Dreams

Before Klaus Schulze became one of the defining figures of the Berlin School, he was a drummer — in early Tangerine Dream, in Ash Ra Tempel, in the same Krautrock formation as Dinger (Neu!) and Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. Three drummers who each became something else entirely: Dinger’s motorik pulse became techno’s foundational rhythm; Liebezeit’s groove became post-punk’s inheritance; and Schulze abandoned rhythm for side-long synthesiser pieces that ran over sequencer pulses for thirty, forty, fifty minutes at a time.

Dreams (1986) is from Schulze’s late period — not the canonical mid-’70s records (Timewind, Moondawn) that defined the Berlin School, but a later instalment of the same project. The Berlin School logic: a single sequenced pattern sustains throughout, evolving slowly, the texture and density shifting rather than the harmonic content. This is the direct ancestor of the Italians Do It Better aesthetic — the connection from Schulze through Tangerine Dream through the synthwave moment is a continuous thread, even if the explicit citations are rarely made.