Save Big on Used Gear + Use Code CUPID10 for 10% Off Select New Items. Shop the Sale Save Big on Used Gear + Use Code CUPID10 for 10% Off Select New Items. Shop the Sale Save Big on Used Gear + Use Code CUPID10 for 10% Off Select New Items. Shop the Sale Save Big on Used Gear + Use Code CUPID10 for 10% Off Select New Items. Shop the Sale

Why We Care About Tangerine Dream

Pioneering Popular Electronic Music

Robin Vincent · 12/19/24

Tangerine Dream exists somewhere in the subconscious of the universe. Even if you're unaware of the band, there will be some flicker of recognition of the name and elements of their music will be hauntingly familiar. Whether you heard it in an elevator, threaded through a movie or resonating in the background of a festival, something about it stays with us even when you're not seeking it out. For those of us who seek, yearn, and explore the avenues of electronic music, Tangerine Dream is the soul within machine-led composition. It's like if opera was electronic or if Kraftwerk got emotional the result would be found in Tangerine Dream.

Tangerine Dream: the Beginning

The band was the 1967 brainchild of Edgar Froese. Edgar, a Berlin-based musician, played in psychedelic rock bands until inspired by an encounter with Salvador Dali to travel down more experimental roads. Pushing boundaries was very much in line with Edgar's interests in art, surrealism, philosophy and psychology. Gathering various avant-garde and psychedelic musicians together in those early years resulted in the strangling, stretching and bashing of guitars, organs, flutes and household objects into what would become known as kosmische Musik or cosmic music. Listening to the 1971 release Alpha Centauri is an exercise in meditative, otherworldly terror.

Froese had an insatiable thirst for musicians, and since its inception, Tangerine Dream has worked through dozens and dozens of them. An early period of stability was found with Chris Franke and Peter Baumann. Franke introduced Froese to Stockhausen and the avant-garde while exploring intentional electronic instruments like the VCS3 synthesizer. Baumann, an accomplished keyboard player, was exploring music through the lens of art and surrealism. This lineup produced the complex meanderings of the rhythmically formless Zeit album, which flowed into the weird but significant 1973 album Atem. Atem brought back drums, smothered everything in the Mellotron, and stood out enough from other "Prog Rock" albums at the time for the BBC's John Peel to vote it one of his albums of the year.

It wasn't until a move to Virgin Records and 1974's Phaedra and then Rubycon in 1975 that the signature "Berlin school" sound of Tangerine Dream began to emerge. The presence and intensity of their sequenced synthesizers tapped into something very primal that we are all too familiar with today. At the time it was something extraordinary, futuristic and yet timeless, and you hear it every time you sit down with a modular synthesizer or hardware sequencer. It brought them worldwide attention and pushed them to return to the live performance arena that had been a vital part of previous projects.

Taking Tangerine Dream on tour was no mean feat. Along with the Mellotron, they had to transport a Moog Modular and lots of other equipment, which was a little bit too delicate for the road. They were plagued with breakdowns and tuning problems, resulting in large sections of the concerts being improvised. In many ways, that was the nature of experimental music at the time. All areas of Prog and Psychedelic rock often forged new material in the fires of the live performance, and while leaning heavily into the electronics, Froese's guitar and Franke's drums still reflected some of that character. It brought an intensity and immediacy to the sound. You knew that a Tangerine Dream gig would always contain something you had never heard before, and that's what made them so riveting. Some of that vibe was captured in the 1975 album Ricochet. They also went through something of a visual transformation. To start with, they were just three men sitting still at machines, so they took to playing in complete darkness, which only deepened their legendary weirdness. But it wasn't long before lights and lasers were patched in to react to the music, adding to the otherworldliness of the event. Gradually it turned into quite an inspirational, art-infused spectacle that is widely copied to this day.

Such was the rising influence of Tangerine Dream at this time that Peter Baumann was able to commission a highly customised modular synth from Berlin-based industrial test equipment manufacturer Projekt Electronik. It was designed to follow the Moog format but to be more robust for gigging and featured normalled connections behind the panels to reduce the amount of patching. Connections could be made with the flick of a switch, as could the generation of intervals and chords using fixed offsets. The integrated sequencers were remarkably flexible, with control over step length and patterns that hadn't really been seen before. The PE Modular was to have a huge influence over the Tangerine Dream sound for the next decade. (See here for some photographs of the PE Modualr system.)

The classic era of Froese, Franke and Baumann came to an end in 1977 as Baumann went on to pursue solo projects. Before he did, the band released the very airy Stratosfear and the live album Encore, recorded from their North American tour. They were recording all the time to a 4-track Ampex deck in the hope of capturing moments of improvised brilliance. It's interesting to note that Tangerine Dream were not touring previous works or doing live versions of popular tracks like other bands; these concerts were an event all of themselves, full of improvisation and the exploring of ideas that would shape how the next album was made. Encore remains a useful marker of the evolution Tangerine Dream had gone through up to this point.

