The Godfather of Techno: A Guide to Klaus Schulze’s Discography

Klaus Schulze’s passing on Tuesday marks the loss of one of the few remaining pioneers of electronic music who emerged out of Germany at the start of the 1970s. One of the leading lights of the Berlin school of krautrock, Schulze spent his teens and early 20s playing guitar and drums in various rock bands before plunging into Germany’s avant-garde scene in the late ’60s. Co-founding Ash Ra Tempel with guitarist/keyboardist Manuel Göttsching and making an appearance on Tangerine Dream’s first LP, Electronic Meditation, Schulze played drums on both, his pulsing beat at once far removed from and a precursor to the music that he’d make when he switched to keyboards and synthesizer.

Despite a generous collaborative spirit that would serve him through his entire working life, Schulze was too restless an artist to get bogged down in the more democratic demands of a band, and he soon struck out on his own to focus on a solo career across which he would amass more than 50 albums and equally as many archival discs of compositions that would remain on the cutting-room floor. His solo debut, 1972’s Irrlicht, was made without synthesizers, but soon he adopted VCS 3 and Moog equipment to explore new realms of sound.

Early electronic artists were improvisational by necessity: A lack of preset features on modular synthesizers, with their byzantine walls of wire inputs, knobs, and sliders, meant that it was impossible to produce the exact same sound twice. Schulze would rely on that spirit for his entire career even after synthesizers progressed to the stage where they simplified the process of programming arrangements. Not unlike jazz pianist Keith Jarrett building entire shows by selecting a key and improvising, Schulze fiddled with settings until he got a pleasing tone, then proceeded wherever his keyboard playing and sound manipulations took him.

Befitting the way that synthesizers opened up sonic possibilities for musicians, the German electronic pioneers conceptualized music in wildly heterodox ways. For Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk, machine music perfectly conveyed the dehumanizing effect of consumerism. Tangerine Dream set controls for the heart of the sun and fully decoupled psychedelia from the gravity of blues-based rock structures. Popol Vuh would devise a kind of neo-primitive ethnographic folk that they would eventually take back to traditional instrumentation.

But it was Schulze—of his peers, the one with the most traditional background in rock ‘n’ roll—who best understood that he and his contemporaries were the latest iteration of a robust history of German compositional innovations stretching at least as far back as Johann Sebastian Bach. Tellingly, Schulze released several albums under the pseudonym Richard Wahnfried as a reference to Richard Wagner, and even based a number of albums and performances around the 19th-century composer’s famous operas.

While Schulze could be as nerdy and science-fiction-minded as Tangerine Dream (he repeatedly returned to Frank Herbert’s Dune for inspiration, including on his forthcoming final album, Deus Arrakis), he just as often used his array of equipment to build upon the pastoral earthiness of Romanticism. That Red Bull Radio dubbed him “the godfather of techno” speaks to the sheer range of music that his ever-evolving approach influenced.

The sheer breadth of Schulze’s discography, so vast that its cumulative running time can be measured in days, if not weeks, makes him an intimidating prospect for the uninitiated. The below guide, taken from various points of his career, shows that for all his propensity for the heady and conceptual, he remained a playful, earnest maker of music all his life, never lapsing into the repetitiveness that dulled the achievements of many of his colleagues.

Tangerine Dream, Electronic Meditation (1970)

Buyer beware: Anyone looking to Tangerine Dream’s debut for the trademark synth stylings of either that band or Schulze’s solo work should search elsewhere, with founder Edgar Froese purely on guitars and tapes while Schulze lays down dubby percussion and fellow future electronic innovator Conrad Schnitzler plays cello and violin. And yet, the hypnotic stoner rhythms found within clearly set the stage for a coming revolution. Froese’s minimalist, fuzzy guitar chords sound like garbled surf guitar anthems picked up as radio waves from deep space, while guest flutist Thomas Keyserling warbles out a link between folk and psychedelia that Schulze would ruthlessly exploit over the next decade. A shrieking curio, Electronic Meditation is the sound of rock breaking apart to open the space for something new to grow.

Irrlicht (1972)

Schulze’s solo debut is an outlier in his discography, including his early art rock with other groups and the synth-driven material that would define him. Recorded with a dilapidated organ and manipulated tape loops of an orchestra, the album has ties to musique concrète and the avant-garde classical of Gavin Bryers’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” or Steve Reich’s early loop experiments. Yet it’s just as much a work ahead of its time as Schulze’s classics, anticipating the ambient work of artists like Tim Hecker and William Basinski. Anchoring patterns emerge through the harsh din of the music that lend a melancholy beauty to the album that immediately establishes Schulze’s interest in the emotional possibilities of cosmic music.

The Cosmic Jokers, The Cosmic Jokers (1974)

Producer Dieter Dierks would hold late-night jam sessions in his studio with various Krautrock luminaries, paying them in vast amounts of drugs that they would consume and then craft loose-limbed musical freakouts. Released without the participants’ approval, the “Cosmic Jokers” consisted of Schulze, Ash Ra bandmate Manuel Göttsching, and Wallenstein members Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf, forging a two-side epic of space guitar, ringing synths, and dancing drums on the rocking first number and chill-out room vibes of sine-wave modulations on the flipside. The balance of acid rock and cosmic ambiance make this as great an entry point for Krautrock writ large as Schulze’s collaborations.

