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Mirage Remastered Klaus Schulze. Copy the following link to share it Copy. You are currently listening to samples. Velvet Voyage Remastered Crystal Lake Remastered See More. Timbres of Ice Klaus Schulze. Silhouettes Klaus Schulze. Timewind Klaus Schulze. Slowly but surely layer upon layer of subtle keyboard is added. What I imagine when I listen to this song is being in some sort of desolate environment like in the middle of the desert. It's the perfect mood and atmosphere and the keyboard soars and creates lush textures underneath to whining leads which remind me a bit of Rick Wright's middle section in Echoes, only a bit more dramatic.
The song goes through many different themes, tempos, moods, et cetera, but it all has one common thing, the atmopshere is tense and there are many moments of pure brilliance.
However, that said, it does tend to drag, being it is 28 minutes long. The second song of the album is the 29 minute Crystal Lake begins with an interesting bell sequence with may be keyboard that slowly becomes a bombastic and grandiose composition with layer upon layer of keyboards and sound effects slowly added on top to reach a glistening crescendo of synthesizers and droning and sparse bass synth notes. I'm quite fond of the middle section, in which the synthesizer lines have become fully realized and the bell sequence becomes the underlying theme over the synthesizer notes.
And much like the opener, there are some certainly some sections that could have been cut out not to mention some overly long sequences , but on the whole this is a fantastic track that really takes you on a second voyage.
Beginning with a somewhat ominous organ motif, the piece evolves and reaches peaks and lows, but maintains an uneasy and desolate atmosphere. Schulze relies of some clicking percussions to keep an underlying beat underneath more anxious and lush orchestral sounding synthesizers. It's a nice addition to the album and really rounds off the cd on a high note.
Overall, Mirage may not be Klaus Schulze's best album in my opinion at least , but it certainly is an interesting piece of work. His music is tough to describe, it is tough to put to words, but tehre is something about how his compositions seem to evolve and then regress, and then come to a crashing crescendo that reminds me somewhat of Post-Rock although Schulze may be the farthest thing from Post-Rock.
If you like lush atmospheric soundscapes in the vein of the more accessible Brian Eno works Ambient 1 or Apollo , you'll find something to love with Klaus Schulze. Very fine effort indeed. This is dark, cold and spacey. This is an amazing soundscape. The haunting mood continues though and that hopeless feeling starts to return after 10 minutes. The cold sounds are just sweeping across the icy soundscape. It sounds so lonely here. After 13 minutes we get what sounds like light keys playing repetively while the solar winds continue to gust.
Another sound joins in that could be farfisa organ. The last 2 minutes are very heavenly as it seems to fade into nothingness. It gets even fuller 9 minutes in. It becomes haunting 16 minutes in and continues that way until the sound becomes intense as other synths join in around 24 minutes. It builds to a chaotic sound 28 minutes in until it ends.
This is one of my favs from Schulze, especially those dark, haunting soundscapes that appear on both tracks. At the time, Schulze's fortune and reputation had already been assured by the international success of "Timewind" two years earlier. For proof you only need to scan his subsequent album covers, typically replacing the Dali-esque surrealism of Swiss artist Urs Amman with sleeve-filling portraits of Schulze himself.
Or consider his vastly expanded arsenal of equipment, all of it proudly itemized inside the original gatefold cover and, when reproduced for the CD booklet, filling an entire page in very small typeface. But in the typically chatty notes for the CD re-issue Schulze admits he planned it as a throwback to the more opaque soundscapes of his earliest recordings "Irrlicht", "Cyborg" , dispensing with the live drum work that had energized his more contemporary "Moondawn" and "Body Love" albums.
The layers of overlapping, atmospheric synthesizers recall some of PINK FLOYD's spacier digressions, in particular the cosmic seagull-and-surf effects from the song "Echoes", on their "Meddle" album. But Schulze doesn't eliminate the beat entirely, allowing a more organic electronic pulse to gradually surface in the otherwise somber waves of sound.
Instead, the album was probably his richest and warmest to date, despite being subtitled 'eine elektronische winterlandschaft' and recorded in what must have been a mood of emotional uncertainty the album is dedicated to Schulze's then-dying brother. And in the years since then it continues to inspire a generation of New Age electronic rip-offs, from copy-cat artists who maybe should have been listening more attentively thirty years ago.
Consumer postscript: As usual, the Revisited Records CD re-issue is handsomely packaged, with essays and photos and a complimentary bonus track, in this case the oddly-titled minute mood piece "In Cosa Crede Chi Non Crede rough translation: "The Same or Not the Same".
Blame Schulze's manager for such a disposable non-sequitur. The additional track was recorded six months prior to the album itself for the soundtrack to an unidentified Dutch film, but in retrospect it was clearly a rough draft of the same music, and thus provides a fitting epilogue to the album proper.