Transition into Soundtrack Work

It took a little while to find their feet again. Froese and Franke drafted in other musicians for the 1978 Cyclone and even experimented with vocals, but the album didn't really land as well as they hoped. Although, in my view, the track "Madrigal Meridian" is an excellent piece of psychedelia. But then, moving forward with Klauss Krieger on drums, they recorded Force Majeure at Hansa Studios in Berlin, and it seemed to capture something quite epic. It's like there's a subtle shift in structure towards something more mainstream and familiar. For me, Force Majeure has reflections of some of what would become their work for TV and cinema. You can almost visualise the opening credits to some futuristic 1980s cop show, and it was only a matter of time until that came to pass.

One of the reasons why Tangerine Dream has become so embedded in our culture is down to their soundtrack work. They seemed to embody the sound of early 80s movies. The 1981 soundtrack to the Michael Mann movie Thief brought them to the attention of Hollywood. Their music turned up on all sorts of things, from test card backgrounds to the theme from Street Hawk and over 20 motion pictures. Their most popular track on Spotify, "Love on a Real Train," comes from the soundtrack to the 1983 movie Risky Business, directed by Paul Brickman. The track underpins a highly sexually charged scene between Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay, and the rhythm and simplicity of the music has lost none of its potency.

However, their success was not always felt in the mainstream as much as many of the artists who followed in Tangerine Dream’s footsteps. It's remarkable that while the soundtrack from Thief was nominated for the "Worst Musical Score" at the 1982 Golden Raspberry Awards, it was Vangelis who walked off with that year's Oscar for Chariots of Fire.

Transformations in the 1980s

Around this time there were other changes that were helped along by the arrival of piano player and engineer Johannes Schmoelling. He pushed them out of the single-scale sequencer lines into more complex chordal structures. Meanwhile, Franke was cozying up to brands such as Oberheim and Sequential, finding himself right on the front edge of polyphonic synthesizers, which included flying to Japan to help Roland with the design of the Jupiter-8. These shifts can be felt in 1980s album Tangram, and their performance over the wall in East Berlin, which eventually produced the 1986 album Pergamon.

The 1980s saw massive transformations in music technology. It's like one minute, they were recording tape loops on the Mellotron for the Exit album (1981) and by 1983's Hyperborea it was all about the sampling. The opening track, "No Man's Land," contains a wild amount of sampled instruments and sequencer ratcheting, which you would be forgiven for thinking was a very recent technique. Although Synclaviers, Emulators and Fairlights were emerging, it was built using Franke’s preferred platform, the Waveterm computer's digital sequencer attached to the PPG Wave synthesizer.

More personnel changes saw Paul Haslinger join in 1986. Haslinger is credited for bringing a more Electronica vibe to the group, moving away from the New Age, improvised psychedelia. Their live performances also changed, where now they were recreating existing music rather than forging new ideas through improvisation. This was helped by the fact that synthesizers could now store presets, so sessions could be recalled rather than patched on the fly. The change may partially be the reason why Franke decided to leave in 1988.

Franke's Departure

For me, Christoph Franke is perhaps the most interesting member of Tangerine Dream. He's been largely responsible for the technology behind the sound of the band. While it was Baumann who commissioned the huge PE Modular, it was Franke who built the studio where they rehearsed and recorded. It was Franke who spent years playing on The Rolling Stones Moog Modular at Hansa Studios. Franke was the master of the sequence, always pushing the boundaries of what they could do and wanted to engineer sounds into existence before the technology existed to do it. In the early '80s, he was trying to convince Mellotron to go digital and spoke to Tom Oberheim about making a sampler. At the time, Franke had made his own little sampler with a few milliseconds of sampling time, just enough to use it as a drum source. Forese commented that over that first decade, probably 80% of their income went into sound research and the development of new instruments. They amassed a huge library of unique sounds, loops and ideas that would have a foundational influence on the musical community. Later on, Franke would design controllers and sequencers and even have a hand in developing Steinberg's Cubase. The value of his contribution to the development of music technology can’t really be measured.

What fascinates me now is that when asked why he left, some of the reasons were due to having so much equipment that they never had the time to explore it. They became surrounded by keyboards (rather than more modular machines), which led them into repetitive dead ends, and everything was just a little too smooth. That sense, I believe, is being played out in our industry all the time. Computer musicians feel it in the endless auditioning of snare drums, which might prompt them to find new adventures in the restrictions of hardware. But then, once you have filled every space in your studio with hardware, you feel no less overwhelmed and perhaps start to see the computer as way of ease and progression, and so the cycle continues. There's something true about enthusiasm and open-mindedness being far more important than the gear you surround yourself with, a sentiment Edgar shared.

Ultimately, Franke got bored, built a studio in Los Angeles and moved on to do his own soundtrack work. This included composing the music for the sci-fi series Babylon 5.

Tangerine Dream in the 1990s & 2000s

After Haslinger's departure in 1990, Froese opened up the emphasis to include more acoustic instruments. Edgar's son Jerome Froese contributed guitars over the next 15 years. Linda Spa brought saxophone and flute, and Zlatko Perica added more guitar, leaving Edgar to look after the technology. The 1980s had a transformational impact on a lot of bands that forged their sound in the analog era of the 1970s. Many similarly experimental bands, such as Genesis, Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk, changed massively in the digital era. Tangerine Dream changed too, but perhaps not so dramatically. The 1992 Rockoon album, written exclusively by the Froese father and son team, retained a lot of the progression, experimental and slightly psychedelic edge and was nominated for the Best New Age Album grammy award.

