THE MUSIC

What is the Berlin School?

The Berlin School is electronic music built on the sequencer, a machine that plays a short run of notes over and over. Above that pulse, synthesizers and Mellotrons lay down long chords and slow melodies, and the sound changes a little at a time: a filter opens, the pattern steps up a tone, a new layer drifts in. A piece often fills a whole side of an LP, and in concert it can run for an hour.

The style began in the underground of West Berlin at the end of the 1960s, with Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Agitation Free, Conrad Schnitzler and their circle, and found its classic form in the mid-1970s. From the 1980s a second generation in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and America took up the music too, on cassettes, small labels and fan-run festivals, and today it is made all over the world, from Finland to Argentina, by more musicians than at any time in its history.

What it sounds like

The sequencer is the heart of it. In the classic music of the mid-1970s the sequence, often eight evenly pulsing notes, does the work that drums and bass do in rock. The musicians picked its notes so that they could improvise over it in either major or minor, which often meant leaving out the third, the note of the chord that decides between the two. Over fifteen or twenty minutes the pattern is widened, narrowed and transposed, while held chords, long glides and fragments of melody move above it.

The harmony mostly stands still: a few notes of a minor-key melody over a chord held for ten seconds at a time. The models came from new music more than from rock. Thomas Kessler, the Swiss composer who ran the studio where several of the bands rehearsed, played the young musicians records by the American minimalists, "and that triggered something", he said. They knew the music of György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and La Monte Young too. Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke heard the same thing in Indian raga and Balinese temple music: very small changes of pitch and rhythm inside a continuous stream of sound.

Much of the music began as improvisation, and much of it leaves room for the listener. Klaus Schulze often played without a strong melody so that listeners could supply their own; music, the sleeve of his Mirage says, is "the background to a mental picture". Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 is an hour on two chords. Over the 1970s the balance moved toward composition, and later scenes changed the accent again: the Dutch musicians of the 1990s wrote more melodic music that reviewers called the Netherlands School, while the British band Radio Massacre International improvised everything and treated the old style as "a vocabulary, not as a musical form".

The machines

The Berlin School was shaped by its instruments, and much of its early music by the fight with them. Before they could afford synthesizers the musicians made do. Schulze recorded Irrlicht on a modified organ and an amplifier wired into itself, and Ash Ra Tempel's worn tape echo served on stage as a kind of metronome. The first synthesizers on Berlin stages were small EMS machines from London.

The classic sound came from the big modular Moog. Christopher Franke found the sequencer of a Moog system at Berlin's Hansa studios and bought it in 1973; Schulze bought Florian Fricke's in 1975. The machines drifted out of tune as they warmed up and had to be played by hand in real time. Mellotrons, whose recorded tapes gave the music its choirs and strings, sat beside them, and Berlin firms such as Projekt Elektronik built sequencers to the musicians' needs. By 1977 Tangerine Dream toured America with what it called an "electronic city" in racks on wheels.

In the 1980s the instruments went digital: Schulze's Dig It (1980) was the first digital electronic LP on the German market. In the 1990s, the British synthesist Ian Boddy remembered, you could find old modular synthesizers thrown out in dumpsters, and musicians began to use them again: Mark Shreeve bought a large Moog modular in about 1993, Steve Roach made Skeleton Keys (2015) on a modular system with no keyboard at all, and many of today's musicians work entirely in software, or mix the two.

West Berlin, 1967 to 1973

West Berlin in the late 1960s was an island, half a city ringed by the Wall. Kessler thought that was one reason its young bands wanted to break out of every boundary: "Since this was physically quite difficult, one tried to break out at least in the music genres." Göttsching described the city's postwar cultural life as a vacuum that his generation had to fill with something of its own.

The scene had a stage and a rehearsal room. The Zodiak Free Arts Lab, which Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Boris Schaak opened in 1968 on the ground floor of the Schaubühne theater building, had rooms painted black and white and put on loud, free and often chaotic nights. Kessler's publicly funded Electronic Beat Studio, in a school basement in Wilmersdorf, let Tangerine Dream, Agitation Free and Ash Ra Tempel rehearse for free. Kessler ran it as a practice room where ideas were shared, and because everyone used the same small room, the musicians knew each other, swapped members and borrowed each other's ideas.

