Tangerine Dream

Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The band has undergone several personnel changes over the years, with Froese the only continuous member. Drummer and composer Klaus Schulze was a member of an early lineup, but the most stable version of the group during their influential mid-1970s period was as a keyboard trio with Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann. Early in the 1980s, Johannes Schmoelling replaced Baumann, and this lineup, too, was stable and extremely productive.

Tangerine Dream's early "Pink Years" albums had a pivotal role in the development of Krautrock. Their "Virgin Years" and later albums became a defining influence in New Age music.

Although the group has released numerous studio and live recordings, a substantial number of their fans were introduced to Tangerine Dream by their film soundtracks, which numbered over fourty and included Sorcerer, Thief, The Keep, Risky Business, Firestarter, Legend, Near Dark, and Miracle Mile.

Line-up

In the late 60s and early 70s, several short-lived incarnations of Tangerine Dream were formed by Froese teaming up with various musicians of West Berlin's underground scene. A few of these collaborators included Steve Jolliffe, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler.

The most notable of Froese's collaborations ended up being his partnership with Christopher Franke. Franke joined Tangerine Dream in 1970 from the group Agitation Free to replace Schulze as the drummer, and eventually he became Tangerine Dream's sequencer guru and was responsible for the pulsing rhythmic synthesizer lines that came to define the band's music. Franke left Tangerine Dream due to creative differences with Froese nearly two decades later in 1987; Many considered Chris Franke the heart of Tangerine Dream due to his mastery of the sequencer. His departure left a hole in the band that most consider unfilled.

Other long-term members of the group included Peter Baumann (1972-1977), who later went on to found the New Age label Private Music, to which the band was signed from 1988 to 1991; Johannes Schmoelling (1980-1985); Paul Haslinger (1986-1990); and, most recently (1990 onwards), Froese's son Jerome.

A number of other members were also part of Tangerine Dream for shorter periods of time. In contrast to session musicians, they also contributed to some compositions of the band during their stay. The five most notable such members are Steve Schroyder (organist, 1971-72), Michael Hoenig (who replaced Baumann for a 1975 Australian tour and a London concert, included on Bootleg Box Set Vol. 1), Steve Jolliffe (wind instruments and vocals on Cyclone and the following tour; was also part of a short-lived 1969 line-up), Ralf Wadephul (credited for one track on Optical Race (1988) and toured with the band in support of this album), and Linda Spa (saxophonist who appeared on numerous albums and concerts between 1990 and 1996, as well as 2005 onwards)

As of 2006 Tangerine Dream is formed by Edgar Froese and Jerome Froese, with the collaboration of Thorsten Quaeschning in the composition of "Jeanne D'Arc (2005)". For concerts and recordings they are joined mainly by Iris Camaa and Linda Spa.

History

Edgar Froese arrived in West Berlin in the mid-1960s to study art. He worked as a sculptor and studied under Salvador Dalí, among others. His first band, the R&B-styled The Ones, was gradually dismantled after releasing only one single, and Froese turned to experimentation, playing minor gigs with a variety of musicians. Most of these gigs were in the famous Zodiac nightclub, although Froese's band was also invited to play for his former teacher Dalí. Music was mixed with literature, painting, early forms of multimedia, and more. Only the most outlandish ideas attracted any attention, and Froese summed up this attitude with the phrase: "In the absurd often lies what is artistically possible." As members of the group came and went, the direction of the music continued to be inspired by the Surrealists, and the group came to be called by the surreal-sounding name of Tangerine Dream.

Froese was fascinated by technology and skilled in using it to create music. He built instruments and, wherever he went, collected sounds with tape recorders for use in constructing musical works later. His early work with tape loops and other repeating sounds was the obvious precursor to the emerging technology of the sequencer, which Froese quickly adopted.

