Julian Cope:
Electronic Meditation - Just buy it, keep it and play it forever - it is a true classic of pre-sythesizer krautness and gives insight into the whole pre-history!
Tangerine Dream - Alpha Centauri
TD Use synthesizers!
Tangerine Dream - Zeit
Zeit (time) is an absolutely weird double album. It's title is well chosen because this album is not suitable for hectic listeners at all! The flow of music is gentle and slow and it seems as though nothing happened. But it does if you can get into it - which is not easy! Listen yourselves, it is too hard to describe Zeit decently. Music from a different galaxy. - by Wah-Wah.
Tangerine Dream - Atem
This is a both a Patrick Moore and a David Attenborough of a disc. It is an epic journey as if propelled and funded by an entire BBC department for a year before being blasted off in a time capsule to the far reaches of outer space. Atem is classic early TD in all its full colour wide screen cinematic glory. Pounding drums, rich church organs, fluid synths, gentle classical strings, bubblings, warblings, twitterings, rumblings it's all here, 20 minutes of seismic pleasure. Fauni Gena is an exploration through a thick lush rainforest. It is early morning and the mists are rising. You can feel the leeches sucking on your blood and you are raw from the bites of the overnight insects. You are not alone, you know that you are being watched and you have to get away. You find your way to a clearing and there is a small circle of huts. You search in vain, the fire is still smoking...........Circulation of Events is a welcome relief as the monster drifts by oblivious to your presence although there is a common sense of unease in its melody. It all ends quite weirdly with echoed voices, toms and more synths beating us to a primitive pulp.
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The 2nd 3rd and 4th albums are all acknowledged by Aphex Twin, Underworld, Eno, Orbital as ambient classics.
The 1st album is very much like Can!
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The remaining albums are much more melodic and i would describe them like Kraftwerk without the vocals. Less poppy. Nothing like the new age music they made in the 1980s.
Stratosfear and Force Majeure are the pick of them. If you like kraftwerk and the more melodic pulsing end of 70s electronic these albums are for you.
Now over to you the ILXors...
― Rastaman Kraut, Sunday, 18 April 2004 19:30 (twenty-two years ago)
Were Tangerine Dream the 1st band to use synths? Don't understand why they arent as rated by some crtics as Kraftwerk. yes they are different from one another but both are pioneers of electronic music and both made some of the most astonshing and innovative music of the 1970s. Just a shame it went so bad in the 1980s. But surely they can be forgiven as they produced such brlliant work in the decade before.
They were interviewed by NME and the stuffy rockist writer walked out of the interview after telling him that "in 10 years times there will be bands with synths instead of guitars topping the charts"
They got it right.
Werent they banned by the vatican from playing cathedrals ?
― paul rafferty, Sunday, 18 April 2004 19:39 (twenty-two years ago)
I do actually think that Kraftwerk's influence on synth-pop, a great deal of New Wave (British New Wave, anyway), and techno was more significant than Tangerine Dream's influence, which I think was really just in the development of new age music (via Kitaro and such). Not to say that Tangerine Dream's influence on the development of new age music is anything to sneeze at.
The early Tangerine Dream albums are Krautrock classics, I think.
― Tim Ellison, Sunday, 18 April 2004 20:04 (twenty-two years ago)
I don't know about either of those stories.
I think I agree with cope though about the 1st 4 albums being the best. They really were unique at the time.
No idea about them being the 1st to use synths. I would doubt it very much though.
X-post
Yeah I agree about Kraftwerk being the influence on synth pop. But I was thinking that they certainly were as big an influence on dance music/techno as a whole.
And i really do feel that the early albums were certainly the influence on ambient music that eno made.
― Rastaman Kraut, Sunday, 18 April 2004 20:07 (twenty-two years ago)
I think the Vatican story was that Tangerine Dream, in the early days, played in the cathedral, I think, in Rheims, France and it was overcrowded and people were peeing on the floor and, apparently, the cathedral was exorcised afterwards?? The story about this is mentioned in Lester Bangs' "I Saw God and/or Tangerine Dream," which is in the Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung collection.
― Tim Ellison, Sunday, 18 April 2004 20:12 (twenty-two years ago)
Ok I didn't mean as big as an influence as Kraftwerk, I meant to have the word 'almost' in there. But they dont seem to get much recognition apart from a few bands as mentioned above.
Clearly Kraftwerk were a bigger influence than Tangerine Dream.
― Rastaman Kraut, Sunday, 18 April 2004 20:13 (twenty-two years ago)