TIMEWIND

As with many seventies progressive music fans, this album was my first exposure to Klaus Schulze's music. And as such, it is still my favorite. And listening to it yesterday, while driving through an early spring New England snowstorm, I found a perfect way to enjoy the album.

The record, and the CD version I also own (sadly, without bonus tracks) is made up of two tracks, each about a half an hour long. The first track, Bayreuth Return, is the more rhythmic of the two. While the rhythm is more low key than, say Tangerine Dream's work of the same period, is has just as much of a hypnotic quality. And Schulze spices it up by subtlely varying the patterns and time throughout the piece. All of this is done while dropping in synth sounds that fly around the stereo spectrum.

The second piece, Wahnfried 1883, is more abstract, but no less spacy and entrancing. An interesting note is the outline of the song printed on both versions of the album I own. Schulze appears to diagram the song in graphic representations of the synth patches he uses, rather than write out traditional music.