The bands went in different directions. Edgar Froese, an art student, founded Tangerine Dream in 1967; its first album, Electronic Meditation (1970), made with Klaus Schulze on drums and Schnitzler on cello and a handcart full of kitchen junk, was still close to free rock and noise.

Schulze left to drum for Ash Ra Tempel, with the guitarist Manuel Göttsching and the bassist Hartmut Enke. The band's concerts could run for hours "without talking or without stopping", and in 1972 it recorded Seven Up in Switzerland with Timothy Leary. Agitation Free, the busiest band in Berlin beside Tangerine Dream, played 45- to 60-minute improvisations, worked with avant-garde composers on John Cage's HPSCHD and toured the Middle East for the Goethe-Institut, bringing home the field recordings of Malesch (1972). Schnitzler, Roedelius and Dieter Moebius formed Kluster, from which Cluster grew. Schulze turned to keyboards and made Irrlicht (1972). Tangerine Dream, now with Franke and Peter Baumann, moved into electronics with Alpha Centauri (1971), the beatless Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973). "When those first Berlin albums came out," Michael Hoenig of Agitation Free said later, "there were no terms by which to judge them."

Their label was Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's Ohr, which sold the music as "Kosmische Musik", cosmic music. In February 1973 Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and Schulze played "An Evening with Kosmische Musik" in Paris to about 1,500 people a night, and France took the music to heart before Germany did. That summer the musicians broke with Kaiser over money, contracts and drugs, and in December Richard Branson signed Tangerine Dream to Virgin in London.

The sequencer years, 1974 to 1979

In 1974 the music found its pulse. Tangerine Dream's Phaedra, recorded at Virgin's Manor studio in Oxfordshire, was built on the Moog sequencer; its title track began as a rehearsal that the engineer happened to record. It reached No. 15 in Britain with almost no airplay, and Rubycon (1975) went to No. 10. The band played cathedrals from Reims to York Minster, scored William Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977) and toured America with lasers.

Schulze made the sequencer a solo instrument. Timewind (1975) won the Grand Prix International du Disque in France, and Moondawn (1976), with the drummer Harald Grosskopf, is the album with which the style, in David Stubbs's words, "would become codified". Göttsching took the idea to the guitar on Inventions for Electric Guitar, recorded in 1974, and then to keyboards as Ashra on New Age of Earth (1976). Michael Hoenig made Departure from the Northern Wasteland (1978) on Schulze's eight-track. In Paris, Jean-Michel Jarre recorded Oxygène (1976) at home; turned down by most labels, it sold 1.5 million copies in Europe within a year.

In West Germany the welcome was cooler. West German critics met the music with rejection or bafflement while it sold abroad; by 1975 German groups outsold every other continental European act on the American import market. "It's a hard, cold sound," an American wholesaler said, "but people go for it as if they were hypnotized." The first followers were already at work: Wolfgang Riechmann, Michael Bundt and Adelbert von Deyen in Germany, and Larry Fast's Synergy in America.

Where the name came from

The musicians did not choose it. "Berlin School" came from outside, in the American keyboard press and in record marketing at the end of the 1970s; in 1980 a German handbook noted, with a raised eyebrow, that the Berlin groups were being sold in the United States as the "Berlin School of Electronic Music". As a style, the name settled on the sequencer music of the mid-1970s.

From inside, the music was Kosmische Musik, the phrase Tangerine Dream used while recording Alpha Centauri; Froese later called the record company's use of it "absolute nonsense". The British press filed the music under Krautrock, the French called it musique planante, floating music, and in America it found a home as space music. In the mid-1980s German musicians working in the sequencer style spoke of a "New Berlin School". Among fans the music is often just EM, electronic music.

The same 1980 handbook drew the line that is still drawn today between Berlin and Düsseldorf: Kraftwerk, in Düsseldorf, put the rhythm first, while the Berlin groups built long, floating, sequenced spaces.

The 1980s

The new decade brought digital instruments, film scores and new audiences. Tangerine Dream scored Thief, Risky Business and Legend. On 31 January 1980 the band played the Palast der Republik in East Berlin, the first West German rock group to play in the GDR. In the GDR, Reinhard Lakomy, who had heard the band secretly on West German television, remembered being "totally speechless", and the band Pond became the first in the GDR to play electronic music live. In 1983 Schulze played to more than 80,000 people in Poland, where Marek Biliński's Ogród Króla Świtu became the breakthrough of Polish electronic music. In Soviet Estonia Sven Grünberg made Hingus (1981) on synthesizers built for him. In August 1989 Schulze, Bernd Kistenmacher, Pond and Servi played an open-air festival in Dresden for the East German youth radio. Three months later the Wall was open.

Göttsching recorded E2-E4 in a single session in December 1981. New York's Paradise Garage played it, and in 1989 the Italian hit "Sueño Latino" was built on it. The record became a cornerstone of the Balearic and chill-out scenes. In America Peter Baumann founded the label Private Music, the record business called much of this music new age, and Steve Roach's Structures from Silence (1984) became the classic of American space music.

The second generation

Meanwhile a generation raised on the classic records began making the music itself. With almost no help from radio, the press or the record industry, it built a scene of its own, making the music, releasing it and playing it live, and Schulze and Göttsching sometimes played its festivals.

In Britain it began on cassettes, which the mail-order shop Lotus sold around the world as seriously as a Tangerine Dream album. Ian Boddy and Mark Shreeve played the first UK Electronica festival in 1983, and when the Sheffield band Wavestar played it in 1985, "300 people chased us up the stairs" for their tapes. In the 1990s Shreeve's band Redshift, Radio Massacre International and Node, the band of the producer Flood, brought back the big analog modular and played planetariums, art galleries and the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. Boddy's label DiN and David Wright's AD Music followed, and from 2001 the Hampshire Jam gave the British scene a yearly gathering.

The strongest scene of all was in the Netherlands. The fan club KLEM, founded in 1979, put on its first KLEMdag in 1988, hoping for 80 people; more than 200 came, and Ron Boots and the Belgian Patrick Kosmos played "on four tables, shoved together with a cloth on top of it". The festival grew to draw up to 2,000 fans a year to Nijmegen and lives on as E-Live. Boots's label Groove became the scene's shop window, with more than 5,000 titles in its catalog today. A second Dutch club, Alfa Centauri, ran a composition contest that brought back Gert Emmens, who had made no electronic music for more than a decade, and young musicians such as Remy came out of the same scene.

In Germany the WDR radio show Schwingungen played two hours of electronic music a week from 1984 to 1995, and its listeners voted every year for their favorites. When the station dropped it they fought "a fantastic battle" of letters to save it, then founded a fan club that became the association schallwende. In Berlin, Kistenmacher, Mario Schönwälder and his label Manikin made the New Berlin School, alongside Software, Robert Schroeder, Detlef Keller, the Dutch drummer Bas Broekhuis and labels such as Spheric Music. In America the radio shows Star's End and Hearts of Space and the Philadelphia concert series The Gatherings, from 1992, gave space music a home.

It was a scene of small money and long distances. In 1993 Boddy pressed 1,000 copies of a CD and needed to sell 300 to break even. "The hard part," he said, "is selling the bloody things!" It also argued with itself about copying the classic records. Gert Emmens admitted that the charge of "attic musicians" copying Schulze and Tangerine Dream had "a kernel of truth", and Boddy came to think that many were "stuck in 1973".

Around the world

France had Jarre and Richard Pinhas, and gave Schulze his first solo concert. Spain had Michel Huygen's Neuronium, whose Quasar 2C361 (1977) was the first record of cosmic music made there. Italy had a cosmic music of its own in the 1970s around Franco Battiato, and today releases more Berlin School records than the Netherlands. In Japan the press spoke of "cosmic music" early on, and Kitaro first got to know the synthesizer through Schulze. Belgium gave the scene Patrick Kosmos, Venja and Vidna Obmana. In Mexico Jorge Reyes made electronic music with pre-Hispanic instruments and recorded with Steve Roach, and in Buenos Aires Ernesto Romeo built a studio around Moog modular systems and their sequencers. Australia's radio program Ultima Thule has played ambient and atmospheric music since 1989.

