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In the 1970's, a decade that was dominated by either dinosaur rock bands or the angry young men of punk's new wave, three unassuming Germans took a gamble with a new and primitive technology - the synthesiser - and quietly helped change the face of contemporary music. From their Berlin base Tangerine Dream brought electronica to the masses, and their recorded legacy up to the mid-1980's has influenced and continues to influence modern electronica to a considerable degree. The band also occupies its own unique place among the other German electronic acts of its generation. Kraftwerk's music, for instance, was all gleaming surfaces and precise rhythms inspired by the emerging technology and industrial environment of their German home. Kraftwerk's music reveals an obsession with the merging of man and machine and encoded within their sublime electropop are the roots of techno. In contrast, Tangerine Dream are godfathers of both psychadelic ambient and electronic trance, the latter having by the early 1990's morphed into dancefloor techno's melodic and more popular cousin. Their forte was a kind of electronic picture music informed by - amongst other things - founder Edgar Froese's deep interest in surrealist art and the work of Salvador Dali. In the early days the band was also influenced significantly by ambient rockers Pink Floyd, but they were also listening to electronic avant-garde musicians like Karl Stockhausen and the classical composers Debussy and Wagner. And while Pink Floyd's experiments nearly always had at least some grounding in established musical forms like rock or folk, some of Tangerine Dream's early music sounded like nothing else on Earth. The band's debut album Electronic Meditation (1969) is actually nothing of the sort. It's a bizarre and now incongruous experiment in raucous "free rock" made with a conventional drum/bass/guitar line-up and various found sounds. Arguably its most notable feature is that it marks the recorded debut of Klaus Schulze, who played drums on the album but left soon afterwards for a distinguished solo career as a synthesist. Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem are the early TD albums that really matter. Alpha Centauri sees the crucial addition Chris Franke to the line-up, whose rhythmic sensibilities would soon move from occasional stints on the drums to a pioneering use of electronic sequencers. The cover notes to the album coin a term that's been associated with the band ever since: cosmic music. And cosmic it is, a primitive but highly evocative brand of electronic psychedelia combining organ, processed guitar and weird phrasing effects. Aside from one passage of wild drumming by Franke on "Fly And Collision Of Comas Sola", most of the music here is beatless in the finest spacemusic tradition. Recognizable rhythms are entirely absent from the next album, the double length Zeit. By this stage the band had acquired a Moog modular synthesiser and the music had taken on an even stronger other-world quality. The line-up of Froese, Chris Franke and now Peter Baumann had stabilised and a clearer focus is evident throughout. It's the band's quietest, strangest, most challenging record, with one track "Birth Of Liquid Pleiades" featuring an unusual combination of synths (the Moog played by Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke) and organ with a cello quartet. Tangerine Dream push their musical ideas to the abstract limits over four long, beatless ambient tracks, evoking deep space and alien landscapes with sounds sometimes completely removed from everyday notions of music. It today remains a fascinating experiment in space and texture. Atem refines the ideas on Zeit into something slightly more accessible. On the lengthy title-track Franke whips up a storm on the tom-toms until the piece climaxes mid-way and dissolves into a series of eerie improvisations on mellotron, VCS-3 synthesiser and Froese's "gliss" electric guitar. The low key mood continues through the remainder of the album until the closing "Wahn", a startling experiment with voices, echo machines and percussion. The band was now attracting considerable attention from outside Germany and after Atem they signed a recording deal with Richard Branson's Virgin Records, which had just had its first and unexpected hit with Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking Tubular Bells (1973). Branson's instincts once again proved correct. Phaedra and Rubycon were big hits in the UK and find the band moving beyond the purely psychedelic influence towards a lusher, more neo-Romantic flavoured sound. These works also document Franke's first extensive use of a sequencer as a means of generating rhythms and melodic pulses, a move which was to have enormous implications for both Tangerine Dream and for electronic music's move into the pop and rock mainstream. By this stage of the band's evolution actual melodies are also starting to appear but not at the expense of the eerie and awe-inspiring atmospheres, created with clever phasing effects and beautiful melodic washes from Froese's mellotron. This is tone-colour music of the highest quality. Stratosfear and the film soundtrack Sorcerer are an even more radical departure from the band's avant-garde roots. Almost certainly taking their cue from the commercial success of Kraftwerk's ground-breaking electropop single "Autobahn", the pulsing title-track from Stratosfear proved to be their most melodic, structured and accessible piece to date and the album cemented their newfound popularity abroad. But even here, that exquisite sense of mystery and otherness remains. All four of these recordings capture the band at its first, mid-70's peak. Following several so-so live albums and the departure of Peter Baumann another transitional period suggested, somewhat worryingly, that the group was becoming a more conventional rock band. On the late-70's album Cyclone (1978), for instance, they experiment with a live drummer, vocalist and more conventional instrumentation. But soon the Kraftwerk-inspired explosion in synthesised pop really began to make its presence felt and Tangerine Dream's music moved on to its next stage. Electronic beats and sequenced rhythms were here to stay and by the end of the 70's had literally changed the face of both popular and experimental music. The technology was evolving at a rapid rate, too, and Tangerine Dream made the most of it in a huge spurt of touring and creativity that lasted until the mid-80's. By the turn of the decade the band's sound had changed quite radically from uncluttered "music of the spheres" into denser, more rhythmic ambient trance. And one could argue that this later period has been no less influential. While Tangerine Dream's 70's music inspired the development of more restrained styles of ambience and spacemusic, their early-80's albums have