Picture Music - Klaus Schulze

Picture Music is the fourth album of electronic music by German musician Klaus Schulze. It was recorded in late 1974 and released in January 1975 on Brain Records. In 2005 this was the second Schulze album reissued by Revisited Records. This is the only Klaus Schulze solo album in which he can be heard playing a drum kit. Prior to his solo career, he was the drummer for Ash Ra Tempel; on his later albums, drummer Harald Großkopf of Wallenstein frequently contributed. Picture Music is an electronic masterpiece that blends experimental soundscapes with the minimalist rhythms of the Berlin-School style. The album consists of two epic-length tracks, "Totem" and "Mental Door," which showcase Schulze's mastery of analog synthesizers and his ability to create immersive sonic environments. The music is both hypnotic and otherworldly, taking listeners on a journey through a range of moods and textures.
The bonus track "C'est Pas La Même Chose" is a stunning addition to the album, showcasing Schulze's talent for creating immersive soundscapes that transport listeners to new realms of consciousness.
Picture Music in its various editions, has more cover art designs than any other Klaus Schulze album, and another reason for confusion of release order of albums lies in the choice of original cover artist. The first cover was a painting of an abstract man and background by Jacques Wyrs. The previous album, Black Dance, featured a similar concept painted by Urs Amann, and in 1975, Schulze commissioned Amann to make new covers for all his previous albums, as well as his next, Timewind. The original Wyrs cover was taken as evidence that Picture Music must precede the era of the Amann covers sequence.
Schulze did commission an Amann cover for Picture Music as well, probably after the first edition of the album was released, but Brain Records did not have a reason to pay the expense of having a new cover designed (unlike his first two albums, which were originally issued under other sub-labels of Metronome Records, Brain's parent company, and then reissued on Brain with new catalogue numbers, so new covers had to be designed anyway), and rejected it. But the Amann cover was used on a French edition on Isadora / Clementine Records (Isadora being the name on the cover, but Clementine was the name on the label).
More covers have also appeared. A 1970s release in Belgium on Ariola Records uses a cover portrait of Schulze, framed to match the cover of a later album, Moondawn. Brain Records issued a series of budget reissues around 1980, with new cover art designed "in house" to keep costs down by not paying royalties on cover art, and replaced the original Wyrs cover with a new design of a framed portrait of a child, balanced upright on one corner in a barren field. In 1985, Gramavision Records in the U.S. reissued several titles from Schulze's back catalogue with new covers showing printed circuit boards superimposed over photographs of landscapes (again, an anonymous "in house" design). The 2005 CD reissue with bonus track uses the Amann cover with his original back cover design that had never appeared before (the French album with that cover had used a blown-up detail from the front cover for the back), and also reproduced previous covers inside the CD booklet.

00:00 Totem
23:53 Mental Door
46:54 C'est pas la même chose