Sunday, August 30, 2020

The Wagnerian Influences on Klaus Schulze



Klaus Schulze is one of the most prominent figures of German Electronic Music.
For years he used the alias "Richard Wahnfried" ( "Richard" by Wagner's name and "Wahnfried" by Wagner's Villa in Beyreuth).

The following statement in taken from the liner notes of his TIMEWIND album released in 1975.

"Timewind was my fifth records and the first one with a clear reference to my Bayreuth hero Richard Wagner, which can be seen by looking at the titles. These songs were classic home recordings, albeit rather primitive ones. In Berlin I lived in the...I could have almost said "Bayreuth Street"! It was Swabian Street and I lived in a former barbershop at the time"


Here is the full TIMEWIND album:

Track list:
I. Bayreuth Return
II. Wahnfried 1883


"In this tribute to Richard Wagner, Klaus Schulze demonstrates that electronic music can be far more than the cold clinical sounds usually associated with the genre"
TROUSER PRESS/USA , November 1977

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Sunday, August 16, 2020

The Philosophy of Nietzsche - An Antidote against Modern Europe






"As far as Europe is Christian, it is (in the ethical and spiritual sense) Jewish;
as far as Europe is moral, it is Jewish. Almost all European ethics are rooted in Judaism. All champions of religious or irreligious Christian morality, from Augustine to Rousseau, Kant and Tolstoy, were Jews by choice in the spiritual sense; Nietzsche is the only non-Jewish, the only pagan ethicist in Europe. The most prominent and the foremost proponents of Christian ideas which are present in its modern reincarnation are pacifism and socialism, and these are Jewish."

Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, Praktischer Idealismus, 1925.


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Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Year Without a Summer, Famine and a Writter's Contest




 
In the shadow of the recent covid19 lockdowns,  house restrictions and world pandemic its intresting to see how famous writters of the past reacted to more or less similar situations. The result was the creation of marvelous novels, poems and stories.



"The extraordinary worldwide meteorological events of 1816 resulted in that year being christened the "year without a summer". A close succesion of major volcanic eruption occured across the globe from 1811-1814. This series was then capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies - The largest known eruption in over 1,300 years. Occuring during the middle of the Dalton Minumum ( a period of unusual low solar activity), it added to an existing cooling trend that had been periodically ongoing since 1350. The summer of 1816 saw average global temperatures by 0.4 - 0.7 celsius (0.07 - 1.3 F), resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere and the worst famine of the 19th century in many other parts of the world. In July the incessant rainfall of an unusually cold, wet summer obliges Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and other friends to remain indoors for the balance of their Swiss holiday. As a form of entertainment they conducted a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Mary Shelley to write the novel Frankenstein and Lord Byron to write the short story "Fragment of a Novel." In addition, Lord Byron also wrote a poem, "Darkness," at the same time. Polidori would later use Byron's "Fragment" as the basis for his tale The Vampyre (1819), which was the first vampire story in the English Language."

Taken from James Pontolillo's THE BLACK SUN UNVEILED book (Chapter: Mary Shelley and the Black Sun 1826
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