Tangerine Dream

Berlin's Tangerine Dream are the leading exponents of "kosmische musik", the extraordinary electronic "new wave" that exploded in Germany at the dawn of the Seventies. A scene made up of highly skilled musicians, often with a classical background, who managed to give new meaning to the use of keyboards and synthesizers in music, shifting the center of gravity of psychedelic rock from the depths of the mind to the far reaches of the universe (though, as in this case, also the other way round...).

The band was formed in 1966 on the initiative of guitarist Edgar Froese, percussionist Klaus Schulze and keyboardist Conrad Schnitzler. From that ensemble came the first album, "Electronic Meditation". The collaboration with Schulze and Schnitzler ended shortly after: the former would go on to become a solo artist and wizard of avant-garde electronics ("Irrlicht", "Cyborg"), the latter a respected virtuoso within Cluster. But Froese didn't give up. First, with Steve Schroyder and percussionist Christopher Franke (ex-Agitation Free), he christened "cosmic music" on "Alpha Centauri" (1971). Then, following Schroyder's departure, he brought in Hans Peter Baumann.

"Zeit" is the first record credited to the trio of Froese, Franke and Baumann, who would become the band's backbone. Tangerine Dream permanently shelved the tools of traditional rock to focus solely on electronic synthesizers. Their premise was to bring the fascination of the visual arts into music through a series of "sidereal journeys". On "Zeit" this translates into a sequence of suites, often born of improvisation in the style of psychedelic rock, but also free jazz and avant-garde music, with synthesizers giving off galactic hums in the great void of the Universe. The listener is thus plunged into a whirlwind of dissonance, echoes, reverb, noise and electronic distortion, suspended in the void of a total absence of rhythm.

A double album, dark and menacing from the cover onward, "Zeit" is a symphony in four movements (one per side), built on rigorous minimalism and Stockhausen-style electronic treatments. Its nearly 75 minutes of music are constructed from layers of sound in constant dialogue with fragments of silence. Dissonance is the absolute protagonist, acting as the connective thread between the four tracks. But what also defines the record is the visionary, almost "pictorial" quality of these forays into space.

The bleak overture of "Birth Of Liquid Plejades" opens with a quartet of cellos, floating as if in zero gravity. A "phase shifting" effect ushers in the second part of the movement, marked by a liquid timbre that seems almost to depict sidereal matter in an embryonic state. The scene is dominated by the electronic breezes of the two VCS3s (Franke and Baumann) and the dark detonations of Froese's generator. After about a quarter of an hour, the third part of the piece takes shape, marked by a dense web of dissonance left to drift in a nebula of organ and moog (the latter played by Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh). The idea, once again, is that of an interstellar journey in which majestic notes and slow-motion sounds flow by. Spatial reverbs, hissing asteroids, distant echoes and metallic noises follow one another over an arrhythmic backdrop that remains dark and charged with suspense throughout. A similar sense of emptiness in the face of the boundless Cosmos is conjured by the multi-timbral "Nebulous Dawn", which opens by simulating the launch of a hypothetical orbiting space station before gradually fading into an increasingly ethereal, intangible sonic dimension.

The slender fabric of "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" is so rarefied it brushes up against the new age music of many years later: an unsettling silent prelude, barely broken by a few distant guitar chords, gives way to a long "pattern" that seems almost to make a mixture of air bubbles simmer, with electric guitar sketching abstract flourishes in the background. The mind drifts back to the magical ballet of spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey".

The fourth and final movement, the title track, is at once the most pretentious and the most impressive. From this dark, at times disturbing sonic magma, from these hisses of stellar wind, a mysterious energy seems almost to be released. A bass glissando anticipates the plunge into a cosmic abyss that closely resembles the darkness of the mind, the darkest recesses of the psyche.

"Zeit"'s forays among the Pleiades recall the space sagas of Isaac Asimov, but also the grimmest scenarios of the biblical Apocalypse. They are blends of sounds drawn from both Western and Eastern cultures, especially Arabic ones. The monotonous pulse of the oscillators and the symphonic carpets that pour from the synths and mellotrons conjure up distant, mystical, alien landscapes that are nonetheless present within our unconscious. A concept album about "time" - the time of space, stretched to infinity, but also human time, about escaping the obsessive rhythms that mark out our daily lives - "Zeit" reveals to us that it is above all to our galaxy that we must turn our gaze to find inner balance.

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12/11/2006