War & Peace Quote by Klaus Schulze

Schulze is doing something rarer than a rock-star gripe: he’s pushing back against a ready-made morality play that critics love because it flatters their own role. His target isn’t just “bad coverage,” but the lazy confidence of journalists who don’t understand the music yet still turn it into a legible story for readers. With Schulze’s kind of work - long-form electronic composition, structurally patient, often indifferent to verse-chorus hooks - the easiest angle is to reduce it to personality and conflict. If you can’t describe the harmonic logic of a 30-minute sequence, you can always describe an enemy.

That’s the subtext of “the usual trap”: the press manufactures an archetype, the suffering artist locked in combat with cartoonish “evil companies and managers.” It’s a narrative that sells because it’s emotionally intuitive and politically tidy. It also absolves the writer from engaging the hard part: what the music is doing, how it’s doing it, why it matters beyond biography. Schulze’s complaint lands as a defense of complexity. He’s not denying that industry exploitation exists; he’s rejecting the reflex that turns every musician into a victim-hero and every commercial actor into a villain, regardless of the actual relationships at play.

Context matters: Schulze came up in a scene where experimental music was routinely misunderstood or patronized, especially by mainstream outlets hungry for digestible categories. His irritation is aimed at the translation layer - the cultural intermediaries who turn difficult art into a familiar plot, then call it interpretation.