![]() ![]() Rockoon was Grammy nominated as "Best New Age Album 1992" and reached the Top Ten in the Billboard New Age charts and the Top Twenty in Billboard. The following releases Rubycon, Ricochet, Stratosfear and Force Majeure were also similarly successful. It reached #15 in the UK album charts and became one of Virgin's first hits. The band, then consisting of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann, signed to Richard Branson’s Virgin Records in the same year and released the album Phaedra, the first commercial album ever to feature sequencers. Tangerine Dream's international career started when the band's 1973 record Atem was named as Album of the Year by BBC Radio DJ John Peel. This style, often described as the Berlin School and later Kosmische Musik, has influenced the electronic music genre to the present day and is the blueprint for contemporary music genres like Ambient or Trance. Continuous modified structures – known as sequencing – were combined with distinctive solos. Tangerine Dream composed long pieces with unique structures, opening new dimensions in sound. Ī short outline on TD's history The early yearsĮdgar Froese initially started his playing career at the famous Zodiak Club in Berlin-Kreuzberg where he met new band member Steve Schroyder, and subsequently added Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, a former student of Joseph Beuys, to the band's line-up.Įschewing their traditional rock influences, the group were pioneers in innovating a new style of electronic music, which began with Bob Moog's invention of the Moog synthesizer. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending.In 1967, Edgar founded the band Tangerine Dream and started to experiment with sequencers and synthesizers, exploring. And “In 256 Zeichen” spreads its melodic ideas too thin the song’s mammoth stretch is an indulgence that soon grates.įor a band as endlessly prolific as Tangerine Dream, it’s hard to argue that Raum is in any way essential it’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. By contrast, the opening “Continuum” sounds almost hemmed in by the conventions of percussion, its rather strait-laced drum-machine beats unworthy of the synth sprawl they sheepishly try to rally into place. “You’re Always On Time” makes up for its weakling eight-minute runtime with one of the album’s strongest melodies, a mournful synthesizer riff that is just unpredictable enough to keep it from lapsing into parody, while “Along the Canal” combines a gloomy chord sequence with a synth effect that patters like rain along a gutter, a mixture of form and function so emotively epic it could paint the Grand Canyon blue. Tangerine Dream are grandmasters of space and melody, and “Raum” shows them at their architectural best, their work as airily palatial as a castle made of cloud. Raum’s 15-minute title track, in particular, is a throwback to the omniscient ambience of 1972’s Zeit, a shimmering Moog bassline summoning forth synth sweeps as potent as rocket fuel, slowly tapering off into the elegant, dreamy drones of Hoshiko Yamane’s electric violin, before the Moog returns to guide the listener home. After 2014’s Phaedra Farewell Tour, Froese decided that the group should return to the formula of synths, sequencers, and electric violin that Tangerine Dream employed in the ’70s and ’80s, “not copying it but recreating that style with present technology,” said Quaeschning. Raum doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. ![]() In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. Their first studio album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured eerie found sounds among more conventional rock instruments, and from 1971’s Alpha Centauri onward-three years before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn-Tangerine Dream threw themselves into electronic instrumentation. Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto- Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. According to Thorsten Quaeschning, who has been with Tangerine Dream since 2005, Froese and his wife Bianca made plans for the band to continue after his death, and Raum was produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive of recordings from 1977 to 2013. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. ![]()
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