Kurtz Mindfields honors Klaus Schulze with live Berlin School synth tribute

Kurtz Mindfields turns his For Klaus Schulze performance into something more useful than a straight salute. It is a live Berlin School lesson in motion, built from sequencer pulse, gradual timbral change and real-time layering instead of museum-piece imitation. That is the right move for a tribute to Klaus Schulze, who died on April 26, 2022, at 74, after a career that began in Berlin, included an early stint with Tangerine Dream, and stretched across more than 60 solo albums.

The key thing here is method. Jean-Luc Briançon, the man behind Kurtz Mindfields, has been working under that alias after earlier runs as founder of the Lyon label Nuage 7 and leader of the nu-jazz group Abigoba in the early 2000s. By 2011, he had returned to the first inspirations that shaped him, and this performance shows exactly what that means in practice. The piece does not try to counterfeit Schulze. It builds a Schulze-shaped space the hard way, by letting patterns breathe, overlap and mutate until the structure feels earned.

The rig tells the same story. Briançon used a SynthR10 as master stereo sequencer, polyphonic pads and effects source, with a Korg Keystage 61 for polyaftertouch, which suits the music’s emphasis on live expression. A Waldorf Zarembourg handled strings with internal phaser. Vpiano fed MIDI keyboards that drove an EMU Longboard Solina sound and a P800 Behringer arpeggio-noised pad. For solo lines, an NRsynth Retro One ran through an effects pedalboard loaded with delay, flanger and phaser. Korg Electribe 2 sequencing and Roland sustain pedals rounded out a setup that feels closer to an operating table than a preset recall bank.

That combination is why the performance lands for vintage synth readers. Berlin School always depended on the interaction between machine repetition and human touch, and Briançon keeps that balance intact. The sequencer drives, but the filters, pedals and aftertouch steer the atmosphere. The result teaches as much as it honors: how to build tension with a long loop, how to change color without changing tempo, and how to make a live patch evolve without ever breaking the trance. Bandcamp shows Briançon has been circling this territory for years, with Homage to Klaus Schulze from April 30, 2022, Desert Winds (for Klaus Schulze) from August 5, 2022, Contemporary NetWork (for Klaus Schulze) on Les Voyages Electroniques, Vol. 2 from August 1, 2023, and Landing on the Moog from February 15, 2026, which also salutes Pete Namlook’s Dark Side of the Moog. This is not a one-off nod; it is a working vocabulary still being refined in public.