of being flamed by fans of Irrlicht I have to play with open cards and say that this album left me completely cold. But not only that. It left me frustrated and exhausted too. The 20 minute + songs just seem to go on and on forever without much happening ( and when something happens that new thing also goes on forever) and while this is undoubtedly a groundbreaking album from those early days of experimenting with sound, the album unfortunately ends up being just that: An experiment for the sake of experimenting. In other words art for art´s sake and as much as I respect innovative and adventurous artists the music of such artists has to give me at least some sort of satisfaction ( move me, challenge me...etc) and that is not the case with Irrlicht which feels unnecessarily longdrawn and patience testing for me. There are simply no redeeming qualities on this album that can warrant even a 2 star rating IMO, so this will be one of my very few 1 star ratings.