BALLET STATIQUE

This is truly one of the greatest electronic albums ever made and definitely the best place to start exploring the wonderful world of Conrad Schnitzler. Electric Garden is a masterpiece of atmospherics, reverberating drips in the canyons of your mind . Overloaded harmonisers and delays build to an orgasmic rush of nitrous oxide clangs that can seriously warp your mind.

I first heard this track on a tape from 1984, by which time it had become popular in Italy and Ibiza, and become an early chillout classic. His home-made synthesizers give his music and originality that you can't buy off the shelf. The five bonus tracks are all worth having as well. Like Gottsching's E2-E4 this is a missing link in the chain between Krautrock and Ambient Electronica. I played this to many DJs including Tsuyoshi - who then put it on a mix CD for Issey Miyake's fashion show!

There's been quite a dramatic change in Schnitzler's sound by the time this came around. It's all a bit more 'accessible' than previous releases. In fact this sounds very similar in parts to the opening track of 'Throbbing Gristle's' - 20 Jazz Funk Greats which was released one year later.

Electronics abound, as your ears are subjected to stereophonic outbursts of arpeggiated squiggles and all sorts of synthetic misdemeanors.

It's all a bit like looking through one of those mid-70's cardboard kaleidoscope tubes that made you dizzy which you were chuffed to bits on getting your hands on in Primary School. Beatless, bassless, guitarless electronic experimentation is what you'll find here.

Personally I prefer his earlier output, which is more abrasive, dark and unfriendly. 'Ballet Statique is entirely electronic and sounds very cold, alien and non-human. At no point more so than on the freakishly haunted house sound of 'Nuri' where some creepy female vocals are introduced which sounds like some spooky invocation of the beast Gods.

Overall, this is a fairly well constructed electronic album with faint semblances of tune and is probably the best place to start for anyone wondering wondering who the hell this guy was with his multitude of obscure releases all beginning with the pre-fix 'CON'.

What really makes this work relevant besides its great abstract electronic music compositions, is also how well it holds with TIME. It has not aged, in fact in this "PE world' it never went away, just was born way ahead in 1978, the beginnings of the "Drum Box" era or the later called "80's". But those are just REFERNCES! It was born as "Con" then turned into "Ballet Statique" which is how it is more commonly named and known, in the quiet disrupted releases and re-releases, of Mr. Schnitzler discography. Focused compositions, which never lose their experimental nature, both in its aural and performance likes. Conrad Schnitzler never sounds pretentious, he holds this "electronic music passion" as a natural instinct as a tatoo. His music composition is progressive, not only for appearing in PA, but because he dares to explore, opposed to repeating, and goes beyond the easy nature of technology's "offerings" and juices those noises into means of modern artificial concrete electronic music, but never to the point of digression or pretention. With this work he travels into all kinds of places (the drum-boxes are only used when needed, which is an additional "bonus" in my book). Those places are so" futuristic", that nowadays will stand among any recent PE work. So this is not TD, Kraftwerk (old or new), Eno, Cluster, Neu, Harmonia or someone else. This masterwork stands by itself, in fact, timeless-like, like any perfect PA *****5 star work should be. Time just confirms its solid music "uniqueness". 5 stars, what else can I say.

Conrad Schnitzler had already established a decent electronic krautrock pedigree prior to this, due to his involvement in the early careers of Kluster/Cluster and Tangerine Dream, but this solo album - its title varying between "Con" and "Ballet Statique" depending on which issue you are looking at - is a striking effort in its own right, offering a progressive electronic soundscape highly reminiscent of a middle ground between the sort of direction his former bandmates in Tangerine Dream had taken in mid-1970s albums like Rubicon and would soon take in their late- 1970s/early 1980s work like Thief or Tangram.

This sort of cyberpunk electronic mood music is not for everyone, but for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like very much indeed, and somehow manages both to provide a precedent for much of the work in this vein that would emerge in the 1980s and seems less dated than many of its imitators.