Deadly Dream

Another TD soundtrack that saw the daylight years after its recording was Deadly Care, music for a TV movie that was composed and recorded back in 1987 by Edgar Froese and Chris Franke but not released until 1992. The CD contains all of the music as supplied by TD to Universal Television. "Deadly Care" is a haunting, detached and at times a melancholic soundtrack. It's dark soundscapes are apropos and the quality of the musical performances are very refined. Edgar Froese and friends entice listeners with an ominously profound, gloomy but high quality CD, namely, Deadly Care.

The Anthology Decades is a compilation of older studio material which has been previously unreleased, though some of the tracks seem to be remixed ('tangentized') or alternate versions of some well-known material: Sunset In The Fifth System obviously bases on an excerpt from Alpha Centauri, Exit To Heaven is very similar to Edinburgh Castle, and Landing On 51 essentially overlays Astral Voyager with some new melody lines. On the other hand, official information from the Tangerine Dream Forum state: "Speculations on so-called 'tangentized' material or the use of some 'overwashed' production methods are completely false. They are compositions out of the 70ies and 80s which have been recorded for the first time or have been taken from Edgar's personal sound library"…

Despite being credited to both Edgar Froese and Jerome Froese, in fact only the final track of the disc carries anything of Edgar's fingerprints, being an alternate mix of his own composition Mombasa, originally released just a few months ago on Booster III (2009). All of the other remixes on DM V are solely the result of Jerome's work on classic TD material from the seventies and eighties, all of which have the original music more or less discernible at some point within them. The most deeply buried of the originals is the brief inclusion of a snatch of Rubycon (1975) as an inner layer to The Return of Time, largely swallowed by a newly minted percussion pulse and swathe of electronic textures. Other tracks, however, offer substantial representations of clearly recognisable original thematic materials, in bold but entirely appropriate new ways, such as the title track from Exit (1981) as Flow Paths…

"Lily On The Beach", recorded and released in 1989, had two aspects showing TD's musical direction for the nineties: It was the first TD album featuring Edgar Froese's then 19 year old son Jerome Froese as guest musician playing lead guitar on the track Radio City; Jerome would become a regular member of TD in the next year and get more and more influence on TD's work in the future. On the other hand Long Island Sunset was the first TD composition featuring saxophone, an uncommon type of instrument for TD's music of the eighties, but becoming a strong part of their work in the early nineties.

Tangram marked the beginning of a new musical direction for Tangerine Dream. It's closer to straight-ahead, melodic new age music and more tied to their soundtrack material. The first of the two side-long pieces progresses through several different passages that use gently brushed acoustic guitars as well as the requisite synthesizers. For new age fans, this is the first glimmering of Tangerine Dream's eventual direction during the '80s.

Rockoon is one of Tangerine Dream's Miramar CDs and one of their Grammy-nominated albums. It features their signature Berlin school electronica with rock & roll textures. It is rhythmic but not techno. There are heavy sequences and some excellent atmospheric passages, but the excellence does not last. It seems like Tangerine Dream just mailed this one in.

It's very difficult to recommend this release to any serious Tangerine Dream fan. Why? Simply because all of these tracks have been released before on other compilations of TD Eastgate/TDI releases, making this a compilation of other compilations. It's a tricky business, but that's what it is, business. There has been no further remastering of the sound - which was excellent in the first place - and the only thing that's really "new" here is the digipack and its design. It's also difficult to recommend this set to those new to TD, simply because there is so much other material that's more cohesive and more important than what's here, from Edgar Froese's various incarnations of the band.

Originally recorded in 1973, Green Desert did not see the light of day until it was remixed and released as part of the In the Beginning box set in 1986, then as its own album later the same year. It is difficult to ascertain how radical this release is from the original recording, but as it stands, it is a logical step between the rawer-produced Atem to the ambient/sequencer-driven style of Phaedra. A key element of this is attributable to Edgar Froese's guitar playing on the title track, an unhurried solo that lasts only about five minutes in the nearly 20-minute piece, yet is easily the most memorable part of the entire song. None of the three shorter songs are as dynamic as the first, each containing a keyboard melody played over synthesized noises and the rhythms of drums, sequencers, or a series of chords.

Tangerine Dream had debuted on record the same year of the original Moon launch, and 30 years down the road, Edgar Froese and co. decided to dedicate a recording to the next step, the eventual landing of a man on Mars. The result, Mars Polaris, is what sounds like a surprisingly accurate rendering of the unmanned Mars Polar Lander's visit to the Red Planet (destined to arrive late in 1999), though the evocative atmospheres and gaseous effects are helped along by the equally descriptive titles "Mars Mission Counter," "Tharsis Maneuver," "The Silent Rock" and "Spiral Star Date."

Exit marks the beginning of a new phase in Tangerine Dream's music: Gone were the side-long, sequencer-led journeys, replaced by topical pieces that were more self-contained in scope, more contemporary in sound. Johannes Schmoelling's influence is really felt for the first time here; Tangram, for all its crispness and melody, was simply a refinement of Force Majeure's principles, and the soundtrack to Thief not an album proper. On Exit, listeners are introduced to electronic music's next generation, notably on "Choronzon" and "Network 23," which brought the sound of the dancefloor into the mix (it hasn't left since). That's not to suggest that Tangerine Dream has stopped creating eerie, evocative music…