In the wake of his successful 1976 album, MOONDAWN, Klaus Schulze was quickly gaining worldwide recognition as a premier electronic musician, his acclaim spreading from western Europe to Asia when he produced the Japanese group Far East Family Band’s PARALLEL WORLD album at The Manor in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire, England. Having previously applied mixes on their NIPPONJIN – JOIN OUR MENTAL PHASE SOUND album, it was at these sessions as producer that Schulze became friendly with a female Japanese photographer who would wind up introducing him to percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta. Yamash’ta was searching for a synthesizer player to complement his ambitious Go project and once the pair met, they quickly found themselves well-suited to each other’s temperament. Schulze joined Go with Yamash’ta, Steve Winwood and Michael Shrieve, who produced a pair of studio albums and one double live LP between 1976 and 1977 for Island Records. Simultaneously, Island signed Schulze as a solo artist just in time for what would become one of the most prolific years of Schulze’s life. In all certainty, a sense of expanding horizons most certainly took place inside Schulze’s head and heart for what he produced in 1977 were two albums worth of soundtrack material for Lasse Braun’s sexploitation film BODY LOVE which flanked MIRAGE, which was his first album delivered to Island Records for release outside of West Germany.

It was an unexpected statement. For although MIRAGE was just as immersive as anything else Schulze had achieved (it could be said you don’t just listen to MIRAGE as much as you let yourself be absorbed into it) it was undeniably more solemn and starker. Recording and mixing throughout January, 1977 in Frankfurt am Main at Studio Panne Paulsen, Schulze created MIRAGE as two tracks nearly half an hour in length apiece. Creating something that was at once glacial and minimalist with the visual sensations of falling snow, dark grey clouds and icy winds cast in successive waves of superimposition, it was little wonder Schulze subtitled both pieces (which themselves were subtitled into six sections) as “eine elektronische winterlandschaft” or, “an electronic winter landscape.” Although this only appeared on the label of the Brain Records release, tuned-in and responsive minds with only the original UK pressing on Island would immediately feel the whole album imbued with a distinctly winter vibe of chilly winds, falling snowflakes, and unhurried lapses into polar calm. The arrangements are striking in their imperceptible transformations that recede as slowly as they proceed, only to taper off and pall into hibernating silence in successive sound layers of drones and inconspicuous detailing.

Side one’s first elongated series of impressions, “Velvet Voyage,” traces a murmuration of tiny snowflakes whipping together in patterned air as an assemblance of Ligeti-like vocalised drones waft among spacious arrangements of light. Once distant calls of electronic birds are displaced by whirring drones that gradually increase, the first of dozens of layered drones emerge. Diffusive on the edges and pulsating slowly in the centre, the gradual progress of the ensuing layers of sound are nearly imperceptible as the repetition of sonic brushstrokes are so slow as to be nearly absent. As well as falling quietly into shifting patterns that slowly degenerate, only to break apart at the edges while the remaining sonic developments remain diffusive. But as those low drones float off and seemingly away, they also act as ballast for the accompanying flashes of high-end twittering and beams of mellotronic voicings that scan the perimeter. As ages pass, foreboding drones spread across an ever-darkening sky that diffuses into landscape as clouds waft slowly by. Skittering sequenced notes scatter across the sky, turning to diffusive clouds of dust and then vanish when sombre, vocalised sounds set against bass notes that resound for so long. A set of twinkling emerges, soon approaching the foreground, twinkling brightly and decorating the bass notes that gradually smear into echo. While winds of mellotron voices kick up, distant synth lines play incomplete melodies behind snowflakes that tinkle as they twinkle and fall. An updraft kicks up of overhanging bass notes for a gentle melody to lightly pass by while those synthesized voicings edge in from within the clouds of twinkling snowfall. A synthesizer solo plots an imagined path through haze until the voices re-emerge, wrapped in windy times and blanketed from the storm for this is “Lucidinterspace,” the penultimately-named sub-section of “Velvet Voyage.” (Although it could accurately describe the whole piece or even the entire album.) A final time the twinkling re-emerges, and those voices are carried into a swirling a vortex and amid slight burbling, vanishes back into the void from whence it came.

Like its opposite side, “Crystal Lake” is nearly half an hour in length and a mind-map for points inner space via its fragile minimalism and drones that slowly shift like sand, or snow. Trebly, twinkling and tinkling notes resound like a superimposed halo of slowly revolving musical boxes in midair translucence during a raging snowstorm of its own pendulum-like creation. As the winds start to rise gently, the chiming continues to fall like snowflakes over an expansive lake darkening at the centre, stilled to its edges and with all color bleached and muted by a thick snowfall of tiny flakes, gradually coursed into eddies by plumes of wind. The segue into the next plateau of chilly redoubt is taken by the emergence of a two bass note cluster that is the most distinguishable shift of the album and quite possibly — the line of demarcation between the sub-titled opening segment, “Xylotones,” and “Cromwaves” for the chilliness is nearly tangible here.

Halfway through the piece, all settles and fades ever, save only scant bass notes and distant skittering. So. Gradual. And. Gently. It. Goes…

Light notes tiptoe gently in as the bass notes begin their deliberate, gradual recede until electric organ notes begin a slow, elegiac solo over ever-amassing clouds of drones, signaling the entry of the sub-titled segment, “Liquidmirrors.” Drones transmute into voices until the dance of light, clear bell tones re-emerge and gathering in strength into rhythmic patterning for this is the rebirthing sequence Schulze subtitled “Springdance.” The sombre mood is lifting for the first time on MIRAGE as a play of synthesizer soloing expands upon the sequencer-driven patterns that have now increased in both magnitude and complexity. While it spreads into to the four fields of the sonic landscape, drones both vocalised and synthesized overlay everything until it all dissolves in echoed, shuddering delay all too soon in a premature farewell.

A few seconds longer and it would exceed half an hour in length and quite possibly: achieve an uncanny transformation in physical reality bordering on the occult. Or at least, conjure up that rare and beautiful feeling outlined so simply and purely in the final sentence of the final paragraph of the final story in James Joyce’s DUBLINERS (1914), “The Dead.” Which summons up the same connection of life’s eternity with death’s singular culmination thusly:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”