Conrad Schnitzler S/D

RIP

From Wikipedia :

Conrad Schnitzler passed away from stomach cancer in the evening 4 August 2011

Oh man... ;_;

Can't find a single news story about it.

Jesus

Supposedly "official" Conrad Schnitzler page? Still not positive how official this is. http://www.fancymoon.com/con_s/

Aw no! RIP.

Uh...

http://www.conrad-schnitzler.de/neu.htm

Very sad. This thread got me into checking his music. I've loved much of it.

super bummed, RIP

played 'Conal' last week on a road trip north of Yosemite as we started getting into the mountains. it was perfect.

putting on the 'Ballet Statique' CD to make breakfast.

RIP

http://www.fancymoon.com/con_s/

notices are starting to pop up, relievedly. this passing is not one to miss. schnitzler's club in berlin was pretty much ground zero, krautrock would have been very different without this man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiak_Free_Arts_Lab

Yeah, I once made a pilgrimage to the original site of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, on one of my visits to Germany...

So sad about this.

Posting to ILM from yr phone, from the back of the room during a keynote talk = challenging

rip, big man.

RIP

RIP. I'm feelin' Blau about this.

RIP - never heard a ton of his work, but the Kluster LPs and his solo stuff on Important is really good

Das bummer. RIP Con. Great man.

RIP. Rot is one of my favorite things ever, as are Kluster and that first Tangerine Dream album. A tremendous figure in my musical life for sure.

Writing up an obituary piece--let me know if any of you have thoughts or memories you'd like to add

A friend is giving me a copy of a radio show he did in the '80s, where he had Schnitzler as the special musical guest--it is awesome

jeez, this is a bummer. r.i.p.

RIP

Brief but wonderful documentary (auf Deutsch):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTR88nW4GcU

i have never gotten deep into his music, not because i don't love "auf dem schwarzen kanal" but only because i have found it so hard to get ahold of. i never got those captain trip reissues of yellow, red, black, etc

someone should organize a memorial torrent

he's done a lot of different things. 'auf dem schwarzen kanal' was the most visible 12" in a brief pop music period. if you like that, check out 'con 3' 'consequenz I' 'consequenz II' and 'roofmusic' (the latter is silly but a sentimental favorite)

and 'ballet statique' (aka 'con') -- not pop, but it's not just his best but one of the best electronic music albums of all time

ballet statique was reissued earlier this year. milton otm, completely essential

pretty much everything i've heard of his up until like mid 80s (haven't had a chance to go much further as yet) has been gold, pure gold

especially love his warped synth pop phase

hopefully there'll be some reissues of the private press stuff

rip con

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdIZsbCe-g

gelb, pure gelb

wrote these reviews of the captain trips reissues for a retail website that sold out of them before they could even post them -- ah well, here now

Conrad Schnitzler, Con (Captain Trips Records)

From 1978, 'Con' is Schnitzler's most legendary release. After a
decade of recording extended side long damaged & detuned synth
epics, he went into the studio with Tangerine Dream's Peter Baumann,
who refined Schnitzler's most decentered sounds into five discreet
tracks. At a time when many of the established electronic
musicians were eschewing all abstraction to focus on classical (and
commercial) melodies, spending more and more time behind the keyboards
and less at the patchbay, Schnitzler's sculptures on 'Con' were
pushing even further towards the forgotten potentials for pure
abstraction in electronic sound. The opening thirteen minute
track 'Electric Garden' is a subtle and spare masterpiece.

This album was originally released on CD by Spalax as 'Ballet
Statique' in 1992 with five bonus tracks taken from the 1981 album
'Electrocon'. This edition on Captain Trips is remastered
(sounds slightly louder but otherwise the same), and contains three
new bonus tracks, including two later reworkings of the track 'Ballet
Statique'. Lovely mini-sleeve replica of the original vinyl, and
an illustrated fold-out sleeve. Though there's no need to rebuy
this if you have the Spalax edition, many of the people who've heard
'Con' list it among their favorite electronic albums of all time,
including me. If you're only buying one, make sure it's this
one.

