...here we have a compilation of artists that maybe seen on the periphery in some cases, but were equally as important to shaping the sounds of the era, and some even having a greater influence on the German underground music that followed than the bigger bands.
Conrad Schnitzler
11 posts
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler is one of Krautrock’s founding fathers; he was part of the original line up of Tangerine Dream along with Klaus Schulze and he was an original member of Kluster, who renamed themselves Cluster after his departure. Schnitzler’s work straddles the line between avant-garde pieces to cosmic electronica, all with a sense of darkness imbued within his sweeping epics. The pieces presented on Paracon are […]
Bureau B The opener “Electric Garden” on Bureau B‘s re-release of Conrad Schnitzler‘s 1978 album Con sets up a wonky forest of purr-cussive sirens that mercurially glisten, shapes that gently ricochet the headphones in buttery artificiality, form-filled but formless, bending that Karlheinz Stockhausen concrete into something less stoic and more playful.
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler, early member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, must have found both of those oppressive bands too formulaic and stifling. By 1975, he had struck out on his own, producing music for films that had yet to be released or even made.
Bureau B This is the second instalment of Bureau B‘s Con-struct series, with Schneider TM taking up the posthumous reins, grappling with Schnitzler‘s daunting archive. In direct contrast to Pyrolator‘s take on the subject (a few years back), this dwells on the more investigate side of Mr Conrad‘s oeuvre, something Mr Dresselhaus gets down’n’dirty with, eking out a host of abstract vitality, wrestling with sonic life-forms that defy your […]
Bureau B This is part of a continuing series of works that delve in the Conrad Schnitzler sound archive to generate newly inspired works. As the label stresses, this series isn’t intended to be homage or to be taken as a plain remix project, but more as an active experiment in creativity itself. Con-struct starts sedately enough in a drift of aerosol(ed) bleeds over a plasticity of hiccups […]
Bureau B Silber When most people were glam(ming) it up in the mid seventies Mr. Conrad was studio tinkering with possible futures. Messing with the building blocks of rhythm, harmony and melody to bleed a snakey elixir that formed this sixty minute noir-riddled masterwork, suitably blighted in whir kittens and sci-fi weevils.
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler’s late ’70s and early ’80s period is difficult to pigeonhole within his larger body of work. By this point he had moved on from the early expansive drone pieces that featured on his first three releases and begun to amalgamate rhythmic patterns along side more condensed song structures. His Peter Baumann-produced 1978 album Con touched upon pop signatures but also allowed typical Schnitzler areas […]
Bureau B Those good people over at Bureau B have been delving into the archives to bring us two classic slices of pre-Cluster goodness. Well before ‘71 and Zuckerzeit, these two albums, originally released in micro editions of 300 copies, demonstrate an avant-garde spirit that was and still is, a pleasure to absorb. Very much a ‘kicking k’ before the soothing ‘c’, these recordings still rival many of […]
Bureau B It can’t be a mistake that Red = Rot since this is electronic music rotted one note at a time. As a debut solo album – its actually more complicated than that – it’s a singular attempt to define a new genre of bubbling, messy, electronic music… Rot is propulsive/compulsive; as dark and shiny as a Scribing Mirror. You can hear the tangles that Conrad Schnitzler […]
Further You know the quote, Arthur C. Clarke’s finest: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You can only imagine how mind-blown people must have been when Conrad Schnitzler cranked up his machines way back in the early 70s but his influence has been written out of the major theses on the development of electronic music, perhaps because of his affiliation with the hair-synth of Tangerine Dream, […]