Moondawn (1976)

Arguably Schulze’s finest album, Moondawn is pure analog pastoral. Its first side, “Floating,” is an endlessly rising collection of twinkling tone clusters, cascading waves of laser-beam synths, disembodied, pagan vocal chants, and a staccato cymbal pattern that drills into the space between your eyes like a woodpecker’s beak. “Mindphaser” initially conjures a sound best described via references to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, all synthetic bird song and howling wind. Then, halfway through, a heretofore unseen dam bursts and a fat-toned organ intrudes, unleashing waves of contrapuntal synthesizer patterns that lift off of Earth entirely and enter orbit. At once tranquilizing and invigorating, Moondawn is the most concise summation of Schulze’s considerable stylistic range.

Richard Wahnfried, Time Actor (1979)

If Schulze is indeed “the godfather of techno,” his first album under the Richard Wahnfried moniker makes a strong case that he might equally qualify as the progenitor of trance. Boasting the surprising input of English rock star Arthur Brown on mostly spoken-word, proclamatory vocals, the album adopts a cold, conceptual tone that points toward some of Schulze’s more arch later works. Nonetheless, the composer exploits the rigidity of the pounding synth and drum lines to break down the listener’s awareness, creating an avant-garde version of Italo disco’s mind-breaking stiltedness.

Dig It (1980)

The advent of sequencers and synthesizer presets utterly ruined Tangerine Dream, who abandoned their exploratory spirit in favor of repetitive, programmatic elevator music that veered them toward self-parody. Schulze, on the other hand, recognized that such tools expanded the possibilities for improvisation. Dig It, his first digital recording, is certainly more structured than his albums from the ’70s, using shimmering ride cymbals as anchor points and adding a sharper, more driving tone to his synthesizers. Even here, though, one can hear how these aspects are used as launchpads rather than locked grooves, with Schulze conjuring a sound like the most outré new wave act in the abstract, distended synth-pop gloss and even getting ahead of the curve on where video game music would go in the 8- and 16-bit eras. At times, the mixture of ambient synth clusters and spacious, quasi-tribal drumming sounds eerily prescient of the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country.

En=Trance (1988)

Schulze gives all the then-current equipment from Roland a workout with this densely arranged album of nervy, neo-noir soundscapes. New-age synth moans are offset with darting basslines, Spanish guitar loops, and orchestral percussion. “FM Delight” is his single best track of the ’80s, rising from a purely ambient wash of white noise into a sunny, bouncy cadence that would qualify as synth-pop if it didn’t roll on leisurely for 18 minutes of top-down driving music. Meanwhile, closer “Velvet System” is the most purely giddy thing that he ever recorded, using synths programmed with the marimba/pan-flute sound that connotes tropical atmosphere for a series of cascading riffs.

The Dome Event (1993)

Forever interested in incorporating new trends in electronic music with his own methods, Schulze freely indulged sampling throughout the late-’80s and early ’90s, often to the dismay of fans. Yet his use of samples could easily be traced to the tape experiments of Irrlicht, contextualizing a seeming attempt to stay relevant as popular music merely catching up to him decades after the fact. The Dome Event, consisting of an hour-long live performance and an 11-minute studio take, is arguably the best demonstration of how playful this period of his music was. The faux-ethnic percussion of Dig It is expanded into lush new-age soundscapes, while a relatively fixed groove of looped hi-hat takes a trope of ’90s electronica and weds it to increasingly orchestral pomp. The studio concoction “After Eleven” is pleasantly jaunty, all treble clef piano attacks that have the sharp bite of saloon music, over which are piled wildly disparate elements of fretless jazz fusion bass, skittering click tracks, and MIDI orchestration.

The Dark Side of the Moog IV, Three Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (1996)

The late, prolific German techno artist Pete Namlook named Schulze as one of his key inspirations, and the two paired up for a comically gargantuan project that spanned 11 albums over the span of 15 years. As the name suggests, Dark Side of the Moog punned on the songs of Pink Floyd, and you can take your pick of each volume’s various peaks and valleys as just about every form of electronic music—from Berlin school ambient to ’80s synth-pop to ’90s techno—is explored. This album is as good a starting point as any to sample this collection, staying true to Floyd’s psychedelic debut LP by leaning into the most brain-frying side of Schulze and Namlook’s work together. Schulze always had a self-effacing sense of humor, and you can hear him having a ball amid the dense techno throb of this record.

Ash Ra Tempel, Gin Rosé (2000)

The early Ash Ra Tempel albums with and without Schulze are frustratingly not on streaming (though easy to find on YouTube), but this friendly 2000 reunion at Krautrock superfan Julian Cope’s CORNUCOPEA Festival beautifully illustrates how much each musician had grown over the preceding few decades. Göttsching’s guitars sing with such subtle flourishes that it’s easy to assume that he’s also working with sequencers and synthesizers, while Schulze gently adds pulses in the spaces around his old bandmate’s chords. Slowly, both work their way toward a set direction, the music gaining in intensity as the guitar lines become richer and louder while Schulze adds more and more color to his soundscapes. By the end, you’re reminded that both men helped lay the foundations for techno in the icy yet plaintive soul of the performance’s home stretch.

Dziękuję Bardzo (2009)

Besides Manuel Göttsching, Schulze’s most significant recurring creative partner might be Dead Can Dance singer Lisa Gerrard. The pair recorded a number of studio and live albums together, and this mixture of performances in Berlin and Warsaw showcases their chemistry. Gerrard’s ominous contralto makes a perfectly entrancing foil for Schulze, who weaves in and out of the dark wave stylings that she popularized in her old band. Listen to the way the music rises and falls from gothic ambience to outright rave on a track like “Bazylika NSJ” is to hear two artists in absolute harmony. The two pieces entitled “Shoreless” are Schulze working solo, and they can be seen as summaries of his work to that point, deftly balancing his early kosmische with later dance and sampling eras into a cohesive whole of neo-neo-classical.