Some splendid travel indeed to the boundaries of electronic prog. How great can these sounds be! Magical my prog friends. I just reinforce here, that this artist should deserve much, much more attention on such a musical site. But I have written this already. The first epic "Velvet Voyage" conveys some truly poignant passages.
Superb atmosphere, relaxing jewel. In one word: splendid. Doesn't need a hundred words to be described: one just need to listen and share the passion.
It is as easy as that! Gorgeous and extremely melodic. What a nice voyage indeed! Such a delicate musical oeuvre. It all starts as a languishing and repetitive sort of "Tubular Bells" which finally evolves into better territories but this is rather weaker than the sublime "Velvet Voyage".
Fortunately, it ends up into some brilliant orgy of keys which consulates me with this number. This makes it quite easy in terms of rating: the masterpiece status for Voyage and three stars for "Crystal Lake". Total: four stars. Another excellent work performed by Klaus. While I've only sampled a fraction of his massive discography, and everything I've heard so far has been good, this stands out as a high point for Schulze.
It is subtitled "an electronic winter landscape" and it sure sounds it. I still can't figure out what the title "Mirage" and the horribly dtaed seventies cover art have to do with the music though. The album is divided into two sides, "Velvet Voyage" and "Crystal Lake," each running nearly a half hour. The are similar in structure, opening with chilly synth atmospherics drifting over slow and gloomy bass lines. After ten minutes or so of build up, Schulze busts out the sequencers and we are treated to a coldly beautiful rhythmic ostinato that devlops throughout the rest of the piece.
While Schulze uses the same formula for both tracks, the melodies are distinct and they each have their own personality. All of the sounds Schulze manages to tease from his synths are cold and distant sounding.
There is none of the warmth or friendliness of something like "Autobahn. On other albums, this tendency has at times proved somewhat tedious, but the material is strong enough here that it never gets old.
The reissue adds a an additional twenty minute bonus track, but it feels superfluous and does little except dillute the tightly focussed original album. The album consists of two, nearly 30 minute journeys of sonic electro-soundscapes. The first 6 minutes of "Velvet Voyage" are loud and experimental drones and short resonances of celestial beauty, but is very dark in color and very noisy. From there is progresses, slowly but surely, adding new elements to the soundscape every few minutes until the mass density of the lead and bass synths give way to a slowing buzz that ends the voyage.
The first 7 minutes of "Crystal Lake" is a repetitive but effective synth line that draws you in, hypnotizing you, and the bass line eventually kicks in and sends your mind adrift on the icy cascades of glistening sound. Lightly used electronic zapping, also helps fill the sound through this first half of the track. Just after the half-way mark, a slow and dreary passage that recalls pastoral classical romanticism enters the frame, adding a little more variety to the mix.
Out of all of the progressive electronic albums floating around, this is without a doubt one of the biggest, loudest, fullest, and overall most satisfying of them all. If you're into progressive electronic and are looking for the best of the best, look no further than Mirage. Side One: "Velvet Voyage" is offers a sonic landscape that is stark, bleak, yet the music is constructed, to my ears, very similarly to a classical piece of music.
The fact that there are no sequences or percussive sounds used to drive the music forward, that it's mostly done with a weave of individual, single note-playing keyboard instruments is what gives me that impression. Strings, winds, horns, and, yes, percussion instruments are magically replaced by electronically synthesized sounds.
The second half of the song, in which the multi-instrumental fabric is full and at play, is my favorite part.
I always find it weird that this weave begins to slowly fade into the background with over seven minutes yet remaining as gurgles, burbles, harpsichord, and Mellotron move out front with the soloing "cor anglais. The bass-heralded shift at is awesome! Such a surprise. The sequences awesomely alternate and shift into other chords over the next three minutes as Klaus keeps us in suspense with each and every new shift.
At the end of the eighth minute a new horn-like synth brings in a spritely new "lead" instrument to distract us. More and increasingly quicker shifts, now supported by an accompanying bass line, exert some new tension into the song during the twelfth through fifteenth minutes.
Thereafter the mid- and upper-range sounds fade out leaving low end sounds to dominate until a synth wash and Arp-like synth leads in the high end upper registers.
In the nineteenth minute a high-end "tingling" sequence and Mellotron male and later female voices join in giving the song an interrupted, floundering feel, like an interlude. It is useless to send us mails just asking us when Klaus Schulze gives a concert in your town, in your country.
The dates of any seriously planned concert by Klaus will be put immediately into this website. After his Tokyo concerts in , KS has publicly announced that he will give no concerts anymore. Of course, you can write kdm an e-mail and ask questions or make comments. But you can also read goings-on and news around Klaus Schulze and else, in a lively weblog by kdm.
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