Art & Creativity Quote by Klaus Schulze

Schulze’s line lands like a gentle correction to a pop-myth we’ve been trained to applaud: the heroic artist founding a label to wrest back autonomy from faceless executives. He’s saying, almost with a shrug, that this narrative doesn’t apply. “Control” wasn’t a prize he won by building infrastructure; it was the baseline condition of his work. That matters because it reframes what independence means in an era that treats ownership as the central drama of creativity.

The intent is clarifying and a little deflating. Schulze isn’t denying the value of IC or Inteam; he’s denying the romantic rationale. If you read between the lines, he’s also protecting his legacy from being absorbed into a tidy business-story arc. For an artist whose name is tied to long-form electronic composition, self-contained studio worlds, and a kind of solitary authorship, “control” is less a legal status than an aesthetic necessity: the ability to let time stretch, to ignore radio formats, to choose texture over hooks.

Context does the rest. Schulze came up in a German scene where the studio was an instrument and the market was often playing catch-up. For many of those composers, the gatekeepers weren’t so much labels as technology, distribution, and the public’s attention span. Starting a label, then, reads less like a liberation movement and more like logistics: keeping catalogs available, curating releases, setting terms for reissues.

The subtext is quiet confidence, almost irritation at being misread. He’s not asking to be seen as “empowered.” He’s insisting he was never disempowered to begin with.