The first Tangerine Dream album, Electronic Meditation, was a tape-collage piece, using the technology of the time rather than the synthesized music they later became famous for, and was a collaboration between Froese, Klaus Schulze, and Conrad Schnitzler. Electronic Meditation was published by Ohr in 1970, and began the period known as the Pink Years (the Ohr logo was a pink ear). Beginning with their second album, Alpha Centauri, the group tended to be a duo or trio of electronic instruments augmented by Froese's guitar, Franke's drums, and sometimes assorted guest musicians. They were particularly heavy users of the Mellotron during this period.

Tangerine Dream signed to the fledgling Virgin Records in 1973 and soon afterward released the album Phaedra, an eerie soundscape that unexpectedly reached #15 in the United Kingdom album charts and became one of Virgin's first bona-fide hits. Phaedra was the first commercial album to feature sequencers and came to define much more than just the band's own sound. The creation of the album's title track for was something of a fluke; the band was experimenting in the studio with a recently-acquired VCS 3 synthesizer, and the tape happened to be rolling at the time. They kept the results and later added flute and Mellotron performances. The cantankerous VCS 3, like many other early synthesizers, was so sensitive to changes in temperature that its oscillators would drift badly in tuning as the equipment warmed up, and this drift can easily be heard on the final recording. This album marked the beginning of the period known as the Virgin Years.

In the 1980s, along with other electronic music pioneers such as Jean-Michel Jarre and Mike Oldfield, the band were early adopters of the new digital technology which revolutionized the sound of the synthesiser. Their technical competence and extensive experience in their early years with self-made instruments and unusual means of creating sounds meant that they were able to exploit this new technology to make music quite unlike anything heard before. To the modern listener, their albums of that period may not seem so exceptional, but only because the technology they adopted at that time is now used almost universally.

Through the 1970s and 1980s the band toured extensively. The concerts generally included large amounts of unreleased and/or improvised material, and were consequently widely bootlegged. They were notorious for playing extremely loudly and for a long time. The band released recordings of a fair number of their concerts, and on some of these you can hear the band working out material which would later form the backbone of their studio recordings (for example, Pergamon, which documents a concert given in East Berlin shortly after Johannes Schmoelling joined the group, contains many themes that would appear later on Tangram).

Most albums were purely instrumental—two albums that prominently featured lyrics, Cyclone (1978) and Tyger (1987) (the latter featuring poems by William Blake recited over music) were met with disapproval from the fans. While there have occasionally been a few vocals on the band's other releases, such as the track "Kiew Mission" from 1981's Exit, the group only recently returned to featuring vocals in a musical trilogy based on Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Tangerine Dream's earliest concerts were visually quite dull by modern standards, with three men sitting motionless for hours alongside massive electronic boxes festooned with patch cords and a few flashing lights. Some concerts were even performed in complete darkness! As time went on and technology advanced, the concerts become much more elaborate, with visual effects, lighting, lasers, pyrotechnics, and projected images. By 1977 their North American tour featured full-scale Laserium effects.

After their 1980 East Berlin gig, when they became one of the first major Western bands to perform in a Communist country, Tangerine Dream became very popular behind the Iron Curtain. They were one of the most popular bands in Poland in the early 1980s and even released a double live album of one of their performances there called Poland. Because of the abstract nature of the music—and, arguably, the lack of lyrics—they did not attract censure from the authorities, unlike many other Western bands. With Poland, the band moved to the Jive Electro label, marking the beginning of the Blue Years.

In the 1980s, Tangerine Dream composed scores for more than twenty films. This had been an interest of Froese's since the late 1960s, when he scored an obscure Polish film. Many of the group's soundtracks were composed at least partially of reworked material from the band's studio albums or work that was in progress for upcoming albums; see, for example, the resemblance between the track "Igneous" on their soundtrack for Thief and the track "Thru Metamorphic Rocks" on their studio release Force Majeure. Their first exposure on television came when a track for the then in-progress album Le Parc was used as the theme for the television program Streethawk. Some of the more famous soundtracks have been Sorcerer, The Keep, Risky Business, and Legend. At their best, the soundtracks have been as musically successful as the regular studio albums, and many fans discovered them through their film or television work.

