Tangerine Tree was a fan project operating from 2002 through 2006 with the goal of collecting, preserving and distributing unreleased concerts and other audio material by the band Tangerine Dream.
For almost four decades, much of this material had been traded on an informal basis and many were sold as bootlegs. Much was unidentified, misidentified, low quality and/or a multiple generation copy. Tapes were starting to degrade, as many were as much as forty years old. In the late 1990s, several collectors created the Digital Tape Tree project and distributed the material on CD-R.
Without doubt, the recordings of Tangerine Dream have made the greatest impact on the widest variety of instrumental music during the 1980s and '90s, ranging from the most atmospheric new age and space music to the harshest abrasions of electronic dance. Founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese in Berlin, the group has progressed through a full three dozen lineups (Froese being the only continuous member with staying power) and four distinct stages of development: the experimentalist minimalism of the late '60s and early '70s; stark sequencer trance during the mid- to late '70s, the group's most influential period; an organic form of instrumental music on their frequent film and studio work during the 1980s; and, finally, a more propulsive dance style, which showed Tangerine Dream with a sound quite similar to their electronic inheritors in the field of dance music.All Music Guide