Raum 2022

Tangerine Dream will release their new album Raum on February 25 (via Kscope/Eastgate Music). The album from Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Paul Frick features music composed and produced with access to the archives and Cubase arrangements of the group’s founder, the late Edgar Froese.

On their new album 'Raum', Tangerine Dream develop the concept of its precursor EP (Probe 68) further. Composed & produced with full access to Edgar Froese's Cubase arrangements (& Otari Tape Archive with recordings from 1977-2013), Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane & Paul Frick deliver late-night real time compositions combined with classic studio productions, sequencer driven haunting soundscapes alternate with anthemic warm synthesizers.
Composed in a time of social distancing & cancelled shows, the tracks cannot exactly be recreated (or will at least need significant re-instrumentation for a live performance). With the 17-minute 'In 256 Zeichen', they lay the fundament of this record. 'Continuum', with its repetitive sequence & broken beat shows glimpses of acid sounds & increasing choral atmospheres. 'You Are Always On Time' is built on PPG wavetable sounds & eerie field recordings. The title track 'Raum' makes a nod towards the early live studio performances like 'Zeit' & 'Phaedra' - the melody accompanied by a chorus-like Roland Jupiter 8 part. An ambient rave Moog Minitaur sequence highlights the final peak, till the violin slowly transports the listener out. A heavy Moog bass marks the beginning & the end of this 15-minute piece.
'Raum' is the band's second studio album after the passing of the founder Edgar Froese in 2015. With deep respect for the sound of the previous five decades, this record continues in the ever-evolving pathway of Tangerine Dream.

Two pieces that I played recently. The first piece has more for the sequencer fans, and the second piece provides forty golden moments of space exploration for reading, relaxing, or sleeping. This release comes after a period of sound design (i.e. sitting and playing with the instruments and enjoying the sounds that emerged) and, as ever, I remembered to press record during that process. There's a lot more of it, but maybe that's for another time.

MACH (DO) is the title of a cycle of pieces for solo instruments which Eres Holz began in 2011 with a virtuoso trumpet solo and which now comprises nine pieces, with live electronics added since the clarinet piece of 2016. MACH! is both an exhortation and an homage to the physicist Ernst Mach. The unit of measurement that bears the latter’s name is still used to indicate the speed of supersonic aircraft – a suggestion of the difficulty of the pieces. MACH, as written in the score of the organ piece, is “a kind of invitation to do that which is not trivial”.

While numerous new wave artists in the early '80s tried to imitate David Bowie, Peter Schilling went a step further. In 1983, Schilling released "Major Tom (Coming Home)," a synth pop retelling of Bowie's 1969 classic "Space Oddity." It became Schilling's first and only entry in the U.S. charts, a song that eventually stigmatized him as a one-hit wonder in America.

In 2017, the Saxon Wind Philharmonic was accepted into Germany's "Excellent Orchestra Landscape" federal subsidy program by a commission for an orchestral piece to the renowned composer Jörg Mainka. With Cloud-Castle, Mainka created a reference work for contemporary symphonic wind music, which the elite ensemble from Bad Lausick has recorded for the first time on this GENUIN album.

Bright Dark’ is the name of a new project and album from Berlin-based pianist Mark Pringle, featuring Felix Henkelhausen on double bass and Philip Dornbusch on drums. Introducing occasional electronic elements into an otherwise vibrant acoustic space, the trio dive fearlessly into Pringle’s compositions with open ears, navigating playful rhythmic vamps, weaving delicate tapestries of sound and meditating on lyrical melodies.

MACH (DO) is the title of a cycle of pieces for solo instruments which Eres Holz began in 2011 with a virtuoso trumpet solo and which now comprises nine pieces, with live electronics added since the clarinet piece of 2016.

Zum Inhalt des Albums Auszüge aus einem Gespräch mit den Künstlern: "Was wollen Sie beide dem Publikum als Herzensbotschaft mit dieser Aufnahme mitgeben? Sarah Brady: Wir möchten zu einer lebensnahen Reise quer durch alle Aspekte der Liebe einladen. Frauenliebe und -leben endet mit dem Tod des geliebten Mannes, und es ist uns sehr wichtig, hier einen neuen Optimismus in den Raum zu stellen: Einen Optimismus, der zeigt, dass die geliebten Menschen auch nach dem Tod immer in unseren Herzen und in unseren Leben bleiben, auch wenn sie physisch nicht mehr unter uns sind.