Blau (Blue) had to be defended at all costs. For his second »Farben« (Colours) solo album, Berlin-based electronic tinkerer Conrad Schnitzler chose this hue in 1974, releasing the result as a double-sided record, just like his previous »Rot« (Red), entirely on his own and largely away from the public eye. It stayed that way until the new millennium, when a first reissue was released in 2001. Prediction: That wouldn’t have happened with a record label. Because what Schnitzler offers in both »Die Rebellen haben sich in den Bergen versteckt« (The rebels have hidden in the mountains) and »Jupiter«, with their cosmically pulsating repetitive orgies, isn’t any weirder than the music he made with Moebius and Roedelius as Cluster – or what his former bandmates explored on their early Cluster albums. It has eerie, glass-clinking sounds, lots of percussive pounding and patterns that mutate long before such terms became popular in the 1990s.
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Conrad Schnitzler – In the Midst of Disorder
PortraitToday, Conrad Schnitzler can no longer be considered the great overlooked artist of his time; he’s had a dedicated fanbase in Japan for years. They have been instrumental in preserving his work. And Schnitzler is noticeably different from Cluster. He’s not as ambient or floating as they were in the beginning, and only much later did he show a clear interest in synth-pop—the quirky kind, mind you. This places him in a continuum with Moebius and Roedelius. And on »Blau«, it’s particularly evident in its wonderfully strange, shimmering form.
