Florian Schneider and the Klinging-Klanging Headmusic

[Stephen Lafleur]

What they always said about Florian Schneider was he had a great radio voice. Yes, that voice, the one you want to have when you're doing the antithesis of singing, which is to speak; that voice that was so voicely in Florian Schneider that in his later years his computers couldn't recognize a voice at all (preferring the squeaks of Google engineers instead).

It was deep without being deep; it had surely some effortless tone down below but its SPEECH, its vowels and orbital words danced along such high, narrow ranges of the overtone series that everyone else seemed sing-song in comparison.

And what they never allowed to be said about Florian Schneider was that he sung. A virtuoso, actually; a polyphonicist actually. Two notes at once, closely spaced together, but always if he sat down at a keyboard later trying to recreate himself he failed to find it.

Why?

Did his hallucinations not exist? Was it music that couldn't be created?

But surely it exists, he says. I heard it, then I sung it.

And one day he concluded that the headmusic always exists (is never non-reproducible); and that day he concluded: the headmusic is always comprised of two.

Kling, Klang.

There is in fact no sound in a Kling-Klang music album that is not "a Kling-Klang", or pair of exactly two disparate musicnotes. This includes the percussion, and as such, music that is entirely Kling-Klanged has the property that a person who hallucinates music can perceive the euphoria of every "instrument" at once.

And Florian loved his percussion: it comprised half of every hallucination he underwent. He flung himself back and forth between a percussionist and a musician, as the speech center of his brain (the only learned reason for Kling-Klangs to abide by vowel-like overtones) appeared and disappeared again, now forbidding the arbitrary non-overtone sounds, now allowing them again in its absence. Psst!)

And he invented the Kling-Klang Percussionkit (whereas Wolfgang Flur merely put a brass button on it), and actually everyone else loved Florian's percussion too.

Because music which is entirely Kling-Klanged has something about it, and there are actually billions of people sensitive to Kling-Klanged music.

And most of them are also unintelligent, or else they would be mentally afflicted like Florian Schneider.

And the other thing they never allowed to be said about Florian Schneider?

Well, we'll get to that later.

Boing, boom, tschak!