Album Notes: Tangerine Dream: Edgar Froese, Chris Franke, Peter Baumann. Additional personnel: Steve Schroyder (organ); Florian Fricke (Moog synthesizer); The Cologne Cello Quartett. Recorded at Dierks Studios, Cologne, Germany in 1972. Includes liner notes by Paul Russell. Digitally remastered by Thomas Heimann-Trosien (Eastgate Studios, Vienna, Austria 1995). On its first two albums, pioneering electronic Krautrock group Tangerine Dream made clear its intention to use SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS-era Pink Floyd as a jumping-off point for the band's cosmic explorations. While T. Dream was never anyone's idea of a rock band, the first two albums do feature electric guitar and drums used prominently in a way that at least tips its hat to the rock aesthetic. On ZEIT, the group moves definitively away from rock trappings into purely atmospheric, improvised electronics, creating soundscapes alternately ambient and avant-garde. A key factor in this process was the solidification of the personnel. Synthesist Peter Baumann completed the trio lineup that would remain intact for the next five years and create the bulk of what's regarded as the group's classic work. For most of ZEIT, conventional melody and harmony are abandoned completely in favor of pure electronic textures. Things build slowly as waves of analog synth and heavily processed guitar ebb and flow in these largely rhythmless arrangements. Occasional melodic colors do appear in the form of a cello quartet, and the subtly elegant majesty of the group's constantly mutating sonic paintings makes ZEIT sound like the soundtrack to an odd-but-memorable dream.
Album Reviews: Mojo (6/96, p.112) - "...In an age when synthesisers were not yet polyphonic, a passing cello section provides the textures that dominate the opening seven minutes....[ZEIT is] icy, meditative calm..." Uncut (2/03, p.91) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...Gothic liturgies of mellotron and synthesized abstraction..."
Advantages: One of the best 'electronic' albums ever Disadvantages: It is somewhat short
...After the success of their 1974 release "Phaedra", TangerineDream released their last organic sounding masterpiece "Rubycon", before becoming a more conventional sounding electronic band. To try and describe the purely instrumental music on this album is difficult. Most people regard electronic music as pings, beeps and other more farty sounds, but here the early synthesisers and manipulated sounds create a wash of noise somewhat like the aural equivalent of a watercolour.
The first piece (Rubycon Part One) sounds like a life-cycle of some alien sound creature. The beginning with its gong like sounds conjuring up something stirring in a dark damp cave before bursting into life in the sunshine with eerie bird-like calling. A pulsing sequencer sound builds up to carry our creature onwards through layers of sounds forming, swirling...
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Advantages: Unreleased tracks Disadvantages: Price, some 're-mixing'
...As you may have already guessed, this is a ‘best of’ album. As TangerineDream have been around for the past 40 years, you don’t need to be a fan to know there are lots of these compilation albums around – some good, some so bad you feel embarrassed to look at the cover let alone play it. ‘Tangents’ is certainly one of the best.
The tracks are from a wide range of studio and sound track albums; some classic ones like Ricochet, White Eagle and Exit, to some quite rare and difficult to find tracks (Wavelength and Flashpoint). Disk 5 contains a lot of previously unreleased tracks, which makes a very useful added bonus, and makes the price worthwhile.
Many of the tracks are just excerpts of long single track albums like Ricochet, but some are re-mixed, or "tangenized", as some fans call it. Some of them are quite different to...
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Advantages: Good solid Tangerine Dream music Disadvantages: Quite quite their best
...over here. If you're in Europe right now you would see that all people talk about the Third World War. As musicians we can use our music to say something about the positive side and hope our message gets through."
Edgar Froese had organised thousands of copies of Exit to be shipped and distributed free to various people in Russia. A short time before Exit was released; TangerineDream had played a special disarmament concert at the Reichstag building in West Berlin in front of around 100,000 people.
* The tracks *
As mentioned before, the first is a beautiful track called ‘Kiew Mission’. A female sensually recites the message of world peace and nuclear disarmament. Very convincing, although the lyrics are in Russian, the mentioning the continents give a good effect. It’s essentially a simplistic, yet universally understandable...
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helpful 04.06.2007
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