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Tangerine Dream
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Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The band has undergone many personnel changes over the years, with Froese being the only continuous member. Drummer and composer Klaus Schulze was briefly 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.
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Encyclopedia
Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The band has undergone many personnel changes over the years, with Froese being the only continuous member. Drummer and composer Klaus Schulze was briefly 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 the genre known as New Age music, although the band themselves disliked the term.
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 total over sixty and includes 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 from 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 (together with Peter Baumann, whose sequencer work is often mislabelled as 'all' Franke's work) became Tangerine Dream's sequencer guru and was responsible for some of the pulsing rhythmic synthesizer lines that came to define the band's music. Franke left Tangerine Dream over creative differences with Froese nearly two decades later in 1987.
Other long-term members of the group included Peter Baumann (1971-1977), who later went on to found the New Age label Private Music, to which the band was signed from 1988 to 1991; Johannes Schmoelling (1979-1985); Paul Haslinger (1986-1990); and, most recently Froese's son Jerome Froese (1990-2006).
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; he was also part of a short-lived 1969 line-up), Ralf Wadephul (in collaboration with Edgar Froese recorded album Blue Dawn, but it was released only in 2006; also 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 2009 Tangerine Dream comprises Edgar Froese, with the collaboration of Thorsten Quaeschning, who helped in the composition of Jeanne d'Arc (2005) and several subsequent releases. For concerts and recordings they are joined mainly by Iris Camaa, Linda Spa and Bernhard Beibl.
History
Origins: Psychedelia and Krautrock
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 Zodiak Free Arts Lab, 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 (prior to this the group had sometimes gone under the title of The Tangerines, Psychedelic Light Dreams or the Tangerine Dream band).
Froese was fascinated by technology and skilled in using it to create music. He built custom-made 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 Tangerine Dream quickly adopted upon its arrival.
The first Tangerine Dream album, Electronic Meditation, was a tape-collage Krautrock 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). But starting with their second album, Alpha Centauri, the group has been a trio or occasionally duo of electronic instruments, commonly augmented by guitar from Froese (or, much later, other musicians as well), and occasionally also other instruments. Of these, drums from Christopher Franke and organ from Steve Schroyder (on Alpha Centauri) or Peter Baumann (on subsequent releases) feature prominently in the band's music during the early 70s. They also started their particularly heavy usage of the Mellotron during this period.
Rise to Fame: The Virgin Years
The band's 1973 album Atem was named as Album of the Year by British DJ John Peel, and this attention helped Tangerine Dream to sign to the fledgling Virgin Records in the same year. Soon afterward they 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 was something of a fluke; the band was experimenting in the studio with a recently acquired Moog synthesizer, and the tape happened to be rolling at the time. They kept the results and later added flute, bass-guitar and Mellotron performances. The cantankerous Moog, 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 Vangelis, 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.
Tangerine Dream Live
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.
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 (reaching 134db in 1976) and for a long time. The band released recordings of a fair number of their concerts, and on some of these the band worked 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 themes that would appear later on Tangram). An excellent introduction is the seminal Ricochet album; this was recorded during a tour which included European cathedrals, with some later overdubbing.
Forays into lyrics
Most TD albums were purely instrumental—two albums that prominently featured lyrics, Cyclone (1978) and Tyger (1987) were met with disapproval from some 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 and their 2007 album Madcap's Flaming Duty
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, recorded during their tour in the winter at the end of 1983. Because of the abstract nature of the music—and, arguably, the lack of lyrics—they did not attract censorship 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.
Soundtracks
Throughout 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 U.S. television came when a track for the then in-progress album Le Parc was used as the theme for the television program Street Hawk. Some of the more famous soundtracks have been Sorcerer, The Keep, Risky Business, Firestarter, 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.
Recent times: Going indie
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, and more recently, Eastgate. 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. Meanwhile, their Ohr and Jive Electro catalogs (known as the "Pink" and "Blue" Years) are currently owned by Sanctuary Records.
Edgar Froese also released a number of solo recordings which are similar in style to Tangerine Dream's work. Jerome Froese released a number of singles as TDJ Rome, that are similar to his work within the Dream Mixes series; in 2005 he released his first solo album Neptunes. Jerome is presently on hiatus from Tangerine Dream to concentrate on his solo career. He has recently finished his second solo album Shiver Me Timbers which was released on October 29, 2007.
