Tangerine Dream

The device pictured below is a Moog 960 Sequential Controller. Launched in 1967 as an accessory for the legendary Moog Modular synthesizer, it allowed users to program short sequences of notes and play them back on a loop. It saw little use in the years immediately following its release, but despite its initial failure and unassuming appearance, it would – through the electronic sequencers that descended from it – change the fate of electronic music forever.

The standard-bearers of this revolution were three Germans based in West Berlin, Tangerine Dream, who rather unexpectedly landed at number fifteen on the British charts with "Phaedra", their first album for Virgin after four uncompromising LPs on the German label Ohr.

The long instrumental pieces on "Phaedra" – like those on the follow-up "Rubycon" – made use of a device that rock musicians had until then regarded as little more than a toy, to build – and gradually vary – loops of synthetic arpeggios capable of fusing melody, harmony, rhythm and timbral experimentation into a single musical entity. A kind of minimalist, electronic counterpart to what previous years had elevated to rock's ultimate subject: the guitar riff. With a futuristic, atmospheric quality – and an unprecedented fusion of stasis and evolution – lending this new creature an unheard-of and irresistibly hypnotic character.

If those early Virgin albums hinted at the transformative potential of sequencers, the full exploration of the new world they had opened up came through live performance. Over the course of more than seventy shows played between 1975's "Rubycon" and 1976's "Stratosfear", the three Germans discovered, night after night, the sonic techniques and principles that would define them in the years to come – techniques that would turn the Tangerine Dream style into an instantly recognisable trademark, sought after and imitated in the burgeoning field of video game music as much as in film scoring, and an essential reference point for any future project in progressive electronic music.

On the tour that took them across France, Germany, Spain and the UK (as well as, for a single date in Turin, Italy), Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke played in cathedrals, performed entirely in darkness and – above all – improvised from scratch every single night. The lights would go out as the band took the stage, and the music that came to life during their impromptu synthetic dialogues still bore many traits of ambient psychedelia, but – sporadically at first, then with increasing awareness – it was evolving towards more dynamic, structured forms. As Froese would explain in 1975: "We're at the point where we can find the end of a piece even without any explicit connection between us. Sometimes it even surprises us that we reach 40 or 50 minutes and everyone feels it's time to finish, so we bring the intensity down and then stop, without anyone giving a signal." Not least because the darkness in the room would have made even eye contact impossible.

Numerous bootlegs survive from that period, along with video footage of the first part of the concert at Coventry Cathedral. But no document shows the outcome of that process of musical reinvention quite like the live album "Ricochet", released on Virgin in December 1975. It is a live album in the sense the term was understood in the Seventies: a fairly radical studio remake of material recorded during the tour – specifically, during the performance at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon (London) on 21 October 1975. An unofficial recording of that same concert also circulates: the distance between it and "Ricochet" – especially in the weight given to the sequencers – is the best measure of the awareness those months had brought about the direction the group's sound needed to take.

The album consists of two single tracks, seventeen and twenty-one minutes long respectively: one for each side of the LP. While the second is a reworking – with plenty of overdubs – of the Fairfield Hall recordings, the first merely takes its cue from the introduction of the concert's opening piece, before steering the theme towards entirely different horizons.

The cover image is a photograph taken by Froese's wife, Monique, on the shore of the Atlantic, near Bordeaux. The album's title is more mysterious: literally meaning "rebound", it is said, according to the 1999 booklet "Tangerine Dreams: 30 Years Of Dreaming", to be a tribute to one of the first "TV video games", which the band members apparently loved to while away the time with between concerts. "Ricochet" is indeed the name of a first-generation console that let players enjoy a few variants of the famous "Pong"… But, apparently, the first model to hit the market dates from 1976 – too late to have been Tangerine Dream's inspiration!

There is somewhat firmer information, however, regarding the equipment used. The liner notes are fairly generic, but a list circulates – considered reliable by experts on the German band – of the instruments used for the Coventry Cathedral concert, to which an upright piano, clearly audible on the second track, should certainly be added for the Croydon date. Besides the obvious array of analog synthesizers (from classics like the Moog Modular, ARP 2600, EMS VCS3 and Synthi A, to the Italian string synth Elka Rhapsody 610, and even a probable prototype of the German PPG 1002), the list includes no fewer than four Mellotrons (Froese used both an M400 and a dual-keyboard Mark V), a Fender Rhodes electric piano, and an electric guitar. And then at least four sequencers: two or more Moog 960s, a "Computer Controlled Rhythm Programmer" (likely an Eko Computerythm, one of the very first drum machines, here used as a trigger for the synths) and one of the first units produced by the German company Synthanorma (perhaps the very same model used that same year by former Tangerine Dream member Klaus Schulze on "Timewind"). Some of these devices had been modified to suit the band's needs, to offer greater versatility and to allow them – even in that pre-MIDI era – to communicate effectively with one another: notably, it was in 1975 that German company Projekt Elektronik built a patch for Chris Franke based on the Moog 960, capable of supporting sequences up to 64 notes long (compared to a maximum of eight on the standard model).

