Sadly we find ourselves penning another death piece…
But then, Edgar Froese (founder of Tangerine Dream and The Ones) had a slightly different point of view on death which sort of fitted with the mood of all of Tangerine Dream’s music.
“There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address.“
It’s fair to say that there is a good reason why most of Tangerine Dream’s music can be found in the bargain bins of various record stores. Frankly, that’s where it belongs.
Even some esoteric pieces like Pinnacles (a solo effort) are poor efforts at being E2-E4 if you take time out to make the effort to imagine them as such.
Tangerine Dream mostly perpetrated a rather flatulent, new age inflected, prog rock. But it wasn’t always thus, and therefore we should give praise to their first album and its extremely advanced use of cut ups.
Its punk rock cover tells you what it was about (initial copies included a balloon as the puppet’s heart), as does the crazed axe work of the brilliant 22 minute epic Journey Through A Burning Brain
This is the best of Krautrock, and the most punk rock of psychedelic music- truly “free, electronic rock”.
And also praise for the brilliant throbbing craziness of Zeit and the superb 2 part single produced at roughly the same time called Ultima Thule
Again this is a world full of angry bubbling synths and frantic punk rock riffing. Truly inspiring music and the most uneasy of listening.
These two albums (along with Atem and Alpha Cetauri) were all recorded for Berlin based independent Ohr (Ear) Records which was run by the incredible Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (for more details I highly recommend Julian Cope’s wonderful Krautrock book).
They are truly the consummate masterpieces of Space Rock before it lost its edge. This was the vision of art and music combined that the commune like Zodiak Free Arts Lab had sought after and was achieved by pioneering and amazing tape looping, cut ups and home made instruments that long pre-dated developments like the sequencer. The musicians were heavily influenced by surrealism, and it feels that way.
Most people think Tangerine Dream started with the (to modern ears) rather wishy washy synth waves of Phaedra (the first record to chart in the UK) but to me it ended there. Which is not to undermine the recently departed Edgar Froese at all, but to reflect that great music has many faces, and that different sounds find many different ears. It was just the music stretched out, becoming mystical and sensual, but losing the edge that made it so special.
Go back and listen to those first 4 albums. And listen to music that blows away all preconceptions.
-TH