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The release of a new album by the God of electronic music, Klaus Schulze, is always an event, though it's no longer a certainty that he'll come up with anything novel. Shadowlands isn't a disappointing album, but it clearly treads ground which is pretty familiar to anyone who has heard his output in the last five years.
Though it has some vocal participation from Lisa Gerrard, Chrysta Bell, Julia Messenger and Thomas Kagermann, who also plays violin and flute, this isn't a vocal album in the way Schulze's collaborations with Lisa Gerrard were. Instead it's heavily reliant on washes of string pads, polyrhythmic percussion and ambient effects. It's pretty similar to everything he's come up with since Contemporary Works.
Nonetheless it bears the marks of genius - and not to denigrate Schulze acolytes like Fanger & Schoenwalder, there's a mountain of inspiration separating their pleasant but imitative output from that of the original master.
The only question is, when there's a 2xCD version with two extra tracks, why anyone would want to buy a single-CD edition of Shadowlands?
Order it from the ever-reliable C&D Services, http://www.cd-services.com/
Another equipment splurge has ended up with me buying a FAT Procoder, Kawai R-100 drum machine and Seiko DS-310 digital programmer. I've wanted a hardware vocoder for some time, as I haven't been impressed by software ones. The Procoder is just about the cheapest it's possible to find, and this is reflected in the build quality, which is atrocious. The manual is awful too, so I had a lot of trouble setting it up, not helped by a lack of suitable microphones. However, it works well with line inputs, and I got some great Klaus Schulze-style rhythmic chords out of it.
The Kawai R-100 is a sheer indulgence, a gritty sampled drum machine with some interesting tuning features, but not something I'm likely to use much.
The Seiko DS-310 is something I never thought I'd own - it's the harmonic synthesis programmer add-on for the DS-250 keyboard. To my astonishment it works, and creates some fabulous sounds (but unfortunately lacks a filter envelope function). Bizarrely, though no-one seems to have posted a scan of its manual, I got one on eBay - no instrument for sale, just the manual. What's that all about then...?
