Richard Wahnfried - Time Actor

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Richard Wahnfried - Time Actor

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I'm not sure why Klaus preferred to do this album under the pseudonym of Richard Wahnfried, but my guess is that "Wahnfried" is more of a collective name for the entire project - on here, Arthur Brown, carried over from Dune, becomes a full-fledged participant, and the two are also joined by keyboardist Vincent Crane, Brown's old colleague (from Crazy World of A.B.), and ex-Atomic Rooster founding member too. And the resulting album is seriously different from standard Schulze material, even if that doesn't necessarily mean better.
Here, Schulze turns away from his usual multi-layered "sonic panoramas" and determines to make a 'New Age symphony' of sorts, dedicated to the concept of time and age, with complex metaphysical lyrics (or, rather, texts, because at times it sounds more like Kjorkegaard than any rock poet) vocalized by Brown. The resulting product sounds, curiously, not unlike some of Brown's work with Kingdom Come in the early Seventies - which, in turn, sounded a lot like some of Klaus Schulze's contemporary work, which basically means the two guys worked for each other a long time before they really met. However, it's more like a cross between the schizophrenic dynamics of Brown and the majestic statics of Schulze, and not in a particularly good way.

What I mean is: 'Dynamics' means that the tunes have sharp, punchy rhythms, as well as vocal 'quasi-melodies' that do develop in some way as time goes by, and 'statics' means that the musical theme regularly stays the same throughout the entire composition. And the album is goddamn long, although not a double one (still goes over 50 minutes); however, there's only one eighteen-minute suite, probably because it'd be hard to stress Brown to do these lengthy twenty-minute half improvisations one by one, or for some other reason…

…but anyway, the results don't impress me. The novelty factor isn't that huge; compared to Brown's own work, Time Actor is pretty timid, and compared to Schulze's own work, the only innovation is that Klaus decided to do something vaguely different. But on its own, it's just boring. The nine-minute 'Time Actor' just has one rhythm, and one lengthy, lengthy, lengthy philosophical monolog on the nature of time, occasionally transformed into a dialog when Brown seems to battle with himself over some particularly tricky aspects. I do admit the rhythm is a solid techno one, and probably one of the first true techno rhythms to make its appearance, but it's not music to dance to, really. And it's immediately followed by the even longer 'Time Factory', and the only differences are that the rhythm is a little different and Brown sings more than he speaks.

And pretty much the same thing happens on every other track. The intense rhythmic pulsation, the mystically tinged vocals, and rudimentary musical themes that either don't develop at all or develop extremely slowly. Perhaps the only major exception is 'Distorted Emission', which actually has something vaguely resembling a crescendo at its heart. Oh, and the final track, 'Time Echoes', is similar to what it bills itself as: no rhythm, just eight minutes of spooky pseudo-Gregorian chanting over isolated bits and tips of synth atmospheres.

All in all, I just don't understand the goal here. It's clearly a 'project' in the sense that I abhor the most: a "project" as a "let's get together and expand on this funny idea I had tonight, no matter what actually comes out of it" thing. So Schulze, Brown and Crane got together and decided to make a concept album about time. So what? Is this stuff pretending to be beautiful? Or deep? Hell, I'll be the first to admit some parts of it do sound cool. The combination of mad rhythmics, stern vocals and metaphysical lyrics works, but rather as a goofy thought-provoking moment than something so serious and solid you could base a whole damn long album on it. Cut each and every one of these tracks down to two minutes, intersperse them with some Kraftwerk-style hooks and you got yourself a good electronic product. As it is, I just don't have the force to sit through this twice. It's not atmospheric enough for me.