TEN TANGERINE DREAM ALBUMS TO BLOW YOUR MIND 2020

Ten Tangerine Dream Albums to Blow Your Mind

10 Best Tangerine Dream Albums 2020

1-Phaedra
2-Rubycon
Phaedra and Rubycon have always been a pair for me and that pair is half of a quartet with Ricochet and Stratosfear.   These are the signature Dream albums, the blueprint for every retro-space artist out there, the sound that influenced ambient, techno, and more.   The classic trio of Edgar Froese, Christoph Franke and Peter Baumann found the secret of rubber band sequencer patterns discovered by Tonto’s Expanding Headband 2 years earlier.  The Dream bound them in interlocking patterns, mellotron chords and synthesizer textures.    Phaedra is transitional, retaining some of the avant-garde Ligeti-esque texturalism from Zeit on the mellotron-drenched “Mysterious Semblance at the Strands of Nightmare,” but the title track and Rubycon, an album length composition, were definitive journeys into inner space.

3-Logos
Tangerine Dream was an exciting live band in the 70s and half of the 80s.  Listening to Logos, from 1982, you can hear why.  This was the Dream working with a precision and structure that earlier works didn’t have, but they were still creating in long-form with a fair amount of improvisation.  Johannes Schmoelling had been in the group for a while at this point and his influence is felt in gorgeous melodies and rhythms that have you ricocheting off your seat and between your headphone cups.  This was really the truly last live recording from the group.  Subsequent live albums would be more pre-programmed performances.

4-Zeit
It’s been called their most experimental CD, but I think it’s their most thoughtful, controlled and uncontrived album.  Playing with a cello quartet, it’s a journey of interwoven tones phasing through each other from acoustic to electric to something entirely new.  Ambient before ambient, but owing much to Gyorgy Ligeti pieces like “Atmospheres,” synths, gliss guitar, organ and “noise generators” unfold in undulating, slow motion patterns across what was a double LP.  This 1972 recording is a drone zone manifesto, and a beautifully enveloping work free of melody, rhythm and just about any other conventional music signpost.

5-Tangram
This is one of the last long-form Dream recordings.  Originally a two sided work, Tangram is a  multi-movement opus sometimes sabotaged by episodic writing, but still with some haunting themes amidst the pounding sequencers and more melodic invention than most prior Dream albums.

6-Stratosfear
Part of the classic quartet of albums, this was their most commercial release to date and the first album with real melodies.

7-Ricochet
The other album in the classic quartet.  Ricochet was their first live album, although it was all new materiel and sounds like a studio recording.  Another two-sided excursion that moves from the quietest solo piano spot to thundering sequencers from the heavens.

8-Quantum Gate
Quantum Gate is the first, full album from the post Edgar Froese edition of Tangerine Dream. This band, with Synth players Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss and violinist Hoshiko Yamane was in the last band with Edgar, and they have carried on Froese’s works but definitely added some new twists that I find refreshing. This is definitely not a “ghost” band, and this album sends me into orbit as much as any record on this list.

9-Force Majeure
Something of an anomaly in that it features a drummer, Klaus Krüger, and gives the Dream a more fluid and aggressive sound, especially in the screaming side long title track. This is a more aggressive edition of the band

10-Optical Race
I know that consensus opinion has it that the Private Music years sucked, and they did, except for Optical Race the first album they made for the label, owned by former Tangerine Dreamer, Peter Bauman.  With just Froese and Paul Haslinger, they create dense, rhythmically charged excursions that stand up to some of their best works and hold up better than albums like Le Parc.

Bonus Album: Edgar Froese‘s  Epsilon in Malaysian Pale.This is the third solo album from Edgar Froese and a Dream album by any other measure.  Two side long tracks of synthesizer and mellotron orchestrations. It’s one of his most pastoral works beginning with nature sounds then flowing into mellotron string pads and mellotron flute melodies weaving between synthesizer swirls and eddies. If someone doesn’t know what a mellotron sounds like, this is the album to play for them, then watch as their mind drifts into Froese’s enveloping soundscapes.

And for you deep space divers There is In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979, it includes every album from Phaedra through to Force Majeure, with the complete albums, outtakes, live recordings, including some entire concerts and some recordings that never came out like “Oedipus Tyrannus.” Also has a nice book that details the recordings of these classics. 

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Updated 6/19/2020