Gold

Someone will have to explain why this album spent 25 years inside the vault. Recorded between 1974 and 1978, during the golden (well, at least commercially speaking) age of German electronic music, Gold features Conrad Schnitzler at the top of his form, balancing his interest in pure electronic sound research with instrumental pop sensibilities. The album picks up where his tenure in the group Cluster had ended, meaning that it is warmer than Kraftwerk's music from that period and wittier than the Tangerine Dream axis. The album, over one hour long, is roughly split between two half-hour suites of segued untitled pieces. Most tracks are built around harmonic and rhythmic parameters. Some are topped by quasi-naive melodies, others feature percussive elements (like a timpani in track three and crude electronic beats in tracks six and 14). The first half ends after track seven. The second one begins in song format -- track nine gets as close to rock as you can using only analog synthesizers -- but quickly veers into spacy textures and abstract amalgams of synth sweeps and cymbal washes, hinting at Asmus Tietchens' first albums (he was recording his debut LP Nachtstucke by 1978). Track 13 adopts a sinister mood with industrial overtones. Fans of '70s German electronica will be delighted by this late addition to the genre's corpus, an addition that piledrives a few so-called classics to the floor. ~ Francois Couture