Concerts and places

Berlin School concerts were long, dark and often improvised. The musicians sat behind their machines in near darkness and rarely spoke. Schulze played alone behind a wall of instruments and mixed his own sound, so that he could change course if the audience didn't like something. Audiences learned a new way of listening; Der Spiegel described them sitting in overfilled halls "as if paralyzed", sinking into their own thoughts.

The music went to unusual places. At Reims Cathedral in December 1974 the nave sent a bass note back with a delay of 6.3 seconds, so the concert had to be "100 per cent improvised, not just musically, but acoustically too". Later scenes found their own forms: Robert Rich's Sleep Concerts, meant to be heard while drifting between waking and sleep; The Gatherings, where listeners could lie down on blankets at the back of a Philadelphia church; and the Ricochet Gathering, which brought musicians together to improvise, unrehearsed, in swamps, deserts and on islands.

The Berlin School today

More than 1,700 acts have released over 12,000 albums tagged "berlin school" on Bandcamp, where the number each year rose from 58 in 2008 to 1,402 in 2025. Britain now releases more of it than Germany, with the United States, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain after them. Some acts release albums by the hundred: the Dutch project Phrozenlight has more than 550 tagged albums, and Ken Martin in Spain more than 350.

Edgar Froese died in 2015, and Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, Mark Shreeve and Manuel Göttsching in 2022. Tangerine Dream carries on under Thorsten Quaeschning, with the violinist Hoshiko Yamane and the pianist Paul Frick, and its album Raum (2022) was its most successful since the 1980s. Others of the first generation are still making records. Peter Baumann released Nightfall in 2025, which he called a modern take on the classic style, and Harald Grosskopf, whose 1980 album Synthesist was rediscovered by a younger generation, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius are still at work too.

A third generation, raised on Bandcamp and streaming, now works beside musicians who began in the 1980s and 1990s. The British producer State Azure improvises for hours on modular synthesizers in weekly livestreams. The Finnish keyboardist Kebu plays almost only analog synthesizers and has twice won the German fans' Schallwelle prize as best international artist. The Wuppertal musician Martin Stürtzer has given a monthly "Home Concert" on YouTube since 2020, the American modular synthesist Lisa Bella Donna has more than a dozen Berlin School releases on Bandcamp, and the Dutch project Tectonia played E-Live in 2025. On Spotify, British acts from the wider electronic scene such as Pye Corner Audio and Craven Faults reach far bigger audiences than most of the scene's own names.

The scene's institutions carry on: festivals such as E-Day and E-Live in the Netherlands, the Electronic Circus in Germany, and Awakenings, the Hampshire Jam and Diode in Britain; labels such as Groove, DiN, MellowJet, Spheric Music and Spotted Peccary; and radio shows and podcasts from Hearts of Space and Star's End to Ultima Thule and Journeys to the Infinite. Film and television have brought a new public: the composers of Stranger Things named Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer and The Keep among their influences, and Hans Zimmer used a piece of Schulze's in his score for Dune.

Where it led

The pulsing sequencer of the Berlin School can be heard in new age and space music, ambient house and ambient techno, and trance. It can be heard too in the electronic film scores of the 1980s and what they inspired, from John Carpenter to Cliff Martinez's Drive and the synthwave of the 2010s. Alex Paterson of The Orb named Tangerine Dream, Schulze and Eberhard Schoener among his influences. The musicians also helped build the tools: Tangerine Dream gave Steinberg ideas for its Cubase software, and the East German Reinhard Lakomy helped develop the program that became Logic. Today a step sequencer for modular synthesizers is named "Berlin School".

Where to start

A path through the music, one record per stop, from West Berlin to today:

Hear it

Our DJ sets move between the classic records and the music being made today, with the full tracklist in the comments of every show.

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