Albums, soundtracks and tours continued apace into the new millennium, but nothing really stood out until they found their new Franke in the shape of Thorsten Quaeschning. He was an accomplished, classically trained musician but also a studio technician with a deep affinity for the sort of complex music technology Tangerine Dream fed on. They worked together for over 12 years, and I feel that in Thorsten, Edgar found someone who could take the band forward while being a sponge for philosophy, approach and musical authenticity that Tangerine Dream had built up over the decades. At this time, Japanese violinist Hoshiko Yamane joined the band, who, along with Linda Spa and Bernhard Beibl, expanded the acoustic instrument contribution. Edgar later reduced this element down to just Hoshiko, who had begun to lean into Ableton Live performance software, pedals and loopers. Edgar's curation and direction wasn’t flawless, but somehow he navigated the band through a time when the computer threatened to swallow every musical risk into the blandness of digitally perfected mediocrity. He considered computers and samplers to be overrated pieces of equipment beyond being tools to help you explore your ideas.

In 2013 came a pivotal moment that would place Tangerine Dream into the subconscious of every gamer the world over. They produced the soundtrack to the Rockstar game Grand Theft Audio V. They racked up something like 62 hours of music that was infused into every aspect of the game. After "Love on a Real Train," half of their next most popular tracks on Spotify are from GTAV, although that might say more about the cross-over demographic of Spotify and gamers than the general popularity of Tangerine Dream tracks.

After Froese

Sadly, on the 20th of January 2015, Edgar Froese died from a pulmonary embolism. In the year before his death, the band collaborated with Jean Michel Jarre on a track called "Zero Gravity," which appeared on the Electronics 1: The Time Machine album and also featured Air, Moby, Massive Attack, and John Carpenter. In conversation with Edgar's wife and Tangerine Dream's manager, Bianca Froese-Acquaye, they agreed to continue pursuing the work. Electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss joined the band with a renewed electronic focus that felt like they were coming full circle.

Some of the first music they produced without Edgar was four tracks for the Netflix series Stanger Things. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, who were the original composers for the show, cited Tangerine Dream as a massive influence—and you can tell.

In 2020 Schnauss moved on to solo projects, and Paul Frick came in to fill the void. Frick had been performing with the band on stage for a couple of years before becoming an official member. There's an extraordinary video of Paul and Thorsten playing together at the Superbooth synthesizer festival in Berlin in 2019. It's breathtaking in its musicality, but also in its classic Tangerine Dream feel.

Thorsten is now the longest-serving member of Tangerine Dream after Froese. There's something about the current trio that inspires confidence in the future journeys into cosmic music. The direction is more fluid and dynamic. In the 1970s and 80s, it was about inventing the music-making machines of the future, pushing from analog to digital to computerised and crossing boundaries. Today, strands go off in all directions, pulling in from the past, wrapping itself around the huge amount of technology that pulses through these times. The resurgence in analog gear has enabled Tangerine Dream to revisit its past lives while still leaning into what's coming. The 2022 album Raum is generally regarded as their finest work in a couple of decades; really since the classic era of Forese, Baumann and Franke at Virgin Records. It's a sumptuous listen, full of the Berlin School of sequencing, but with modern production, fascinating sounds and a timeless depth and intensity.

It is perhaps in their live performances that the spirit of Tangerine Dream is really at play. Under Thorsten’s direction a performance will spend time recreating the old material and rewarding fans with glimpses of their most influential tracks. However, at the end of each show the musicians let themselves fall into the indulgences of improvisation to forge new adventures in electronic music.

Legacy

The influence of Tangerine Dream is felt so warmly by the synthesizer and electronic music community. It's experienced every time someone steps up to their modular or sets a wash of pads under a sequenced bassline. It's appreciated in the risks they took in soundtrack work, which makes you wonder if there was no Tangerine Dream, would Vangelis' Blade Runner theme have ever existed? Their contribution to technological developments is probably less known, but Franke's studio building and experimentation were pushing technology at a very pivotal time. While they may have found themselves wandering cultural cul-de-sacs in the 1990s and 2000s, the new age of hardware has gathered them into itself as godparents of the latest synth wave.

Why do we care about Tangerine Dream? Because they are us. They are musicians, engineers, adventurers, tinkerers, designers of dreams, and captivators of sound. They’ve shown us what is electronically possible and inspired us to push for the future while respecting our heritage. Whether we can name a single track from their catalogue of over 100 albums, we know that so much of the gear we use and the music we find in our machines comes with gratitude to this band's work.

Recommended Listening:

  • Phaedra (1974)
  • Rubycon (1975)
  • Force Majeure (1979)
  • Hyperborea (1983)
  • Rockoon (1992)
  • Raum (2022)

Selected Live Performances: