MOONDAWN

After taking a bit of a detour on the relatively unfocused Timewind, Schulze returned six months later with Moondawn, a more coherent album which resumed the trajectory he had established with Blackdance (1974) and Picture Music (1975).

Like Timewind, Moondawn is composed of two pieces in excess of 25 minutes each. "Floating" is an atmospheric synthesizer track that is rhythmless until a sequencer gradually phases in around seven minutes into the piece. This is joined a few minutes later by a drum-kit pattern played by Harald Großkopf. The relative volumes of the sequence, the drum kit, the synthesizer pads, and the synth leads, seem to vary in some sinusoidal pattern until the rhythmic parts gain the higher ground in the last few minutes.

"Mindphaser" is not terribly different, beginning with a soft synthesizer lead over pads and some sound effects. What seems to be a very light sequence, but may in fact be a synthesizer patch, appears several minutes in, but until then the track is essentially rhythmless. Grainy chords, almost choral, begin to assert themselves about ten minutes into the song, and the chord changes begin to occur rapidly enough to suggest a rhythm. Despite this warning, the appearance of the drum-kit at 11:54 is abrupt. The remainder of "Mindphaser" is almost a funhouse-mirror rendition of the first half - - it's a much more energetic, yet twisted, interpretation of the same material.

In light of Moondawn, Timewind seems to have been an unsuccessful "studio-as-instrument" experiment in which Schulze may have tried to manipulate too many variables simultaneously. Moondawn seems to be the more logical successor to the Irrlicht → Cyborg → Blackdance course which would culminate in 1978 with X, Schulze's masterpiece.