Overview
“Moondawn” is the sixth solo album by Klaus Schulze, a German composer and musician known as an electronic music pioneer, born in Berlin in 1947, who had worked as a member of German electronic music/krautrock groups, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, and worked as a solo artist since the 1970s.
Commentary
The album was recorded in 1976 by Schulze (Moog, ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, EMS Synthi-A, Farfisa Syntorchestra, Crumar keyboards, Sequenzer Synthanorma 3-12) and Harald Grosskopf (drums), and was released by Brain Records, Germany.
“Moondawn” is his first album to use the Moog synthesizer. With this album, he made a transition from his early drone-based style to the spacy and ambient style based on synthesizers, which is called “Berlin School”.
“Moondawn” is one of the classical masterpieces in the genre of electronic music. Its meditative soundscapes pioneered ambient and new-age music, and its sequencer-driven rhythmic sounds predicted techno and trance music of the later years.
The original LP contains two tracks longer than 20 minutes: “Floating” (27:15) and “Mindphaser” (25:22).
“Floating” is a hypnotic track beginning with “The Lord’s Prayer” spoken in Arabic.
When the album was reissued on CD in the early 1990s, Schulze added mellotron and some reverb to cover tape hiss, and made the tracks a bit shorter than on the original LP.
The CD released by Manikin Records in 1995 and the CD released by Revisited Rec. in 2005 were based on the original master tapes.
The 1995 Manikin Records reissue included the bonus track “Supplement” (25:22), an alternate version of “Mindphaser”.
The 2005 Revisited Rec. reissue included the bonus track “Floating Sequence” (21:11), an alternate version of “Floating”.
