Interview conducted circa 1989, source unknown.

For many years Klaus Schulze was one of the most influential European musicians in regards to synthesizers and their role in contemporary music. He is not only famous for his work with the legendary band Tangerine Dream, but also for his many experimental solo projects.

His first meeting with Alphaville came about by coincidence. A friend of his, a studio technician, had something to do at the band's Lunapark Studio and Klaus accompanied him. The two hours with the band there turned into a year-and-a-half that he spent in Berlin instead of in his own remote studio in the woods near the small town of Celle.

Enthusiastic about his experience with Alphaville, Klaus reveals more about their collaboration:

"We had a couple of hours and Alphaville were busy mixing a track. I said hey, if you're in a hurry I'll do it for you right away and Marian said, all right, go ahead.

"It was meant to be a joke, but I tried it out anyway just for fun. I thought, a pop group like this, they maybe working on a single for two or three weeks. Well, we needed eight weeks just for the first track. And all of a sudden I realised that these people had more in their heads than I had thought. So we started with this track and then there were long discussions about how it should be structured. I realised that this group was very exacting, almost perfectionistic.

"We finally got along so well that we just said, let's really get started and see this through. And then it was lots of fun. The most interesting thing about this production was that the group itself decreed that we didn't necessarily have to do everything like they were used to in the past. We wanted to do what was fun for us and what we really believed in. Thus all possibilities were completely open. It didn't matter either when a couple of tracks were thrown out.

"It was my idea to include more elements of live music, for example on the track 'Summer Rain' on which we used lots of live instruments. I think you can probably hear that it is somehow more alive than all the sample stuff you hear so much of nowadays. The development of vocals also became increasingly dominant, in this case. I think we created a pleasant symbiosis that contributes a lot to this album's live feeling."

In the meantime, the new album, co-produced by Klaus Schulze and Alphaville, is finished. Titled The Breathtaking Blue it is set for release here with their first single, 'Romeos.'