Review Summary: Journey through the Cosmos
After his brief stint as drummer in bands like Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze finally realized that a solo career would be more suitable. His debut was in some ways even further ahead in its time than his later electronic works, with the German creating environmental drones and highly experimental cosmic sounds made completely without the use of synthesizers.
The sounds on “Irrlicht” had much more in common with the philosophies of concrete music, with Schulze manipulating the tapes he made of an orchestra, practicing and manipulating those sounds on an electric organ. Schulze himself called the album "quadrophonische symphonie für orchester und e-maschinen", which sums up the album quite well.
The record is divided into three movements or Satz. The first Ebene, the longest part, is obviously the best here, a 23-minute piece, a powerful experience, almost like a space trip, with organs and other electronic instruments creating a floating atmospheric environment, with a warm sound texture and spacious. Schulze did something more on the first track than an atmosphere of the cosmos – he wove a cosmological quest for a man, which gives the song a full metaphysical dimension.
It starts in a dehumanized way, although not completely, because from the beginning there is the fear that the cosmos will awaken. Soon, the sounds of people's world arrive, fragments of orchestral music, but they are so processed and cut that they seem to flow from a huge distance. Here we have no doubt that we are in space and, simultaneously, on Earth, at most light-years away.
Gewitter is actually a small interlude to find less metaphysical, more purely solid and psychedelic sounds, with more emphasis on the sounds of concrete music. Finally, Exil Sils Maria is already the cosmos strongly dehumanized, cold, dispassionate, sinister and immobile. It lasts for over 21 deeply imaginative minutes, conjuring images in listeners' minds of deep space, deserted sunrises, whispering machines at night and the void of infinity.
All in all, “Irrlicht” is an ambient electronic masterpiece. This would mean that Schulze's debut is one of the greatest achievements of popular music in general. It's hard not to mention the organ spirit of French composer Olivier Messiaen in the last part of the first track, in the most important fragment of the album; the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen's compositions in the sound environment is strongly audible. This, however, does not detract from Schulze's success, but the opposite.