The first track opens on applause and a long drone on the note C, which through filter manipulation shifts its timbre and gradually begins alternating with other notes in the key of C minor. Both elements are also present in the bootleg version, but for the "Ricochet" recording they are completely recreated. Already by around the two-minute mark the divergence is stark: while the concert recording shows a gradual layering of psychedelic textures, the LP track brings in electronic percussion and drum machines much sooner, along with the emergence of clear melodic themes carried both by the sequencers (a triplet phrase of A♭-B♭-C, repeated relentlessly) and by Froese's Stratocaster guitar. Everything dissolves around the midpoint of the track, giving way to a digression of percussion, effects and sequencers which, besides strongly recalling the atmospheres of Pink Floyd's "Echoes", clearly shows the modus operandi the German band had developed for handling the possibilities of their technological arsenal in real time.

By slotting different programmed sequences one after another – and in some cases subtly altering them by adding or removing a note, and therefore a beat, from the melodic phrase – the musicians create a rhythmic/melodic tapestry whose interweavings represent an ongoing tug-of-war between regularity and instability. The result is a state of perpetual suspension and transformation, a parallel dimension born of repetition in which, however, the metre – dictated precisely by the number of notes making up the sequences – keeps shifting and generating overlaps: 5/8, various takes on 4/4, 6/4, 6/8. Layer upon layer, synthetic column after synthetic column, out of this galaxy of sequenced orbits rises another cathedral, a mirror image – and even more spiritual – of those in which the band's concerts were held. An architecture of sonic arches and buttresses devoted to cosmic ecstasy, forming a barrier against the natural flow of time and transfiguring it into an eternal present of cycles and unpredictability.

Rather than opening with the string synth chord of the live recording, the album's second track begins on the notes of an acoustic piano. A classically-inflected phrase with a nocturnal mood, again in C minor, which gradually gives way – as in the concert, but much more quickly – to the dreamy interweavings of the Mellotron's "flute" register. It is shortly after the entrance of the sequencers (around the three-minute mark on the album version, already almost the tenth minute in the live one) that the two recordings begin to have overlapping sections. Although the backdrop is similar, however, almost all the foreground elements are overdubbed: not only are the sounds on the LP track – naturally – brighter and less muffled, but the role of the sequencers and electronic percussion is far more prominent. Here too, the band chose to beef up the melodic component in the studio, introducing a majestic synth theme achieved with a "brass" patch, absent from the original Croydon performance.

A little past the halfway mark, a noise-laden swell accompanied by vocal fragments serves as a hinge between the two roughly eight-minute live excerpts selected from the original's thirty-odd minutes, used to build the studio remake that appears on the album. As in the preceding section, the more chaotic and psychedelic side of the live performance is here too reined in, in favor of greater linearity: something is lost in sheer sonic power and ritualistic intensity, but there's a gain in compactness, coherence and thematic memorability.

"Ricochet" didn't repeat the commercial success of "Phaedra" and "Rubycon", but it still spent four weeks on the British chart, peaking at number forty and earning a Silver disc. With its hybrid nature - not quite a live album, but not a pure studio album either - clearly tied to the band's radical past yet, more than any other release of the era, pointed toward the future, it represents a pivotal step along the path of Tangerine Dream. It's the finest testament to a period of extraordinary creativity that would bridge the early, defiantly underground performances and the laser shows straddling the Seventies and Eighties, when, with the captivating "Force Majeure", "Tangram", "Exit" and "White Eagle", the German outfit would come to represent the most accessible, sci-fi-leaning side of the wildly eclectic new age wave.

On those albums, and on the long tours that accompanied them, the three German musicians kept updating their technological arsenal, drawing heavily on the digital revolution that was soon to sweep through the world of synthesis. Yet while other artists had to start from scratch or reinvent their approach, Froese, Baumann and Franke found themselves naturally at the helm of this transformation, one that would shift the electronic musician's role from tinkerer to programmer. That's because, on those nights amid the cathedral windows, endlessly experimenting with the knobs of decidedly rudimentary analog sequencers, they had glimpsed the future despite the darkness. It was a shift that was not merely musical but cultural too: Tangerine Dream's concerts in European cathedrals bore witness to a new relationship between electronic music and its audience. Underscoring the peculiar, even social, significance of that moment, the words of Reverend Bernard Goureau, cultural attaché of the French diocese of Reims - which in 1974 was the first to host a Tangerine Dream performance in its cathedral - remain telling:

It's true that the young people smoked marijuana to better connect with the sound of Tangerine Dream and with the spectacle as a whole; it's equally true that others, answering nature's call, urinated against the cathedral's columns; and finally it's also true that, to fend off the cold, couples could be seen locked in embraces and kisses. But it's just as true that some six thousand kids, having sat on the floor in the dark for three hours, had appreciated the music and could have caused far worse damage, with far less decorum.

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31/08/2025