Klaus Schulze: Body Love 2
“I strongly recommended it because I do believe that Schulze made in Nowhere-Now Here his most beautiful music piece of the 70's”
1 Nowhere - Now Here 29:02
2 Stardancer 2 14:15
3 Moogetique 13:15
4 Buddy Laugh (A Rock'n'Roll Bolero) 23:16
Revisited Records SPV 78852 CD
(CD 79:33) (V.F.)
(Berlin School)
What is interesting about reeditions is the history around the work and of the possibilities of retouching some reviews writing a little bit hastily. Thus, in the booklet of this one we learn that we owe this album to the insistently of Island Record corporate management which, after Mirage (LP Island 9461), wanted an album in the vein of Moondawn and Body Love. Not that much forbidding to Chris Blackwell's requests, Klaus Schulze decided to offer an album that would have the same rhythmic colors as Moondawn and Body Love. He simply named it BODY LOVE 2. So, here is again a quite new review for a quite new reedition which absolutely worth that we talk about and the buying.
And nevertheless this 9th album from Schulze started vaguely as a cosmic music à la Mirage with a synth which frees nice cosmic waves. Right from the first breaths of Nowhere - Now Here we are on known ground. Without having the same atmospheric and rhythmic structures that on Body Love, Nowhere - Now Here offers a floating intro filled of galactic tones unique to Schulze’s creativity. A synth sings in background. It sings a delicate filet for whistled a great spatial melody of which circles of influence are gradually leaking away, to embrace a sequence with pulsations of bass line which wave and jump slightly among Grosskopf's cymbals. Percussions fall. Agitators, they form a perfect symbiosis with the sensuality of a suave cosmic tempo, while synth solos roar and teem all around a structure embraced by astral choirs that we hardly notice. Near the 14th minute, the rhythm breaks and permutes on an unbridled structure where the sequential movement undulates wildly, supported by Harald Grosskopf's wild percussions and surrounded of furious synth solos which become entangled in a cosmos dominated by mellotron and synth impetus. A superb cosmic storm punctuated by great solos of an uncontrollable Moog, challenging the sequential measures of Nowhere - Now Here which is simply magnificent, and which astound constantly by its permutations as subtle as unforeseen. Like this delicious sequence which hatches out a little after the 17th minute to dance on a rhythm that had just permutated and take a clearer tangent where solos of the Moog roar and sing on a structure that we would wish timeless. Stardancer 2 is a remixed version of Stardancer which nests on Body Love. The vaporous intro is shorter, before that the rhythm explodes on great percussions and gorgeous synth solos which plunges us de facto into the unbridled atmosphere of Nowhere-Now Here. Moogetique returns everybody to the ambient square. It’s an ambient and atmospheric track to slow metallic striations which float and squeak around a synth filled of dark, cold and empty winds. We are in an immense musical oblivion that a mellotron digs some more of its black and obscure winds to caress finely hatched synth lines, plunging the auditor into an ambient madness that would easily have found its place in 2001: A Space Odyssey, so much the atmosphere lends itself to it.
This revisited version by the label Revisited Records offers in addition a long 23 minutes track entitled Buddy Laugh (In Rock 'n' roll Bolero). Here's a strange naming, because we are far from being in a bolero, even less a rock, but rather in a fascinating movement which gathers together various segments of tracks that we find on both Body Love. The intro plunges us into an abyssal musical blackness with dark and black choirs and winds of a caustic Mellotron which cogitate around Schulzian sound effects, before fading away in an intense mellotron mist. Cymbals announce an evolution in the movement which becomes suddenly more sensual, touching lightly Nowhere - Now Here, before that the drum shapes an inconsistent rhythmic, near free-jazz or improvised prog, beneath heavy and sinuous reverberations. One would say a stylistic composition by Schulze on drums, who peels a brief solo which is fading away in a cacophony to find again the path of knowledge with a movement closer to Stardancer roots. I don't really know what to think of Buddy Laugh (In Rock 'n' roll Bolero). By moments I find in it some interesting passages and in other moments, I find it a bit long and boring, removing thus any pertinence to buy this reedition only because that this track is absent in our Schulze collection.
If you are among the lucky ones that possess a version of BODY LOVE 2, either from Brain or Island in 1977 or Metronome Musik (1992) or still, Universal International (2003), I don’t believe that this new edition from SPV is essential, especially that some of my friends blow me that the Brain and Island versions are superior in tones to it. On the other hand, if you still don't have BODY LOVE 2, I strongly recommended it because I do believe that Schulze made in Nowhere-Now Here his most beautiful music piece of the 70's and I push even farther by saying that it is doubtless a turning point in the history of analog EM. I rarely heard a track that is merging so well in the progressive music as in free jazz than electronic. It's a small jewel which is amply worth its place in any personal record collection, so go for it.
Sylvain Lupari (September 7th, 2006) *****