Conrad Schnitzler, Con 2+ (Captain Trips Records)

The 1980 followup to Schnitzler's disorienting and beautiful
masterpiece 'Con', was, surprisingly, a 12-inch disco single for RCA
Records. Though 'Disco' might remain a relative term, the four
tracks on the 'Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal' EP are straight up danceable
electropop. The production standard is very high, with
Schnitzler's distinct analog synth solos filling in all the details
between his chanted, vocodered & filtered vocals.  Released
near the beginning of Neue Deutsche Welle and the rise of Germanic
electropop that signalled a clean break from the tranced out cosmic
music of the 70's, Schnitzler might have been the last person people
expected to bridge the gap without missing a beat, but he did it:
this 12" EP is definitely of interest to fans of contemporary
works by D.A.F., Pyrolator or Palais Schaumberg, but shows the
distinctive fingerprints of a ten year veteran of the electric music
lab. This Captain Trips release fills out the disc with a
previously unreleased album recorded in 1981, 'Consequenz 3',
featuring an assortment of primitive synth sounds laid over loud,
live, real drums -- while some of the tracks sound somewhat
unfinished, the sounds remain bizarre and there are enough strange
twists in the tracks to take the unprepared listener by surprise.
The main attraction here, however, is of course the re-release of the
long unavailable 'Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal'. Captain Trips has
added a lyric sheet in English and Japanese, as well as an illustrated
fold-out insert.

Conrad Schnitzler, Con 3 (Captain Trips Records)

Schnitzler's 1981 'Con 3' follows on from the previous year's 12"
EP with an entire album of electropop for Germany's Sky Records.
The sounds are still strange, but the cleanly recorded spoken word
vocals are now front and center in the mix. There are many
people who will prefer his slightly bent electropop songs to the purer
abstractions of his earlier (and later) work -- and for those who love
'Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal', this is definitely the album length
followup. Perhaps slightly less strange, but still, with the
occasional track like 'Wer Sind Wir Denn', hardly normal. The CD
adds six tracks of instrumental remixes of the album's tracks -- very,
very minimal.

Conrad Schnitzler, Electrocon (Captain Trips Records)

The original CD release of 'Con' (as 'Ballet Statique') on Spalax
Records in 1992 also featured five previously unreleased bonus tracks
that were just as beautiful as the album itself, each one exactly four
minutes long. Here at last is a release of the entire album they
were pulled from, also recorded at Peter Baumann's Paragon Studio from
1980 to 1981. If you're a fan of 'Con', this is certainly a great
followup purchase. And this one definitely has my favorite
cover of the entire series -- the man himself, dressed to ride
complete with robotic helmet, posing atop a metal sculpture,
brandishing his binaural head-shaped microphone at the end of a long
pole. Thanking you!

2006 interview in The Wire:

http://thewire.co.uk/articles/7175/

Thanking you!

Love this:

"I’m not soft eyes. I’m eyes with bananas in. I have Xs in my eyes."

nice piece on con by randy jones:

http://madronalabs.com/topics/987-conrad-schnitzler-remembered

“Ja! I’m always trying to make sounds that aren’t normal. To avoid sounds that you can make real music with.”

Love this guy.

Conrad Schnitzler tribute on WFMU right now (3-6 PM EST) with special guest GenKen, who knew him well:

http://wfmu.org

they're playing 'Gelb' right now

I'm told they'll soon be live mixing material from the cassette concerts--it's like a con-cert but on WFMU

thanks for the heads up! listening. d-_-b

^^

my epic 3000-word obituary on Schnitzler will be up at frieze.com, either later today or tomorrow--i'll post the link when it's up

here's the link to the obituary i wrote, for frieze:

http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/conrad-schnitzler/

The Live '72 double LP on Further is excellent.

you are some kind of saint, geeta

amazing work

you are sweet, milton

just heard from seidel, who told me that he's printing it out and delivering it to con's wife

Great piece

yeah!

thanks, guys!

Dave weighs in at the Stranger, great headline:

http://lineout.thestranger.com/lineout/archives/2011/08/24/the-longest-article-on-the-internet-about-conrad-schnitzler

finally got around to reading your article, geeta. really loved it.

thanks, alan.

i've been getting a lot of letters from people asking me to post the 30-page-long Con email that I refer to in the article. wondering if that's a good idea.

i mean, it is long. there is certainly interesting stuff in there. most of it is in german. but perhaps i should wait before doing that. for one thing, it'd be good to translate the whole thing from german to english. but also, to interpret it, try to give it some context, instead of just dropping it on my website as a giant mass of data. for example, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there about his thoughts on various sculptors (jean arp, alexander archipenko, etc); a lot of stuff about rhythm, and his concept of how rhythm works, and about painting (especially jackson pollock)

i was going to say ... and i was going to ask whether it's enough for a 33 1/3 or something that length?

not that they'd do a 33 1/3 on ballet statique or whatever

ha ha! i think writing one 33 1/3 book was enough for me!

if i wrote a 120-page book about something like this, something that meant a lot to me that was a bit too 'out-there' for yr average american publishing house--and just distributed it myself, as a PDF, would people be into it? perhaps i could get people to send donations? if i could get people to agree to pay $10 up front (perhaps for a 'signed, numbered' copy that's printed on nice paper?) i could probably afford to do this.

i would