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 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 until his own departure in 1985. This lineup was notable for composing many movie soundtracks. Since Froese's death in 2015, the group has been under the leadership of Thorsten Quaeschning. Quaeschning is Froese's chosen successor and is currently the longest-serving band member, having joined in 2005. Quaeschning is currently joined by violinist Hoshiko Yamane who joined in 2011 and Paul Frick who joined in 2020. Prior to this Quaeschning and Yamane performed with Ulrich Schnauss from 2014 to 2020. Schnauss only played three shows with Froese in November 2014 before Froese's passing.
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 titled 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.
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 a 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 recorder, 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. However, while the Moog provided the sequences, the band's dominant instrument during this period was the Mellotron, with the band using four of them, not only for polyphonic textures but also for sound effects. Many of their electronic sounds were recorded on custom Mellotron tapes for live performance. The track "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares" was entirely played on a Mellotron. Phaedra 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 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.
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 and acted in the experimental film "Auf Scheißer schießt man nicht", directed by Hansjürgen Pohland. 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.