Schickert

For the first time, from the vaults of electronic music guru, Klaus Schulze, comes The Schulze-Schickert Session, a rare and previously unreleased private session featuring echo-guitar pioneer Günter Schickert. Recorded on 26 September 1975 in Klaus Schulze's home studio in Hambuehren, Germany, Schulze can be heard playing an EMS Synthi A, as well as keyboards, and a Syntanorma, while Schickert plays a 12-string Framus with metal strings and also sings on a few tracks. Although Schickert's name is little-known outside of a very select circle of krautrock fans, he was a key member of the Berlin free jazz scene of the 1960s and a pioneer of the echo-guitar.

Günter Schickert, four decades of multiinstrumental cosmic explorations, under Berlin`s sky, above genres, and compromises. "Labyrinth" stands for versatility, where genres do not matter, soundscapes or life situations take over, song-writing emotions pop out, handing out a spectrum of surprises to the listener. You may find yourself flying low along steep cliffs and with a blink of eye you are thrown into a Middle Eastern scenery.

This is the new instalment of Soul Jazz Records’ ground-breaking Deutsche Elektronische Musik series, ‘A near-definitive guide to some of the world's most extraordinary music’ (The Guardian).

This is a real treat, a live in the studio session by Gunther Schickert and Axel Struck on guitars with Michael Leske on drums. A powerful trio of mindexpanding krautrock sounds formed in 1973, they recorded their first sessions in 1976, improvising directly to tape in Schickert’s basement - but these weren’t released until 1986, originally in cassette format - reissued some years later on CD. Three long tracks, it sounds like a cross between the 1st Ash Ra Tempel album and Gunther's two solo albums. Powerful music propelled along by dual guitars and driving percussion, the sound literally takes off into cosmic space.

While other musicians mostly vary their repertoire with nuances, every Klaus Schulze performance is hard to predict. His former bandmate Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream) once needed a nice image when describing his way of improvising on stage with electronic instruments, “This is like a parachute jump where one cannot be sure if the parachute will even open.” This was particularly true during the time of the unpredictable, analog synthesizers- but Klaus kept this same work method throughout the years without making any changes. And with this he is one of the few musicians who saved this art of improvising, all during the transition from the analog to the digital era…

Fellow humans, Bureau B invite you on an expedition to Silberland, a singular span of spacetime created by Germany’s sonic futurists of the seventies and eighties. Embracing the early electronics and tape experiments of the sixties’ avant-garde, these artists aimed to boldly go, eschewing small steps for giant leaps into a nebulous and novel sound.