informed several strands of electronic dance. The key to all this is the exquisite layering and repetition. Although it's hardly club music in itself, one can detect the roots and layered melodies of dancefloor trance and the more melodic strains of progressive house. You can hear it in the work of European DJ-producers Oliver Lieb and Paul Van Dyk; in the music of acts from the psychedelic trance scene like Electric Universe and Astral Projection; in the output of UK progressive trance labels like Platipus Records and Hooj Tunes/Lost Language; and the melodic meeting of techno, electro and rock that define the early albums of UK dance pioneers Orbital. Tangram, Exit, Logos (live) , Poland (live) and the Firestarter soundtrack are the key albums of this period. The complete soundtrack to Michael Mann's 1984 film The Keep would also qualify but it remains officially unreleased due to legal disputes. With some fresh angles and a sleeker, gleaming sound provided by new member Johannes Schmoelling these albums see the nebulous and subtle qualities of the band's earlier work integrated with brighter synth arrangements, more developed rhythms and typically piercing lead guitar lines from Froese. As before, tracks of ten to twenty minutes duration are common in all their trance-inducing, multi-coloured glory. The band's sense of harmony and use of layers is thrilling: very few electronic acts past or present have been able to interlock two, three, even four spiralling melodies with such hypnotic perfection. Perhaps the crowning jewel of this period is the live recording Logos. Like all their live album until the late 1980's it features all-new material not replicated on any of their studio recordings. It's a consistently engaging, beautifully complex and layered work. Melodic, driving rhythmic workouts coloured by odd percussion samples and digital voice bytes combine effortlessly with slower, more surreal passages of abstract sound. Even if the electro drum sound is rather leaden (something Kraftwerk always did better) Logos is still one of the most colourful and attractive pieces of pop-flavoured ambient ever released. The 40-minute title suite "Logos" climaxes in a wall of rich minor and major synth chords so rapturous and sensual it simply obliterates the notion of synthesisers as soulless machines. That same euphoric quality also distinguishes the mesmerising title tracks from two otherwise mediocre albums White Eagle (1982) and Hyperborea (1983), the latter proving to be the trio's last release on Virgin Records. Unfortunately, within the space of a few years the group's remarkable chemistry had dissipated. After the horrible Le Parc (1985) Johannes Schmoelling left the band for a solo career. His contribution to TD was enormous, particularly in the way he applied emerging digital synth technology to bring a more streamlined and structured sensibility to the band's music. In fairness his classically-trained replacement Paul Haslinger did revitalise the band for a time. Check the bright, crisp structures of the lengthy "Song Of The Whale" suite from Underwater Sunlight or the absolutely stunning electro-classical-ambient fusion of "Alchemy Of The Heart" from Tyger. But then Franke - whose sequencer programming was the band's virtual engine room - also departed. Exhausted from constant touring and conscious that the band was being overtaken by the next generation of electronic musicians, his exit was a major turning point. Tangerine Dream never recovered. Soon Froese alone owned the name and, joined by his son Jerome, went on to release album after album of mostly trite, throw-away synth pop or similarly lifeless instrumental electronic rock. Just how far the mighty have fallen can be witnessed on Canyon Dreams (1989) an album typical of the band's pitch towards the lucrative American new age market. Coming from anyone else the album would be competent if forgettable. But coming from Tangerine Dream it's an embarrassment to their legacy. The music's most distinctive traits have all but disappeared, leaving an album that's indistinguishable from the electro ear candy being churned out by the current generation's more mediocre new age pop talents. Different but equally as wretched is Optical Race (1988) which features a female vocalist on some the most execrable "songs" you could ever wax ears on, while uptempo efforts like the colourless Goblins Club (1996) are a pointless attempt at "updating" the band's sound by messing around with elements of 90's dance music. The simple problem with band’s latter-day output is that it "makes few utterances that cannot be heard elsewhere in rock”, as Paul Stump so sharply observed in his band biography Digital Gothic. Of the many available compilation albums the double CD Dream Sequence is a fine snapshot of the Virgin Records years, even if it edits such epics as "Logos" and "Rubycon". Less forgivable in the minds of many is the wrong-headedness that informs the popular Tangents 1973-83 (1994). This 5-CD set was assembled by Froese who without the direct input of Baumann, Franke or Schmoelling saw fit to remix, add to, or wholly re-record a majority of tracks on his own. Not surprisingly the results are uneven and your reaction to the album will depend partly on whether you waxed ears on the originals first. Suffice to say that the empty spaces in tracks like "White Eagle" and "Exit" should have been left unfilled and to even think about touching "Logos" was a very bad idea indeed. On the other hand the shiny digital reworkings of early analogue synth classics like "Phaedra" sound so radically different to the originals that they qualify more as interesting cover versions than lousy remixes. Tangents may be a comprehensive-looking release but should be be approached with caution. Both the intrinsic value and the enduring influence of Tangerine Dream's best work should never be underrated. Various strains of ambient electronica would be unthinkable today were it not for their artistic and technological innovations. As for their influence on modern dance music, forget any claims by techno and house snobs to the contrary ie. Kraftwerk good, Tangerine Dream bad. This band deserves massive respect. The layered, throbbing, psychedelic creations of their peak years informed several major strains of electronic club music in the 80's and 90's with trance and progressive being the most significant. Never forget, either, that the history of TD parallels the history of the synthesiser. The band and synth manufacturers often worked closely together in the development and testing of new music technology. From the loungeroom to the dancefloor, ask any electronic musician today who their inspirations are and Tangerine Dream is one of the hallowed names that pops up with hypnotic regularity. With the band now seemingly in irreversible decline, the dream may be gone, but the legacy echoes on…and on…and on. |
