Poster for the Tangerine Dream album “Stratosfear”
Photo: Redferns, Brian Cooke. All rights reserved.
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Edgar Froese, head of Tangerine Dream, created sounds from 1967 that inspired everyone worldwide who saw a future in electronic instruments and pad music. Architecturally, Froese’s pieces were not intended to fit into their surroundings, as Eno planned after him with Ambient, or to translate man’s interaction with technology into sound, which Kraftwerk made their life’s work.
Tangerine Dream’s instrumental songs were cosmic music – the best of their sounds were so alienated that you couldn’t imagine a familiar picture of them. In the mid-1970s, Froese paved the way for the so-called Berlin School alongside Ash Ra Tempel and Agitation Free. The no less influential Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler also briefly belonged to Tangerine Dream. However, the band enjoys a better reputation abroad than in Germany.
Big hit in America
Signed to the Virgin record label in 1974, the band became known to a wider audience with the album Stratosfear, which featured a ten-minute title track and organic-sounding use of piano and flute.
Since their work for the William Friedkin film “Sorcerer” in 1977, Tangerine Dream have been among the most popular German artists in the USA. Whenever you saw vampires flee (Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”) or the devil decide the end of our world (“Legend” by Ridley Scott) in the cinema of the 1980s, Edgar Froese’s extraterrestrial-sounding symphonies were heard. Even after his death in 2015, audiences continue to turn a blind eye and drift away.
Read more: The best German songs of all time
More highlights
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