Ballet Statique

German electro pioneer Conrad Schnitzler had been a prime mover on the nascent German electronic scene for some time—as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster and a founder of Berlin’s Zodiac Free Arts Lab—but Con, his first widely distributed solo release, marked his emergence from the hermetic Berlin underworld and onto the international scene. While Schnitzler’s earliest self-released solo albums (1973’s Rot and 1974’s Blau) were harsh, sometimes-inhospitable affairs, Con found him working in a much more atmospheric mode. He used a more luxuriant, less forbidding set of tones and even toyed with the odd melodic flourish. Some of this might be due to the presence of Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann, whose production work gives compositions like “Electric Garden” a spacious, almost romantic feel. Ballet Statique remains a work of spare, sometimes unsettling electronic minimalism, but its slightly mellower textures may make it an ideal entry point into Schnitzler’s remarkable but often-intimidating oeuvre.