Maschinenpop: Tangerine Dream: You are not alone in the cold universe

At the very beginning they called it “cosmic music.” You can easily imagine this babble and humming as the sound of artists’ studios in the early 1970s when people were painting large abstract surfaces and struggling to think of a title for the painting. No wonder, since Tangerine Dream’s first musicians came from the fine arts or were Stockhausen students who earned extra money playing blues rock and psychedelia in West Berlin clubs. Before they got into the new hot shit: synthesizers.

Shortly afterwards, in the “Virgin years” (named after their English record company Virgin Records), Tangerine Dream further developed their synthetic original substance in the sound laboratory and became the flagship of the “Berlin School for Electronic Music”. While the Düsseldorf relatives of Kraftwerk increasingly developed into ironic, reductionist man-machine, Tangerine Dream carried out an alchemical marriage between the machine and the organic. Highways and Rrrrobotsrr weren’t her thing; Rather, they described nature, metaphysics, the unconscious, myth – living, breathing abstracts from whose mist shape and form emerge and disappear again at a geological pace.

The threatening album “Phaedra” from 1974, the group’s first successful record, offers an excellent vantage point into the sound geology of the dreaming tangerines – as long as you don’t have a head for heights and aren’t a sufferer of anxiety. If you want to immerse yourself further in this tectonics, you can purchase the twelve records from the “Virgin Years” either as an inexpensive or luxurious box or browse through the band’s generous YouTube channel. A few other albums from these years that were not subject to the Virgin contract might also be instructive. For example, the first two film scores – those for William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” (“Breathless with Fear”) and Michael Mann’s “Thief” (“The Loner”) – or the Eastern Bloc live records “Pergamon” and “Poland”.

Tangerine Dream achieved some notable successes on the avant-garde side of the Krautrock spectrum with their “cosmic music” from 1970 onwards, but it was only after they emigrated to London’s Virgin Records that something started to slip. 50 years ago, “Phaedra” was in the British LP charts for weeks and sold a million copies to completely amazed music listeners in the UK alone. The freedom of form of these sounds was as fascinating as it was disturbing. Was it even popular music or was it a continuation of Beethoven, Bach, Ligeti, Riley and Stockhausen with different means? Influential English radio DJ John Peel was a fan, David Bowie and Brian Eno were fans, and Steven Wilson says he first got into music through Tangerine Dream. Germany, on the other hand, had already downgraded itself to a frugal rock province after the upheavals of Krautrock and had lost its sense of wonder: “Phaedra” sold a mere 6,000 copies in this country. Incidentally, Kraftwerk’s initial album “Autobahn” fared hardly differently in Germany in the same year.

Suddenly Tangerine Dream, then consisting of the trio Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann, were Germany’s most important electronics company out in the world. And in Eastern Europe too, in the evenings in barren youth rooms, thanks to piracy recordings and world radio, people listened to these wonderful sounds that seemed to promise nothing other than freedom – namely through their own freedom of form and through the organic way with which they brought the world into the barricaded workers’ homes. , farming and concrete states.

Their cultural officials let the band in in person early on because they considered this purely instrumental music to be unsuspicious. In the East Berlin Palace of the Republic, at the beginning of 1980, officials secured 80 percent of the tickets for this first ever appearance by a West band for themselves and their most deserving labor heroes. This in turn immediately became unruly and caused 900 people who were waiting in front of the venue without tickets to be allowed in. There are voices in Poland who claim that Tangerine Dream’s self-torturing tour in the bitterly cold December 1983 prepared the eventual demolition of the Iron Curtain just as much as Solidarność or John Paul II. On the live album “Poland” you can hear how machine rhythms chip away at walls When longing-sacral soundscapes pour over your mind and how the audience reacts to them, you want to believe it.

In fact, strange things still happen today when you let the “Virgin Years” whir into the player. The neurons sniff it and immediately get to work. To then be completely absorbed in hypnotic sound worlds full of tenderness and noise, highs and lows. You find yourself among endless cascades, in the midst of eternally stretching patterns and mysteries, caught in ever-building structure that somehow never gets finished, and millimeter-precise escalating beauty, caught even between the sequencer rhythms that jump around each other in an astonishing way .

Floating in your own timelessness, you suddenly realize: you are not alone in the cold universe. Everything is alive! The architecture, the air around you, even the machines, even the vacuum of the cosmos, maybe even the concrete of the real socialists. You want to keep exploring these transcending fractals, so that in the end you just start over again. The Virgin Years are an ouroboros, an alchemical serpent that bites its own tail.

Sure, after that the discography became a bit confusing and random, and the sounds that Edgar Froese generated became decidedly too stringy, too cozy. But the tangerines are now dreaming more restlessly again. After Froese’s death in 2015, his three Eleven continued at Froese’s request, viewed with suspicion by skeptics and purists, and have since built a considerable bridge over the breathing mists of time with careful retrofication. This is clearly today’s music and yet it almost sounds like “Phaedra”.