Context changes everything, and the landscape that Klaus's music sits in has changed beyond recognition since I first came across it. Then you could count solo electronic synthesiser artists on the fingers of one hand. Less flamboyant than the gallic Jarre or the Greek Vangelis, and less in hock to classical traditions than the Japanese Tomita or the American Carlos, Klaus arguably had more mystique. (Not as much as fellow countryman Schnitzler, I grant you — and now we're up to six, but you knew that "fingers of one hand" stuff was hyperbole, didn't you?)
My copy of Timewind is a thick gatefold sleeve. It's the Virgin re-issue rather than an import, so at least the cost wasn't intimidating (only £2.99 in fact), but everything else was: the cover art, the graphic score on the back, the Wagnerian references, just two tracks, one of which is over half an hour long. Among the racks of other records, Klaus's seventies output had presence; its substance was tangible, visible, impressive to all senses. Heavy, you could say.
Now all music is lighter than air. The three-minute tracks feel the same as the 30-minute ones. And there are more solo electronic artists in your postcode than there were in the world thirty years ago.
Klaus has responded by going with the flow. He's switched from filter-then-publish to publish-then-filter: Wikipedia has lost count of his output, referring to "more than 60 albums (more than 140 CDs)". As I mentioned before the quality is inevitably variable. Spotify has the recent-re-issue of Timewind, where the bonus tracks double the length of a long album. The 38-minute track turns out to be just an alternate take of the 30-minute one.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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