Robert Schröder – Galaxie Cygnus-A
By Mark Dohmann
| Label: | Innovative Communication – KS 80.021 |
|---|---|
| Format: | Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition |
| Country: | Germany |
| Released: | 1982 |
| Genre: | Electronic |
| Style: | Berlin-School |
“Ich bin ein Berliner” und “Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen”
So said John F. Kennedy on June 26, 1963 at the critical time in West Berlin during the Cold War.
Kids born in this era in Berlin must have felt pressures of rebuilding a destroyed country and the larger geopolitical forces at loggerheads in their back yard.
Escaping was an art form for those in East Berlin as was smuggling of western goods and information back into East Germany. Escapism for the youth in West Berlin would have been another pathway out of the pressures of life at the time.
Somehow forged in this period were dreams of peace and humanity and a cosmic outlook. These came together in a dreamlike synthesis of electrons for students of music to release a wave of unique music known as the “The Berlin School” or Berliner Schule. The Berlin School is a style of electronic music that developed in Germany in the mid-1970s. The name originated from the main place of activity of the representatives of this style – Berlin (West).
Alongside the Düsseldorf School, the Berlin School is one of the two main styles of German electronic music from the mid-1970s. They are two distinctive styles. A simple comparison is Tangerine Dream (Encore 1977 – Berlin School sound) vs Kraftwerk (Trans Europe Express 1977 Düsseldorf School sound). One is a dreamscape floating in outer space the other a transportation device driving down a defined path. Both work for me and I guess what I’m trying to depict for those unfamiliar with the oeuvre is the underlying influences on the Robert Schroeder Galaxy Cygnus A album under review.
A Brief History of Synthesizers
Perhaps a good place to start is what drove this innovation. Before the movement towards electronic dance music we know today the electronic music of the 70’s was centered on the early tools for synthesis using analog oscillators. A lot of the musicians hand built their own kit based synthesizers before acquiring commercial devices.
The seeds of the modern electronic synthesizer were planted at the turn of the 19th century when an American inventor called Thaddeus Cahill applied for a patent to protect his idea for a Dynamophone.
This steam-powered instrument was a giant, weighing more than 200 tonnes (ouch!).
In 1919, Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, built the Theremin, a monophonic instrument where the player would move and wave his arms between two antennae with an electrostatic field between them.
A slight variation on the instrument called an electrotheremin is slightly easier to play and it was used to create the high-pitched sound in the Beach Boy’s 1966 hit Good Vibrations.
The first electronic sound synthesizer, an instrument of awesome dimensions, was developed by the American acoustical engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar in 1955 at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) laboratories at Princeton, New Jersey.
The output could be monitored on loudspeakers and allowed you to record onto two records, but the synthesizer was limited by its input method – it was controlled by information punched onto a roll of paper tape and was impossible to play spontaneously.
One of the first synthesizers that would be recognized as such by modern musicians was created in 1964 after Bob Moog met Herbert Deutsch, and the former was inspired to create a voltage-controlled oscillator and amplifier module with a keyboard – but it wasn’t until 1967 that Mr Moog called his diverse modular system a ‘synthesizer’.
These voltage-controlled oscillators were first popularized by Wendy Carlos, a physics and music graduate who met Moog at an audio-engineering conference where he was exhibiting.
Carlos recounts the fateful meeting on her website: “Bob looked tired but friendly, and we chatted briefly, traded phone numbers and addresses. It didn’t take long to establish a budding friendship.
“It was a perfect fit: he was a creative engineer who spoke music: I was a musician who spoke science. It felt like a meeting of simpatico minds, like he was my older brother, perhaps.”
For her first studio album ‘Switched on Bach’ (1968), Carlos recorded works by J.S. Bach using Moog modular synthesizers. This helped introduce the synthesizer to a wider audience and made Moog synonymous with synthesizers.
Down the rabbit hole we go!
Kids in West Berlin would no doubt have been triggered by this pioneering work and recognized the familiar music but otherworldly tones it was built upon. During the same period Karlheinz Stockhausen a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
A critic calls him “one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music” (Hewett 2007). He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques or aleatoric musical techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization. So the scholars and the kids would eventually meet in Universities in Europe and combined with the Tennessee USA Moogs start some pretty amazing innovations and explorations.
The first fully integrated synthesizer, the 1970 Minimoog represents a crucial development in electronic music.
Minimoogs were easy to play and easy to take on tour. For the first time, the synthesizer became an ‘instrument’ instead of a piece of studio equipment and it was used by everyone from Kraftwerk to Michael Jackson.
