How a Berlin drummer created a new logic of electronic composition—and prepared the musical ground for ambient, techno, and trance.
There is a familiar way of telling the history of electronic music: first came the inventors of machines, then the synthesizer pioneers, and finally the producers who turned those machines into dance music. Klaus Schulze does not fit comfortably into that sequence. He did not invent the synthesizer, did not write pop songs about technology, and did not produce trance in the modern club sense. His more important achievement was less visible: he discovered a new way for music to exist in time.
Eduard Artemyev did not treat the machine as the opposite of humanity. From the ANS synthesizer to Solaris, Mirror and Stalker, he used electronics to search for the hidden life inside human memory.
The supersaw is one of those sounds that people recognize before they know its name. It appears in the moment when a trance track stops feeling like a sequence of notes and turns into a wall of light: wide chords, a rising melody, and a sense that the room has suddenly become much larger.
Berlin School was never a building or a formal academy. It was a way of making electronic music: long sequences, unstable machines, slowly changing harmony and the sensation of travelling without moving.
Trance has been with us for decades, yet it still sounds more futuristic than most music made today.
That may seem strange. The classic elements are familiar: repeating arpeggios, long builds, wide pads, synthetic basslines, melodies that disappear and return. None of this is new. But trance was never futuristic because of a particular synthesizer or production technique. It was futuristic because of the way it understood movement.
