Klaus Schulze: the krautrock maestro that wrote music for porn
Krautrock was one of the most influential rock sub-genres to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s. By this point, many young people expressed interest in creating music that separated them from the country’s Nazi legacy, desiring to develop music geared away from traditionalism. These musicians were keen to ditch everything they knew about music and embrace innovative composition methods.
According to Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust, “We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock ‘n’ roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different.” Notable krautrock outfits, such as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, blended avant-garde and experimental sensibilities with cyclical rhythms, motorik beats, early forrays into electronica, and lengthy improvised jams.
The popularisation of krautrock led to the development of other genres, such as ambient music, dance, and multiple forms of alternative rock, including post-rock. The genre’s influence spans the late-1970s outputs by David Bowie, such as Station to Station to prolific psych-rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
One of the genre’s most significant figures, however, was Klaus Schulze, who played in some of the greatest krautrock bands of all time. He became one of the earliest members of Tangerine Dream, performing on their debut album, Electronic Meditation, in 1969. However, by the following year, he had already moved on to Ash Ra Tempel alongside the influential guitarist Manuel Göttsching. Yet, after the band released their self-titled debut album, Schulze was ready to move on to something else.
This time, he began a solo career, releasing his first record, the proto-ambient Irrlicht, in 1972. Following in the tradition of many other krautrock outfits, Schulze became a prolific musician, continuously releasing new and innovative records. Throughout the following decades, he collaborated with countless people, even creating music as part of the krautrock supergroup The Cosmic Jokers with artists such as Göttsching and Wallenstein’s Harald Grosskopf and Jürgen Dollase.
Since his musical career began, Schulze has released over 60 albums, including some created under the pseudonym Richard Wahnfried. However, in the late 1970s, Schulze demonstrated his versatility by creating two soundtracks – Body Love and Body Love 2, which scored Lasse Braun’s pornographic movie, Body Love.
The movie was released in 1977 and featured Catherine Ringer, a French singer from the group Les Rita Mitsouko. Although Schulze was initially hesitant to score the film, he agreed when he found out that Braun had played some of the musician’s earlier albums while filming. The resulting scores are a cosmic experiment in spacey synths that wouldn’t sound out of place in the background of a giallo horror of the period.
Listen below.
