hough he’s often regarded as an integral figure on the varied Krautrock scene rising in Germany in the 70s, Conrad Schnitzler has left surprisingly little in the way of a recorded legacy. He recorded a pair of albums (plus a live album) with Kluster before they dropped the K for a C and set off into resolutely ambient, peaceful frontiers. And his own solo recordings after leaving the band are nearly all out-of-print or available only on obscure labels. Like this one, a collection recorded between 1974 and 1978, during Schnitzler’s early solo career, but never released until now.


Gold is an album that solidifies Schnitzler’s reputation as an important early explorer of synthesized ambient music. The first three Kluster albums were improvisatory guitar-driven jams with only the barest suggestions of what the group’s three members would go on to do in the future; when Schnitzler left the group, both he and the new duo Cluster set off into increasingly abstract and ambient territory almost simultaneously. Interestingly, though, Gold still retains beats and rhythms among its spacey synthesizer swirls. The third track (all 14 songs are untitled) sounds surprisingly like Schitnizler’s Kraut peers Kraftwerk, but stripped down and with a harsher, proto-industrial tinge to the machine-shop rhythms. The sixth track builds up marching rhythms from a crackling sea of clattering, with an imperious melody soaring above the complicated beats. On the twelfth track, Schnitzler lays down a sort of prototype for a lot of modern IDM, with a melodic synth streaming back and forth over glitchy, fast-paced beats and hidden counter-melodies.


For much of the rest of the album, Schnitzler ventures more into beatless ambience, which is not to say that he forsakes variety. There are hardly two songs on the entire album that explore similar ideas, since Schnitzler seems to be restlessly toying with the various moods and sounds he can conjure from his primitive machinery. A standout of the album’s more subdued cuts is track seven, which retains a gritty edge to its meditative synth pulses, but the entire album is consistent in quality despite its wide range. The opening track’s layered drones, the high-pitched interstellar waves of track eight, the noisy blur of track thirteen, the tranquil calm of the fourth track, which sounds like a perfect fit for the Blade Runner soundtrack: Gold encompasses all these styles and more.


Schnitzler’s Gold, basically, is everything that Krautrock fans would expect of the scene’s more electronic denizens. These synth noodlings have perhaps stood the test of time a little less ably than Neu!’s more organic drive or Kraftwerk’s poppier use of the same ideas and textures -- there are a few moments here when the instruments’ obvious primitiveness gets in the way of the pure enjoyment of the music. But despite this limitation, Schnitzler’s music has an undeniable charm, an experimental spirit and uncanny sense for capturing moods, that easily overcomes any shortcomings of his technology. Like Kraftwerk, Schnitzler balances arty ambition and experimentation with a desire for accessibility and beauty, leaning of course slightly more towards the experimental end of the pole than Kraftwerk did for most of their career. This is a worthwhile recording for anyone interested in either the early Krautrock scene or the early foundations of electronic music.