Freitag, 9. September 2022

Wiedergelesen 15 (from The KS Circle # 135, March 2008)

There are a few of you who cannot read the text on the back page of KONTINUUM's booklet. [The album was released in June 2007]. Because the designer had chosen to print a very small lettering in dark green on black (!). KS and I, we are members of this helpless club. I was asked to reprint it in The KS Circle. Also there were some who had asked me for a German translation. Both I will do, of course, gladly, here, and in a readable size and lettering:

''All you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.'' This easily and loosely expressed statement was valid at the old times of Bach (who had said the above ...says a dubious but amusing rumour), but... technology was moving on. Today's musicians use not just a pianoforte but computer programmes. Side effect: a laptop is smaller than the Grand Piano, so it leaves more room for the artist to walk around thinking about what to compose, play and record. Hopefully, I say :-)
. . . . I myself am not a musician. But, as most boys of my generation, in younger years I dreamed to be a member of a band. For reasons unknown to me I always wanted to be the bass player, the solid backbone of a gang of four or five. Sadly, I never made it. Maybe because I never really tried (PS: except as the rhythm man on washboard in a Skiffle trio that existed for one day, around 1958). Instead, and meanwhile, there is a branch of music at which I truly excelled. The area I mean, at which I consider myself of Olympic standard, is ...listening! Listening to many different music. Thanks to Stephen Fry who put my nose on the obvious truth that listening is an important part in the wonderful but also huge world of music. Important it must be, just because there are more listeners than players of music.
. . . . But we are here in a booklet of a Klaus Schulze album. When I write this it's still ''the new'' album by Klaus. And at the moment I am one of the few who have heard the music of KONTINUUM in advance, means: before release. People who know me also know that I'm not a ''fan'' of KS but a critical partner and friend. And that I'm not always happy about each and every piece of sound that he had released in the past; which is normal if you look at the huge output of KS. If I think a few seconds about it, the albums which I don't like 100% were often the ones he did not make as soloist. Or, the other way around: I prefer Klaus Schulze pure. As soloist. Alone.
. . . . KONTINUUM is such a pure solo album. And I like it. But not just because there is no singer or a second (and third) player on it (who all too often are just happy to have a chance to play with the ''great master'' ...but often have no own style, or they forget it because of Schulze's prominent presence).
. . . . I like KONTINUUM as it is, as a whole, as a perfect album. Yes, I mean it and I repeat the word: perfect. Klaus proves again, as with Moondawn, Mirage, or Are You Sequenced? that he's still the master. He even shows that he is the master of reduction; he must not do everything all the time. What I hear: not one note or sound or rhythm is too much.
. . . . The album starts with the best from the past, yes I mean the wonderful sequencer: wonderful in sound and rhythm. KS is not the best in finding melodies, but with sounds and rhythm he's unbeatable. And, sometimes it has to be stated: the best of the past isn't getting bad just because it's not the newest trend. You will also learn this when getting older, my friend.
. . . . On KONTINUUM Klaus also avoids kitsch and pathos (of which he is not always free). Easily he could have added some of it here or there, in these three long tracks of KONTINUUM. The temptation was surely there. But Klaus followed the musical rule that I like so much: Less is more. He just touched the right key at the right time. Which is the most difficult thing to do, in music and else.

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In Deutsch: auf den Seiten 12 und 13 dieser PDF: 131352 (pdf, 267 KB) .