In the past, the group has had recording contracts with Ohr, Virgin, Jive Electro, Private Music, and Miramar, and many of the minor soundtracks were released on Varese Saraband. In 1996, the band founded their own record label, TDI. Subsequent albums are today generally not available in normal retail channels but are sold by mail-order. The same applies to their Miramar releases, the rights to which the band has bought back to themselves. Meanwhile, their Ohr/Jive Electro catalogs (known as the "Pink" and "Blue" Years) is currently in the hands of Sanctuary Records.

Edgar Froese has also released a number of solo recordings which are similar in style to Tangerine Dream's work. Jerome Froese released a number of dance-oriented singles as TDJ Rome, that are similar to his work within the "Dream Mixes" series; in 2006 he released his first solo album. Also of possible interest to Tangerine Dream fans are the solo work of Christopher Franke, Johannes Schmoelling, Klaus Schulze, Michael Hoenig, and Paul Haslinger.

Influences

Although Tangerine Dream began initially as a surreal rock band, each of the members contributed different things. Edgar Froese's guitar style was inspired by Jimi Hendrix, while Chris Franke contributed the more avant garde elements of Stockhausen and Terry Riley. Finally, Peter Baumann contributed imaginative composition techniques the band often used to make up for his lack of keyboard skills. Of course, this changed over the years as members joined and left, from the Yes-like influence of Steve Joliffe on Cyclone to the sample-based sound collages of Johannes Schmoelling on Exit and Hyperborea.

Discography

Studio / live albums

The border between Tangerine Dream's studio and live albums is quite a blurred one. Albums billed as "live" commonly include overdubs and original material added in studio; at its worst, less than a third of Live Miles comes from actual live material. Given the fact that the band's live albums often consist of original music not available on any studio album, the distinction between studio and live albums is less useful with Tangerine Dream than with most bands. The group has only somewhat recently (1997 onwards) started releasing "normal" live albums, that is, recordings in which the band primarily performs pieces from previous studio albums.

The major original albums released by the group are:

The Pink Years

(1970) Electronic Meditation
(1971) Alpha Centauri
(1972) Zeit
(1973) Atem

The Virgin Years

(1974) Phaedra
(1975) Rubycon
(1975) Ricochet
(1976) Stratosfear
(1977) Encore
(1978) Cyclone
(1979) Force Majeure
(1980) Tangram
(1980) Pergamon Live
(1981) Exit
(1982) White Eagle
(1982) Logos
(1983) Hyperborea

The Blue Years

(1984) Poland
(1985) Le Parc
(1986) Green Desert (originally recorded in 1973, remixed in 1984)
(1986) Underwater Sunlight
(1987) Tyger
(1988) Live Miles (1996 title, formerly Livemiles)

The Melrose Years

(1988) Optical Race
(1989) Lily On The Beach
(1990) Melrose

The Seattle Years

(1992) Rockoon
(1993) 220 Volt
(1994) Turn of the Tides
(1995) Tyranny of Beauty

The Millennium Years

(1996) Goblins Club
(1997) Ambient Monkeys
(1998) Hollywood Years 1
(1998) Hollywood Years 2
(1999) Valentine Wheels
(1999) Mars Polaris
(1999) Tang-Go
(2000) Soundmill Navigator
(2000) Great Wall Of China
(2000) The Seven Letters From Tibet
(2001) I-BOX
(2002) Inferno
(2003) Mota Atma
(2003) Rockface - TD Live in Berkeley 88 (1988 - 2003)
(2004) Purgatorio
(2004) East - TD live in Berlin (1990 - 2004)
(2004) Goblin's Club (Re-issue 2004)
(2004) Arizona - TD Live in Scottsdale (1992 - 2004)
(2005) Vault 4 - TD Live in UK/USA (1986 - 2005)
(2005) Jeanne D'Arc
(2005) Phaedra 2005

The Dream Mixes

A side-project initiated by Jerome Froese, the series has a dance music slant and primarily consists of remixes of other TD material.

