Tangerine Dream Virgin

"Exit" is an electronic music album released in 1981 by the German group Tangerine Dream. The first track features an uncredited Berlin actress chanting, in Russian, the names of the continents of the world and pleading to end the threat of "limited" nuclear war, which was a potential danger facing the world during the late Cold War era in which the album was released. "Exit" reached No.43 in the UK, spending 5 weeks on the chart.

From mid October to late November 1982, TD toured in Europe performing 31 gigs at all in Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the UK, Belgium, West and East Germany. The concert at the Dominion Theatre in London was released only a few weeks after on the record "Logos Live".

The name to this album was inspired by a quote from Caesar and the album follows in the footsteps of the extremly successful recording "Phaedra".
"Rubycon" featured much the same instrumentation as "Phaedra". It also showed a certain distance to mainstream rock, in that it was a suite in two parts, taking up two entire sides of the album - as did Mike Oldfield's mid-'70s albums "Tubular Bells", "Hergest Ridge" and "Ommadawn" which were released by Virgin as well.

The last official studio album for Virgin, "Hyperborea", was recorded in August 1983. The title refers to the mythological land beyond the cold North wind, an earthly paradise of eternal sunshine. In Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical book Hyperborea is named as the second earth race after the so called Polaric race, followed by the Lemurian, Atlantis and Aric race.

Tangerine Dream's final album for Ohr Records, "Atem", released in early 1973, was much more accessible than "Zeit". The British DJ John Peel was a big fan of "Atem" and wrote and phoned Edgar Froese to tell him how much he loved their music. "Atem" became his album of the year 1973, and this might be the reason TD got a contract with the London-based Virgin Records.

"Ricochet" is the first live album by Tangerine Dream. The album was released in 1975. It consists of two long compositions mixed from taped recordings of the England and France portions of their fall 1975 European Tour. The sound of the album is similar to the group's other "Virgin Years" releases, relying heavily on synthesizers and sequencers to produce a dense ambient soundscape. "Ricochet" utilizes more percussion and electronic guitar than its predecessors "Phaedra" and "Rubycon", bordering on electronic rock. The principal innovation on the album is its use of complex multi-layered rhythms, foreshadowing not only the band's own direction in the 80s, but also trance music and similar genres of electronic dance music.

In 1979 Edgar Froese met Johannes Schmoelling, who joined Tangerine Dream to reestablish the trio status of the group. This lineup would come to be regarded by many fans as the strongest in the band's history. The first record project of the new line-up was "Tangram" (the title originating from a very old Chinese puzzle), released in the spring of 1980. It was recorded in Chris Franke's new Polygon studio complex in Berlin, and once again the music filled up two complete sides of an LP and had a warmer, almost symphonic sound than previous TD albums. "Tangram" is regarded to be one of the most dramatic albums ever released by the group. The mixture of smoothness with familiar TD elements landed the album in the British Top 40.