Manuel Göttsching may not have been the first artist to make electronic music, but he was certainly the first artist to make good electronic music, as far as these ears are concerned and as E2-E4 demonstrates.

E2-E4 is yet another excellent release by Göttsching, the man who discovered how to make electronic music feel as alive and as human as anything else. His keyboards breathe and pulse, and to this date I have not yet found one other artist that can combine guitars and synthesizers as seamlessly as him. The blend is completely uniform and the instruments never stand at odds with each other, working perfectly in tandem to create spiritual soundscapes that envelop the mind and body like purified air.

Where artists like Kraftwerk and Klaus Schulze/Tangerine Dream could only relate the synthesizer to cold, early science fiction landscapes, Göttsching wasn’t tied down by anyone else’s vision and let his music come only from the heart and soul, producing electronic music with a warmth and natural humanity that many other early electronic music pioneers lacked, or in the case of Kraftwerk, tried desperately to avoid for apparently no reason other than to be alternative.

Unlike Krafterk, Tangerine Dream, etc., Göttsching’s music still holds up today and sets a standard for anyone looking to create rhythmically engrossing and/or atmospheric electronic music. In particular, 1984’s E2-E4 with its clear, fast-paced, constantly shifting beats contain the earliest traces of techno music from an artist that was always looking further into the future than any of his contemporaries were.