TRANCEFER

I start this review to welcome a man that I started to love in 1971. I mean Mike Shrieve, the drummer of the legendary "Santana". It is always a pleasure for me to listen to him.

With "Trancefer", Klaus did partially revert to his first love (which is also mine, talking about his great music): the sounds of the seventies: when music meets the cosmos and transports you to the end of this galaxy. Excellency is the word.

It all starts with the short epic (only? eighteen minutes!) which is again an ode to tranquil electronic music with fine and nicely balanced keyboards lines almost all the way through. No such weak beats à la "Dig It": only a succession of spacey and more dynamic / dramatic musical development.

The percussion influence of Mike is definite from the seventh minute onwards. At some points, this song reminds me of the intro of "Slippermen" from whom you might have heard of. Unreal, mysterious, profound. After a quite drumming middle part, the song softens a bit (but not too much) to get back to a more conventional partition.

The second (short) epic available on this album is another fine Schultze piece of music. The faithful Wolfgang Tiepold is adding again another dimension with his excellent cello play. Combined with Michael, this is quite a treat, although not quite an usual Schultze fantasmagoria.

I am rather pleased to see how Mike could influence this work. But he such a great drummer (with song writing abilities let's not forget) that this is not a surprise.

Seven out of ten for this good album..

On Trancefer, Klaus Schulze has come to grips with his new digital equipment and realizes equally mesmerizing atmospheres as he had created on X, only this time it's done entirely digital. The most surprising element would be the length of the album. While a normal Schulze album rarely clocks off under 60 minutes, this one is with its 37.30 minutes almost as short as a your average Tangerine Dream platter.

A Few Minutes After Trancefer is a dominantly non-melodic and very percussive track. It is very rhythmical and creates a great ambience. Silent Running is probably the best of both, again it's very spacey and brooding.

This album is a solid effort and recommended to all fans of Klaus Schulze. It's more experimental then most of his 70's work but if you take your time to let yourself be absorbed by it, you might marvel at this lush minimalism as much as I do. It is certainly not the first time that Schulze captivates me with what amounts to just sound and rhythm, but it remains a unique experience. 3.5 stars

A lot of great electronic music - - and music in general - - has been created using digital synthesizers. So my preference for Klaus Schulze's analog period (essentially the 1970s) has little to do with the type of synthesis. And actually, his first two albums (Irrlicht (1972) and Cyborg (1973)) didn't feature any synthesizers. When it first became practicable for him to use analog synths, he did so right away, on Blackdance (1974). Over the next eight albums he continued to add and subtract other techniques and instruments, the analog synthesizer being the only real constant.

The claim that Schulze was successful in the 1970s seems borne out by his ability, in 1980, to purchase a Crucianelli GDS digital synthesis computer for around US$27,000 ($84K today). He first used the GDS on Dig It, released a year prior to Trancefer. An interesting note: only five or six of this GDS model were produced. Wendy Carlos also bought one and used it (extensively, as I understand it) on the Tron soundtrack. Anyway, Schulze had plenty of commercial success with an idiosyncratic style of analog synthesis across ten albums from Blackdance to ...Live... (1980), but when digital synthesis became available, he embraced it fully.

The works on Dig It were more song-oriented than most of Schulze's output, and there was stylistic diversity both within and between its tracks. In this respect Dig It was similar to its predecessors, X (1978) and Dune (1979). On the other hand, the two tracks comprising Trancefer are more repetitive and, as the title implies, trance- like - - harkening back to Schulze's mid-1970s work. Unusually, the personnel are the same throughout the entire album: Schulze, Wolfgang Tiepold (cello), and Michael Shrieve (percussion). Since Schulze's next albums, Audentity (1983) and Angst (1984) would continue the trend of heterogeneity between tracks, Trancefer seems to be a belated bookend to an earlier era.

The arrangements on the two tracks are reminiscent of the rhythmic movements of albums like Blackdance and Moondawn, with 'A Few Minutes After Trancefer' the more energetic and 'Silent Running' relatively subdued. Shrieve's contributions are well-integrated in most places, if a little too forward in the mix for my taste. Unlike much of Harald Großkopf's drumming on four of Schulze's prior albums, Shrieve's percussion tends to dovetail with the sequencer parts rather than establishing a backbeat. Throughout much of Trancefer, Tiepold serves a similar purpose, although elsewhere his cello does the opposite, clashing musically and rhythmically with Schulze's sequenced parts.

In short, Klaus Schulze has recorded some truly great works of electronic prog. He's also released some duds. Trancefer is neither. Nonetheless, it's a good album, and it's probably the best of his early digital works.

Some people beleive Prog Electronic music went terrible wrong (or downhill) in the 1980s--due to the influence and popularity of New Age music. Here is an album that proves an exception to the rule.

Line-up / Musicians: - Klaus Schulze / performer (Yamaha CS-80, G.D.S. computer, ? ), producer With: - Wolfgang Tiepold / cello - Michael Shrieve / percussion

1. "A Few Minutes After Trancefer" (18:20) defintely one of my favorite mesmerics from Klaus from the 1980s. (36.5/40) 2. "Silent Running" (18:57) (34/40)

Total Time: 37:17

B+/four stars; an excellent addition of 1980s Prog Electronic music to any prog lover's music collection: proof that progressive electronic in the 1980s was not quite dead.