Tangerine Dream

Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music band founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The group has seen many personnel changes over the years, with Froese having been the only constant member until his death in January 2015. The best-known lineup of the group was its mid-1970s trio of Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann. In 1979, Johannes Schmoelling replaced Baumann. Since Froese's death in 2015, the group has been under the leadership of Thorsten Quaeschning (Froese's chosen successor and the current longest-serving band member, having joined in 2005). He was joined by violinist Hoshiko Yamane in 2011, Ulrich Schnauss in 2014 and Paul Frick in 2020.

Tangerine Dream are considered a pioneering act in electronica. Their work with the electronic music Ohr label produced albums that had a pivotal role in the development of the German musical scene known as kosmische Musik ("cosmic music"). Their "Virgin Years", so called because of their association with Virgin Records, produced albums that further explored synthesizers and sequencers, including the UK top 20 albums ''Phaedra'' (1974) and '' Rubycon'' (1975). The group also had a successful career composing film soundtracks, creating over 60 scores.

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, Tangerine Dream continued to explore other styles of instrumental music as well as electronica. Their recorded output has been prolific, including over one hundred albums. Among other scoring projects, they helped create the soundtrack for the video game ''Grand Theft Auto V''. Their mid-1970s work has been profoundly influential in the development of electronic music styles such as new-age and electronic dance music.

On 29 September 2017, the band released an all-new music studio album entitled '' Quantum Gate''. In December 2019, they released ''Recurring Dreams'', a compilation of new recordings of some of the band's classic compositions. On 26 November 2021, the band released an EP entitled ''Probe 6–8'' (including three tracks: "Raum", "Para Guy" and "Continuum"), whose concept was developed further on their following album ''Raum'', their latest studio album to date which was released on 25 February 2022.

Lineup

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tangerine Dream existed as several short-lived incarnations, all of which included Froese, who teamed up with several musicians from West Berlin's underground music scene, including Steve Jolliffe, Sven-Åke Johansson, Klaus Schulze, and Conrad Schnitzler.

Froese's most notable association was his partnership with Christopher Franke. Franke joined Tangerine Dream in 1970 after serving time in the group Agitation Free, originally to replace Schulze as the drummer. Franke is credited with starting to use electronic sequencers, which were introduced on ''Phaedra'', a development that had not only a large impact on the group's music but to many electronic musicians to this day. Franke stayed with the group for 17 years, leaving in 1988 because of exhausting touring schedules, as well as creative differences with Froese.

Other long-term members of the group include 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); Froese's son Jerome Froese (1990–2006); Linda Spa (1990–1996, 2005–2014), a saxophonist & fluter player who appeared on numerous albums and concerts, contributing one track on ''Goblins' Club''; and most recently Thorsten Quaeschning of Picture Palace Music (2005–present).

A number of other members were also part of Tangerine Dream for shorter periods of time. Unlike session musicians, these players also contributed to compositions of the band during their tenures. Some of the more notable members are Steve Schroyder (organist, 1971–1972), 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, keyboards and vocals on ''Cyclone'' and the following tour; he was also part of a short-lived 1969 line-up), Klaus Krüger (drummer on ''Cyclone'' and ''Force Majeure'') and 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).

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Tangerine Dream was often joined on stage by Zlatko Perica or Gerald Gradwohl on guitars, and Emil Hachfeld on electronic drums. Jerome Froese left in 2006 after a concert at the Tempodrom in Berlin. Until late 2014, Tangerine Dream comprised Edgar Froese, as well as Thorsten Quaeschning, who first collaborated in the composition of ''Jeanne d'Arc'' (2005). For concerts and recordings, they were usually joined by Linda Spa on saxophone and flute, Iris Camaa on drums and percussion, and Bernhard Beibl on guitar. In 2011, electric violinist Hoshiko Yamane was added to the lineup and is featured on some of the most recent albums.

In late 2014, Bernhard Beibl announced on his Facebook page that he would stop collaborating with Tangerine Dream. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that Tangerine Dream would no longer be touring with Linda Spa or Iris Camaa, but that Ulrich Schnauss had been brought into the fold. Edgar Froese's death in January 2015, however, left this a short-lived line-up.

History

Origins: psychedelia and krautrock

Edgar Froese arrived in West Berlin in the mid-1960s to study art. His first band, the psychedelic rock-styled ''The Ones'', disbanded after releasing only one single. After The Ones, Froese experimented with musical ideas, playing smaller gigs with a variety of musicians. Most of these performances were in the famous Zodiak Free Arts Lab, although one grouping also had the distinction of being invited to play for the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. The music was partnered with literature, painting, early forms of multimedia, and more. It seemed as though only the most outlandish ideas attracted any attention, leading Froese to comment: "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, inspired by mishearing the line "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" from the Beatles' track " Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

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.

Released in 1970 by record label Ohr, 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. The line-up for the album was Froese, Klaus Schulze, and Conrad Schnitzler. ''Electronic Meditation'' began the period known as the ''Pink Years'' (the Ohr logo was a pink ear). Subsequent albums, beginning with ''Alpha Centauri'', relied heavily on electronic instruments. The band's music during the early 1970s prominently featured organ from Steve Schroyder (on ''Alpha Centauri'') or Peter Baumann (on subsequent releases), commonly augmented by guitar from Froese and drums from Christopher Franke. They also started their heavy usage of the Mellotron during this period.

