The 1970s were arguably the most pivotal decade for electronic music. While artists such as Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk experimented with sounds and formulae that would give birth to disco, house and techno, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream were popularising ambient music.
Released 50 years ago today, Klaus Schulze’s second solo album since departing Tangerine Dream, Cyborg, was a seminal work in abstract experimental electronic music, considered at the cutting-edge in 1973 and remaining as relevant today.
Recorded in a simple home studio, while Schulze worked as a mailman for the German post office, Cyborg was an ambitious and esoteric follow-up to 1972’s Irrlicht. Four tracks, spread over two discs, construct a vast, sprawling and ominous cosmic soundscape, where twisted and modulated cassette recordings of classical instruments are juxtaposed with the shimmering and pulsing of analogue synthesizers. The result is at once intriguing and haunting, blissful and menacing, unique and quintessentially Schulze.
