Wealth & Money Quote by Klaus Schulze

There is a particular sting in how matter-of-fact this sounds: not a grand tragedy, just the blunt hangover after “huge… success.” Schulze is talking like someone who’s already done the glamorous part (the music, the acclaim) and is now staring at the spreadsheet. The line’s power sits in that collision between myth and infrastructure. Electronic music history often gets told as lone-genius futurism, but here the future is derailed by something painfully old-fashioned: cash flow, management, and the fragility of small institutions.

The mention of “IC” and “Ideal success” (his work with/around the German label and scene ecosystem of the era) hints at a broader 1970s pattern: niche, forward-leaning art generating sudden revenue without the corporate scaffolding to protect it. The subtext is less “we were robbed” than “we weren’t built to handle winning.” “When I came back” suggests distance and delayed discovery, the classic touring/recording bubble where artists are last to hear the bad news. That gap produces the emotional whiplash: success feels like a shared ascent until you realize the machinery underneath has been misrun.

Schulze’s phrasing is also quietly accusatory without naming names. “All the much money… was gone” reads like restraint, the kind you use when you don’t want to litigate friendships in public. The final “I was very upset” is almost comically understated, which makes it land harder: not melodrama, just the exhausted realization that artistic momentum can be kneecapped by someone else’s incompetence, or by a scene’s naïve trust in its own idealism.