As it turned out later, Goettsching had spent several years getting ready to record his most important album in just one hour. He created his own studio in 1974 when he was 22 and carried out sessions an hour and half long in order to study every connected piece of equipment. Manuel said later: “Studio is my instrument.” The trick is to know how to smoothly introduce any box with levers into the record. It’s exactly the same as having musicians in an orchestra where Goettsching is the conductor. The simplicity of the E2-E4 record wins listeners over, but as usual simplicity is the result of a difficult search for it. You have to spend lots of time, go through hardships to the stars, to a clear understanding. It all came together on Saturday at noon on the 12th December 1981:

“In 1981 I was working on a new solo album, and my plan was to make a big composition. I’d increased all my equipment and I wanted to make a more synthesized, orchestral composition. So I working on this piece and tat piece but I couldn’t really get into it or finish it. Then I just played for one hour and I had a beautiful piece. Very little preparation. First oscillator, second oscillator, changing envelopes. It’s very quickly done, just ten minutes. Start with one instrument, then ho the second, then the third, back to the first, change it a little bit, start with something else, go back, always interacting. About eight instruments at the same time. I started with the two chords, with a sequencer controlling the volume of each of the steps, and that makes the shifting accents that go through the piece. I don’t change the chords, I change the accents. One hour, just once, and finito. It was a fantastic moment.”

The two chords that became the basis of the record, not changing for the whole 58 minutes, represent one of the reasons why the album is called Е2-Е4 — like a move over one square, the beginning of a chess party and of a new solo career — Goettsching as a big chess fan loved concept albums and beautiful names. “I listened to it again and again and thought, ‘Okay, maybe this is something I should release.’ But I had a problem because it was 58 minutes and the CD was in the development stage. I knew about CDs but normal media was vinyl, so making it on vinyl was not possible without a break. My contract with Virgin was open because there was an option to continue after the four albums, but Virgin had changed very much from a very independent company to a very commercial company. It was okay, but I thought my music is maybe not anymore the right stuff for this company. So, they invited me and I thought they would probably buy it, but it would be put in a corner and they would forget it. I had a chance to speak with Richard Branson, who I knew at the time, and he said, ‘It is great.’ He had a baby in his arms and it fell asleep, and he said, ‘This music is fantastic, you can make a fortune with it’. But I didn’t leave it with Virgin, and I waited two years and my old friend Klaus Schulze was doing a new label. He asked me if I wanted to release something and I thought, ‘Okay, let’s give it a try.’ So, it was released in ’84, but without spectacle and got some very bad reviews, that this is boring.” A Berlin magazine called Zitty understood neither the idea nor the conventional tracklist about mittelspiel and tore the record apart, writing that there was no justification for releasing such an album and that it wasn’t music but a sin. Later the magazine apologised.