(1995) Dream Mixes
(1997) Dream Mixes II: TimeSquare
(2001) Dream Mixes III: The Past Hundred Moons
(2004) Dream Mixes IV

Soundtrack albums

Selected soundtracks (among about 40 in total):

(1977) Sorcerer
(1981) Thief
(1983) Risky Business
(1984) Wavelength
(1984) Firestarter
(1984) Flashpoint
(1985) Heartbreakers
(1985) Vision Quest
(1985) Legend (U.S. theatrical version)
(1987) Canyon Dreams
(1987) Near Dark
(1987) Shy People
(1987) Deadly Care
(1987) Three O'Clock High
(1989) Miracle Mile
(1989) Dead Solid Perfect
(1997) Oasis
(1997) The Keep (the original 1983 release was pulled from stores)
(1998) Transsiberia
(1999) What a Blast
(2003) Mota Atma

Archive releases

Tangerine Dream have in the recent years released much old archive material, mostly of live concerts. The Bootleg Boxes and The Bootmoon Series are official releases based on the fan project "Tangerine Tree", consisting of fan-made recordings. Exceptions are London 1975 from the former set (which was recorded by BBC), and Brighton and Cleveland from the latter (which come from the band's own archives).

(1999) Sohoman (Live in Sydney 1982)
(2000) Soundmill Navigator (Live at the Philharmonics 1976)
(2000) Antique Dreams
(2003) The Bootleg Box Set Vol. 1
(2003) Rockface (Live in Berkeley 1988)
(2004) The Bootleg Box Set Vol. 2
(2004) The Bootmoon Series: Montreal - April 9th 1977
(2004) The Bootmoon Series: Aachen - January 21st 1981
(2004) The Bootmoon Series: Paris - February 2nd 1981
(2004) The Bootmoon Series: Sydney - February 22nd 1982
(2004) The Bootmoon Series: Ottawa - June 20th 1986
(2004) East (Live in Berlin 1990)
(2004) Arizona (Live in Scottsdale 1992)
(2005) The Bootmoon Series: Brighton - March 25th 1986
(2005) The Bootmoon Series: Cleveland - June 24th 1986
(2005) Vault 4 (Live in Brighton U.K. 1986, Live in Cleveland U.S.A 1986)
(2005) Kyoto (reworked 1983 studio tapes of Froese & Schmölling)
(2005) Rocking Mars (Live at Klangart Festival 1999 in Osnabrück)
(2006) Blue Dawn (reworked 1988 studio tapes of Froese & Ralf Wadephul)

Compilations

There have been more than two dozen compilations of Tangerine Dream's music; most of these had a short market lifespan and covered either the Pink Years, the Blue Years, or both. From the Virgin Years, the collection Dream Sequence (released 1985) remains still in print.

There have also been three "major" compilations. Tangents from 1994 (covering the Virgin Years) and The Dream Roots Collection from 1996 (covering the Pink & Blue Years) are both 5CD sets remixed by Edgar Froese himself; also, the 5th CD of both consists of previously unreleased material. The third similar compilation is i-Box (1970-1990), a 6CD set released on the band's own TDI label in 2000. It is heavily based on the previous two sets, but also covers from the Melrose Years", and has different bonus material

(1995) Dream Music (Silva Records)

Bootlegs

(1998) TraumZeit

References

External links

Tangerine Dream.org – The official Tangerine Dream website
Tangerine Dream links @ DMOZ
Voices-in-the-net.de – Comprehensive discography
Tangerine Tree
Tangerine Dream Database from Rainer Rutka

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Tangerine Dream