Rise to fame: the Virgin years

The band's 1973 album '' Atem'' was named as one of British DJ John Peel's records of the year, 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 No. 15 in the UK Albums Chart and became one of Virgin's first bona fide hits. ''Phaedra'' was one of the first commercial albums 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 an accident: 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 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'.

Their mid-1970s work has been profoundly influential in the development of electronic music styles such as new-age (although the band themselves disliked the term) and electronic dance music.

In the 1980s, along with other electronic music pioneers such as Jean-Michel Jarre (with whom Edgar Froese collaborated on Jarre's 2015 album '' Electronica 1: The Time Machine'') and Vangelis, the band were early adopters of the new digital technology, which revolutionized the sound of the synthesizer, although the group had been using digital equipment (in some shape or form) as early as the mid-1970s. 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.

Tangerine Dream live

Tangerine Dream's earliest concerts were visually simple 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 happened during the performance at York Minster on 20 October 1975. As time went on and technology advanced, the concerts became 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 improvised material and were consequently widely bootlegged. They were notorious for playing extremely loudly (reaching 134 dB 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 that would later form the backbone of their studio recordings. (For example, ''Quichotte'', re-released as ''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 early example of this was the ''Ricochet'' album, a section of which was recorded during their 1975 tour but with a large amount of material recorded in the studio.

Forays into vocals

Most of Tangerine Dream's albums are entirely instrumental. Two earlier albums that prominently featured lyrics were ''Cyclone'' (1978) and '' Tyger'' (1987). While there were occasionally a few vocals on the band's other releases, such as the track "Kiew Mission" from 1981's '' Exit'' and "The Harbor" from 1987's '' Shy People'', the group only returned to featuring vocals on a larger scale in a musical trilogy based on Dante's ''Divine Comedy''. This was followed by a 2007 album '' Madcap's Flaming Duty'' and a 2010 cover collection '' Under Cover – Chapter One''.

After their 1980 East Berlin gig, when they became one of the first major Western bands to perform in a communist country, Tangerine Dream 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. 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 20 films. This had been an interest of Froese's since the late 1960s, when he scored an obscure Polish film, as well as appearing as an actor in several German underground films. He made the score for the experimental film "Never shoot the bathroom man", directed by Jürgen Polland. 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 US 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'', '' Thief'', ''Legend'', ''Risky Business'', '' The Keep'', '' Firestarter'', '' Flashpoint'', '' Heartbreakers'', '' Shy People'' and '' Near Dark''.

Tangerine Dream also composed 35-hours of music stems for the video game ''Grand Theft Auto V''.

In 2016, Tangerine Dream released their own version of the theme music for the television series ''Stranger Things''. Tangerine Dream had inspired music for the series.

Going independent

Several of the band's albums released during the 1990s were nominated for Grammy Awards. Since then, Tangerine Dream with Jerome Froese took a directional change away from the new-age leanings of those albums and toward an electronica style. After Jerome's departure, founder Edgar Froese steered the band in a direction somewhat reminiscent of material throughout their career.

In later years, Tangerine Dream released albums in series. The ''Dream Mixes'' series began in 1995 with the last being released in 2010. The ''Divine Comedy'' series, based on the writings of Dante Alighieri, spanned 2002–2006. From 2007 to 2010, the ''Five Atomic Seasons'' were released. Most recently, the ''Eastgate Sonic Poems'' series, based on the works of famous poetic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, began in 2011, with the last appearing in 2013. Also, beginning in 2007, Tangerine Dream released a number of EPs, referred to as "CupDiscs" by the band.

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, which are similar to his work within the ''Dream Mixes'' series. In 2005, he released his first solo album ''Neptunes'' under the name Jerome Froese. In 2006, Jerome left Tangerine Dream to concentrate on his solo career. His second solo album ''Shiver Me Timbers'' was released on 29 October 2007, and his third, ''Far Side of the Face'', was released in 2012. Beginning in 2011, Jerome Froese joined with former Tangerine Dream member Johannes Schmoelling and keyboardist Robert Waters to form the band Loom, which plays original material, as well as Tangerine Dream classics. Thorsten Quaeschning, leader of Picture Palace Music, was brought into Tangerine Dream in 2005 and contributed to most of the band's albums and CupDiscs since then.

The group had recording contracts with Ohr, Virgin, Jive Electro, Private Music, and Miramar, and many of the minor soundtracks were released on Varèse Sarabande. 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 or through online channels. The same applies to their Miramar releases, the rights to which the band bought back. Meanwhile, their Ohr and Jive Electro catalogs (known as the "Pink" and "Blue" Years) are currently owned by Esoteric Recordings.

Concert updates

To celebrate their 40th anniversary (1967–2007), Tangerine Dream announced their only UK concert: at London Astoria on 20 April 2007. The band also played a totally free open-air concert in Eberswalde on 1 July 2007 and at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt on Main on 7 October 2007. 2008 saw the band in Eindhoven

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