More schooling
Important for the emergence of the Berlin School for Electronic Music was the electronics Beat Studio Berlin, headed by the Swiss composer Thomas Kessler and later in the Halensee elementary school in Berlin. Various groups such as Agitation Free, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream started rehearsing here.
As early as 1969, the Berliner Abendschau made a contribution about the Beatstudio. The comments were almost pioneering about the still very young avant-garde band Agitation Free with its founding members Ludwig Kramer (later Walpurgis ) and Christopher Franke (afterwards Tangerine Dream for 18 years). “They strive to continue the beat that they see in the electronics” … “That’s nothing more”.
Following are excerpts taken from https://www.emusician.com/artists/totally-wired-with-tangerine-dream.
“The explosion of synthesizer technology can be traced in large part to the personal, highly developed music of Tangerine Dream. Their first recording, Electronic Meditation, was a Stockhausen songbook played by acid heads. Electric guitars, organs, violins, metal, whips, and cellos were distorted to the limits by founder Edgar Froese and Conrad Schnitzler and set against Klaus Shulze’s free jazz drumming (still acoustic in those days). Schulze, now a highly regarded synthesist in his own right, recalls the radio stations’ reactions. “While it was playing,” he laughs, “they’d give us these strange looks like there was something wrong with the turntable.”
Things got even more curious on their next three recordings, Alpha Centauri, Atem, and Zeit, with the gradual introduction of Mellotron and the VCS3 synthesizers. The personnel also stabilized around founder Edgar Froese, Christoph Franke, and Peter Baumann—probably the only element of stability in a floating world that made Pink Floyd sound like a rural blues band by comparison. Alpha Centauri bears a dedication to “all people who feel obliged to space.” They experimented with subtler textures, and on the double record Zeit, used a string quartet in the manner of Ligeti.
Tangerine Dream had a curious breakthrough in 1973 with Phaedra, a recording that remains fresh and visionary. A Moog synthesizer was added along with sequencers, a development that, until recently, would be a trademark of their music. Phaedra topped the British pop charts with its liquid textures and insistent rhythms that sounded like giant cosmic rubber bands.
It was during this period that Tangerine Dream honed their reputation as a performing ensemble, playing odd venues like planetariums and darkened churches throughout Europe. Their concerts were almost entirely improvised, with only a few pre-programmed sequencer patterns. They were, and still remain, one of the only live performance electronic ensembles and one of the few who can pull it off with the quality and complexity of their studio recordings, as the live records Ricochet, Encore, Tangerine Dream, Logos, and Poland will attest.
They finally came to America in 1977, by which time they’d acquired a synthesist’s candy store overflowing with state-of-the-art equipment. In 1977, that meant instruments like Oberheim polyphonic synths, ARP 2600s and string machines, PPG synthesizers, digital sequencers, and a host of custom-designed devices. The LP notes to Encore list 25 instruments.”
Voyages into Outer Space.
Like NASA sending Voyager 1 and subsequent devices into space the electro-music space explorers and pioneers kept sending new albums into the cosmos for headphone audionauts to ride in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In this genre there are a bunch of luminaries.
For me Robert Schroeder is one of the more interesting ones. I have owned this LP (Galaxie Cygnus-A) since new in 1982 and it was another album foisted upon me by the unique Danny “The Russian Émigré” in Swanston Street.
One reviewer stated “A mystical bridge between us and the greater cosmos this music was Robert Schroeder’s imagination responding to The Universe”. For a idea of the music, you can sample the long out of print work that has been resurrected on the CD Cygnus-A (50’24”).
The seven electronic realizations play one into the next as one continuous musical concept. His expressing of machine beauty in music may be heard equally in the meticulous crafting of synthesized sounds and the melodious flight of his solo lead lines and dramatic harmonic shifts.
While each section may be described as elemental, tonal lines vivified by a simple sequencer pattern upon a bed of sustaining synth strings, Schroeder’s ethereal sense of certainty enlivens these parts in the language of the unimaginable vastness he is reaching for. From ominous rumblings to composed spacey suites, on Cygnus-A Robert Schroeder peers into the darkness of space and finds some light.”
For me it’s a lights out, strap yourself in for a rocket ship ride into the outer reaches of space. If you’re not floating by Alpha Centauri within ten minutes you might need to check the artificial hibernation settings on your spacesuit and call mission control with “Houston we have a problem”.
Track listing
A1 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 1 4:35
A2 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 2 8:32
A3 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 3 3:13
A4 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 4 2:50
B1 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 5 10:05
B2 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 6 6:38
B3 Galaxie Cygnus-A / Teil 7 2:32