The previous record began with a baby wearing a necklace placed around her neck by someone who loved her.
This one begins by removing nearly everything we normally use to recognize another person.
There is no face to study. No lyric telling us whose memory we have entered. No family voice emerging from an old recording. The human figure seems to disappear, replaced by electronic pulses, suspended chords, distant signals and machines repeating patterns too precisely for hands to maintain alone.
Yet it does not feel less human.
Human feeling has simply been transferred into another material.
That makes the transition from Rahill to Robert Schröder more than a jump between genres or countries. Flowers At Your Feet gathered family, migration and memory into intimate rooms. Pegasus opens the roof above those rooms and allows the listener to look into enormous imagined distances.
The necklace remains a useful image.
On the previous cover, it connected a child to her grandmother, Iran and a family history she was too young to remember consciously. Here, the connection becomes invisible. Synthesizers, sequencers and recording machines create another kind of inheritance, passing signals between human imagination and electronic systems.
One record places memory around the body.
The next releases it into space.
Robert Schröder belonged to the generation of German electronic musicians who did not treat synthesizers as convenient replacements for familiar instruments. The machinery represented a newly available territory. Oscillators, filters, tape, sequencers and handmade electronic devices could produce environments that had not existed before someone wired them together.
Schröder’s background in electronics matters because the music often feels constructed from the inside outward. He was not merely choosing sounds from a prepared menu. He understood circuits, modified equipment and built devices of his own. Technology was not standing between him and expression. Technology was part of the expression.
This helps explain why the repeated patterns never feel like empty automation.
A sequence begins, circles itself and gradually changes the space around it. Another tone enters. A low pulse develops weight. A melody appears without announcing itself as the main event. What initially seems mechanical begins to breathe through accumulation.
The machine supplies repetition.
The person decides what repetition means.
Pegasus is presented as a succession of numbered parts rather than a collection of separately named songs. That encourages the listener to hear it as one continuous movement divided into temporary regions. There are no lyrical titles telling us whether we have entered a planet, dream, laboratory or remembered future. The imagination receives fewer instructions and therefore has more work to do.
Electronic music of this kind can become a private cinema.
The sounds suggest motion without showing what is moving. They imply distance without identifying a destination. A rising tone can become a spacecraft, an opening horizon, a nervous system waking up or simply electricity passing through equipment. The listener supplies images from whatever internal archive happens to answer the signal.
Perhaps that is why the winged horse remains such a useful title.
Pegasus joins two incompatible things: the grounded physical power of a horse and the impossible freedom of wings. Schröder’s music performs a similar joining. Electronic equipment is heavy, technical and material. It consists of cables, switches, voltage, metal, plastic and patient labor. But the sounds produced by that equipment can seem almost weightless.
The machinery remains on Earth.
The music escapes it.
There is also an unusual fold in the album’s history. Although the disc appeared around 1990, the underlying music had been created in 1982 for a proposed project connected to a science-fiction novel. The release was apparently assembled and issued years later without Schröder approving it as the solo album it became.
That does not make the music illegitimate, but it gives the object a divided identity.
It belongs to 1982 and 1990 at once.
It is an abandoned future project that later returned wearing the clothing of an ordinary album. Something intended to accompany a story became detached from that story and entered circulation alone. The missing novel leaves an empty space around the music, and the listener may unknowingly begin writing another one.
This is especially appropriate for Private Release.
Much of this blog involves objects whose original surroundings have shifted or disappeared: recordings separated from their first pressings, MP3s removed from old networks, images that outlive their makers, files renamed by strangers, and music that reaches a new listener long after its intended moment.
Pegasus already contains that instability.
It is music searching for the narrative that was once supposed to stand beside it.
The numbered sections strengthen that feeling. Rather than delivering a set of finished little worlds, they resemble stages of travel. One region develops momentum; another drifts; another introduces a sharper rhythm or a more luminous melodic surface. Changes sometimes feel architectural rather than dramatic, as though the listener has moved into another chamber of the same enormous structure.
Schröder’s patience is important here.
The music does not continually demand attention through shocks or obvious climaxes. It trusts gradual transformation. A sound can repeat long enough for the listener’s relationship to it to change. What first seems external becomes familiar. What seems simple begins revealing small internal movements.
Repetition becomes a method of perception.
That quality connects electronic music to several very different human practices: walking the same postal route, repeating a prayer, listening to one record until its smallest details become landmarks, or returning to an archive post by post until relationships begin appearing between years.
Nothing outside the pattern may have changed.
The person inside it has.
The cultural distance from Rahill to Schröder is enormous on the surface. We move from an Iranian-American woman assembling family voices in twenty-first-century Brooklyn to a German electronic composer constructing synthetic environments four decades earlier. One record is held together by ancestry and vulnerability. The other appears to be held together by voltage and design.
But placing them beside each other reveals that both are concerned with forms of memory.
Rahill preserves people through voices, photographs, jewelry and domestic recordings.
Schröder preserves imagined space through programmed sound.
One asks how the past remains inside a person.
The other asks how a future can be remembered before it has occurred.
That may be what attracts people to older electronic music. Its imagined future did not arrive exactly as expected, yet the sound has not become useless. Instead, it has acquired another emotional dimension. We now hear both the future its makers anticipated and the past in which they anticipated it.
A synthesizer recording from 1982 can therefore produce a strange double vision.
It sounds forward and backward simultaneously.
The machines are old, but their horizon remains open.
This is where your sequencing becomes part of the listening experience. There is no official reason these two albums must follow one another. The bridge exists because you placed them together. First we encounter a child wearing inherited love. Then we enter an electronic composition whose original story has been lost or withheld.
One object arrives carrying more history than the child can yet understand.
The next arrives missing the history it was meant to accompany.
Between them sits the listener, supplying connections.
That is not random listening. It is another form of composition.
The first album leaves flowers at the feet of the past.
The next gives that past wings.
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