Stratosfear is the eighth major release and seventh studio album by the German group Tangerine Dream. The LP reached No.39 in the UK, in a 4-week chart run, and eventually reached silver status for selling in excess of 60,000 copies (£100,000+).
Stratosfear, the last Tangerine Dream album by the great Baumann/Franke/Froese threesome, shows the group's desire to advance past their stellar recent material and stake out a new musical direction while others were still attempting to come to grips with Phaedra and Rubycon. The album accomplishes its mission with the addition of guitar (six- and 12-string), grand piano, harpsichord, and mouth organ to the usual battery of moogs, Mellotrons, and e-pianos. The organic instruments take more of a textural role, embellishing the effects instead of working their own melodic conventions. Stratosfear is also the beginning of a more evocative approach for Tangerine Dream. Check the faraway harmonica sounds and assortment of synth-bubbles on "3 AM at the Border of the Marsh From Okefenokee" or the somber chords and choral presence of "The Big Sleep in Search of Hades"…
This release contains a real time composition from the TD line-up Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, Paul Frick. As a guest musician they invited Michał Łapaj of Riverside. This live session was recorded during their performance at the United Arts Festival in Gdansk and at Progresja Summer Stage in Warsaw in August 2021. The session is a special one, as it consists of a montage of the two live sessions from Gdansk and Warsaw - let yourself be surprised!
Andre Konchalovsky's 1986 film Shy People, would seem the perfect vehicle for a Tangerine Dream score. Alternately pensive and paranoid, full of taut drama and dreamy expanses as well as moments of true psychological horror, Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Paul Haslinger not only scored the film, but produced and engineered the recording, too.
This was the first TD album to incorporate lyrics and vocals (from Steve Jolliffe, who also contributed wind instruments and keyboards). By this point, the nucleus of the band was down to Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke, with the sound centering more on shifting arpeggiation over percussive rhythm structures, with "Madrigal Meridian" being an impressive example of this. Jolliffe's vocal contributions on "Bent Cold Sidewalk" and "Rising Runner Missed by Endless Sender" provide an aggressive edge that effectively catapults the listener from the hypnotic pulse that Tangerine Dream are best known for - still, it's by no means a failed experiment, though it does make Cyclone one of the least useful TD albums for working up a good meditative state.
This 2CD set features newly recorded versions of fan favorites such as "Cloudburst Flight" (from the 1979 album Force Majeure) and "Scrapyard" (from the 1981 soundtrack to the Michael Mann film "Thief") along with other rare tracks plus a stellar version of The Beatles’ "Tomorrow Never Knows" and much more.
"Booster" comes as a double CD and contains some real goodies from the alchymical soundboard of TD. There are two brand-new compositions and some tracks which aren't available on various EP's anymore. Of course you will hear music you've probably heard before. But for some of you it will become a collector's item as a pack of tracks which definitely will become 'classics' out of the first decade of the new musical Century.
Quinoa is a set of rare and previously unreleased material from Tangerine Dream. "Voxel Ux" was composed for a website competition in 1996. "Quinoa" was available to fan-club members only. It was a limited-edition (1,000 copies) release in 1992. "Lhasa" is the first of seven movements in Tangerine Dream's Tibetan cycle. This CD is the classic Tangerine Dream sound with heavy sequences and dense atmospheres. Saxophone riffs are an added bonus. Tangerine Dream fans and e-music lovers will like this disc a lot.
In a sense, Tangerine Dream's 2008 album, "Views from a Red Train", is an updated version of Edgar Froese's solo album "Macula Transfer" of 1976 in that many of the tracks were composed by Froese whilst killing time on the road, either in airport departure lounges, motel rooms, or simply visiting tourist spots. Happily, the result this time is an altogether more mature and developed affair, even than the solo album's 2005 rehash. The new album benefits hugely from substantial contributions from regular TD collaborating artists in addition to the composer: Bernhard Beibl provides characteristically flashy and flamboyant guitar work on a handful of tracks, complementing Edgar Froese's own intoxicating melodic riffs to perfection; Iris Camaa adds her own brand of electronic percussion in places (most noticeably in 'Hunter Shot by a Yellow Rabbit' and 'Fire on the Mountain')…
Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a newly re-mastered edition of Tangerine Dream’s classic soundtrack to the legendary film Sorcerer, directed by William Friedkin in 1976. Tangerine Dream members Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann composed a stunning electronic score which perfectly accompanied Ffriedkin’s imagary and was the band s first commission for a Hollywood movie. This Esoteric Reactive edition is newly re-mastered, restores the original album artwork and includes a lavishly illustrated booklet with new essay.