BODY LOVE (OST)

The first of two matching soundtracks for a Dutch pornographic film (directed by an Italian aristocrat affecting a Scandinavian alias) continued in the same direction as Schulze's best-selling "Moondawn" album (1976), with lots of textbook Berlin School Moog vamps over a rhythmic bed of rock-steady acoustic drumming. The formula wasn't fully realized on the earlier LP, but Schulze refined it here to the acme of synthetic excellence, succeeding where "Moondawn" didn't because of the dynamic urgency of the music.

Maybe he was inspired by the film scenario, which follows a decadent blue-blood couple who arrange to have their teenage daughter deflowered at an upscale orgy on her 18th birthday. If so, it's hard to reconcile the energy and drive of the album opener "Stardancer" with the mechanical dispassion of hardcore movie sex. The swirling Arabian chords and near-eastern motifs were fast becoming common stock for synth jams of this sort, but each long piece is incredibly textured, and the live drumming by old pal Harald Großkopf (like Schulze, another of R.U. Kaiser's Cosmic Jokers) gives the album real muscle.

It's a well-balanced effort, too. The pulse-raising agitation of "Stardancer" segues nicely into the much calmer interstellar drift of "Blanche" (named for the composer's girlfriend). The subsequent tension between the two is then resolved by the side-long (on vinyl) "P.T.O.": 27-escalating minutes of passionate synth-rock foreplay and release, more stimulating (I imagine) than anything in the film itself.

The '05 Revisited Records CD re-issue includes the unreleased epilogue "Lasse Braun", a hyper-drive extension of Schulze's earlier (and flawed) "Picture Music" album, adding twenty-two minutes of quietly bubbling synthesizers and ice-smooth soloing (and name-checking the film's director). Most bonus tracks are superfluous footnotes, but in this case the appendix perfectly complements the original album, looking back in satisfied afterglow while anticipating the second wind of Volume II.

Klaus Schulze was an artist approaching his creative zenith in 1977, and the Body Love albums (both of them) were the final steps below the career-peak plateau of "X", released the following year.