Conrad Schnitzler, briefly a member of Tangerine Dream in the early 1970s and of Cluster when they were still spelling themselves with a »K«, released a great deal of music, most of it self-released on cassette or CD-R. To gain an overview of the sound artist’s complete works, one can either research laboriously online or simply wait until all his albums have been reissued by Bureau B. As with Conal, originally released in 1981 on the Norwegian label Uniton Records.
On Conal, the squeaking and manipulation of pitches recall the childlike pleasure with which electronic pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s tried to generate strange tones with their archaic devices. On the other hand – as so often with Schnitzler – sequences and textures keep appearing that, years later, would become part of the accepted vocabulary of acid house, Berlin techno and dark ambient. In this way, Schnitzler positions himself as an outsider musician whose sound art affronts every faction. Conal came out at a time when the Krautrock euphoria in the underground was already over. And the mainstream of the early 1980s could make nothing of such an uncompromising handling of the synthesiser anyway, since electronic instruments were just then being discovered there as melody suppliers for pop.
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Portrait
Conal
