30 Icons of Echoes #3: Tangerine Dream
Electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream are #3 of 30 Icons of Echoes. In a special two-hour show, we’ll hear the Echoes Tangerine Dream Documentary as well as music from across the band’s career as well as solo projects. 50 years ago, Tangerine Dream began recording their electronic music in what was then West Berlin. Founded by Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream has epitomized the electronic age of music, recording over 150 albums of synthesized compositions. Their film soundtracks include Sorcerer, Thief, Risky Business, and Legend. Tangerine Dream founder and last original member, Edgar Froese left the planet in 2015, but the group continues on with music he composed. We draw upon over a dozen interviews with the Dream members past and present including Froese, Peter Baumann, Christoph Franke, Klaus Schulze, Thorsten Quaeschning and Ulrich Schnauss as well as comments from Moby, Steve Reich, Steve Roach, Robert Rich and Ian Boddy, to celebrate these Icons of Echoes.
See the complete list of The 30 Icons of Echoes.
Next week, the number 4 Icon, Lisa Gerrard and Dead Can Dance.
Where is Johannes Schmoelling? He is the most influencing musician of the golden era of Tangerine Dream!!!
We never interviewed Schmoelling. He was good, but certainly not the most influential musician in the golden era of TD.
Johannes Schmoelling was “good, but not the most influential musician” in Tangerine’ Dream’s golden era? Johannes is arguably the single best musician in the band’s history, and he played circles around his predecessor Peter Baumann. While Paul Haslinger is a superb pianist, himself, I do think Johannes is better, more inventive. Nobody in the current line-up is at Johannes’ level, either. We mustn’t forget that Johannes wasn’t just influential, he was fully one-third responsible for Tangerine Dream’s “Eighties” sound, and his signature style is heard all over the fantastic soundtracks they released in the first half of the decade that everybody cites to this day, from THIEF to LEGEND. (For many, the FFS line-up is their favorite.) Johannes’ solo discography is full of gems that evoke the sound of that time—the man’s a melodist on par with Jan Hammer!
Well, I don’t think anyone “played” circles around anyone in this band. It’s not what they have ever been about. And the golden era of the group was the 70s, pre-Schmoelling, although his period was excellent as well.