To celebrate their 40th anniversary (1967-2007), Tangerine Dream announced their only UK concert at London Astoria on April 20, 2007. TD also played a totally free open air concert in Eberswalde on July 1, 2007 and at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt on Main on October 7, 2007. 2008 saw the band in Eindhoven Holland playing at E-Day (an electronic music festival) together with Ron Boots, later in the year they are also playing the Night of the Prog Festival in Loreley, Germany additionally they have just announced concerts at the Kentish Town Forum, in London on November 1, the Picture House, Edinburgh on November 2 as well as their first live concert in the USA for over a decade, at the UCLA Royce Hall, Los Angeles on November 7. Recent announcements (2009) have been made of upcoming shows in Germany and Japan.
Artistic connections
Influences
Tangerine Dream began 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. Yes-like influence was brought in by Steve Joliffe on Cyclone. The sample-based sound collages of Johannes Schmoelling drew their inspiration from a number of sources; one instance is Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians on, for example, parts of Logos Live, and the track Love on a Real Train from the Risky Business soundtrack.
Classical music has had some influence on the sound of Tangerine Dream over the years. Ligeti, Bach, Ravel and Stockhausen are clearly visible as dominant influences in the early albums. A Baroque sensibility sometimes informs the more coordinated sequencer patterns, which has its most direct expression in the La Follia section that comes at the very end of the title track of Force Majeure. In live performances, the piano solos often directly quoted from Romantic classical works for piano, such as the Beethoven and Mozart snippets in much of the late '70s - early '80s stage shows. In the bootleg recording of the Mannheim Mozartsaal concert of 1976 (Tangerine Tree volume 13), the first part of the first piece also clearly quotes from Liszt's Totentanz. The first phrase is played on a harpsichord synthesizer patch, and is answered by the second half of the phrase in a flute voicing on a Mellotron.
An infrequently recurring non-musical influence on Tangerine Dream, and Edgar Froese in particular, have been 12th-19th century poets. This was first evident on the 1981 album Exit, the track title "Pilots of the Purple Twilight" being a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Locksley Hall. Six years later, the album Tyger featured poems from William Blake set to music; and around the turn of the millennium, Edgar Froese started working on a musical trilogy based on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, completed in 2006. Most recently, the 2007 album Madcap's Flaming Duty features more poems set to music, some again from Blake but also eg. Walt Whitman.
Pink Floyd were also an influence on Edgar Froese and Tangerine Dream. Madcap's Flaming Duty is dedicated to the memory of the late Syd Barrett. The title refers to Barrett's solo release, "The Madcap Laughs".
The band's influence can be felt in ambient artists such as Deepspace, Future Sound of London, and Global Communication, as well as Rock, pop, and dance artists such as Radiohead, M83, DJ Shadow, Ulrich Schnauss, Cut Copy and Kasabian. The band also clearly influenced late 2000's Trance music, where lush soundscapes and thick, contemplative synth pads parts are used along with repetitive synth sequences, much like in their 1975 release Rubycon. The group have also been sampled countless times, more recently by Recoil on the album SubHuman and on several Houzan Suzuki albums.
In popular culture
- Japanese electronic musician Susumu Hirasawa dedicated his song "Island Door (Paranesian Circle)" to Tangerine Dream. At 13 minutes, it is Hirasawa's longest composition.
- Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds makes reference to one of the gas giant planets in the Epsilon Eridani system as being named Tangerine Dream.
- The Japanese band Do As Infinity's debut single "Tangerine Dream" was named after the band.
- Till Lindemann, vocalist of Rammstein, stated that Tangerine Dream was one of his influences to make his music.
- At the end of Tenacious D's track "City Hall," lead singer Jack Black references the group ("Malibu nights, tangerine dreams").
Discography
Tangerine Dream has released over one hundred albums (not counting singles, compilations and fan releases) over the last four decades. A project to collect and release fan concert recordings was active from 2002 to 2006, known as the Tangerine Tree.
See also
Literature
External links
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- The Official Tangerine Dream forum
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- Discographies:
- – A comprehensive discography
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- Misc. resources:
- Tadream: TD Yahoo discussion list
- – fansite featuring a cover art gallery and a listing of known live concerts
- – The Tangerine Dream Concert Track Listing 1980-2005 By John Burek and Mark Schaffer
- – Reviews and more
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- Other
- An informative fan site is hosted by , an Astronomical Observatory in Northern Ireland.
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