The sole original member and driving force behind Tangerine Dream died today. What?!!
I was figuring on him just continuing recording Tangerine Dream albums well past retirement age until I found out his age and realized that that’s exactly what he did.
A world without Edgar Froese is incomprehensible to me, despite the fact I stopped keeping up with their releases after Tangerine Dream’s 1982 album, “Exit.” With each passing year, the albums kept coming -- either with constantly reconstituted lineups of T-Dream or solo albums -- but I could never begrudge that beefy, stern-looking Teutonic author of huge passages of “Electronic Meditation,” “Alpha Centauri,” “Ultima Thule,” “Zeit,” “Atem,” “Phaedra” and “Rubycon” a single soundtrack or live album.
This was because Tangerine Dream have always been on my shelves, my turntable, in my 1982 Sony Walkman, CD players, on my hard drive and in my mind since the late seventies when I made that fearless import purchase of “Ricochet” for $7.99. There was no other group that progressed through that particular route of experimental music in their time, or any time: from a power trio in the late sixties to an electronic trio in the mid seventies AND no two albums bore any resemblance to each other except for how different they were. The landscapes they populated my mind ran from ethereal to dark, glacial to epic, and sometimes (like “Wahn”) so completely freaky they embossed their impressions on my brain forever. Like an inverse “Green Eggs and Ham,” I’ve listened to them everywhere and doing everything: walking through a snowstorm with my brand new Sony Walkman, sitting on a plane flying above the Atlantic Ocean, walking summer dunes in North Carolina, driving California highways, watching the sunset and many other scenarios. I bought a CD of “Phaedra” for the studio I worked at in the early nineties and spent countless hours on the computer in deep concentration spinning it on infinite repeat at low volume. (I played it so much for years that when I last saw it in 2010, the clear plastic of that jewel case was nearly opaque. Not from dust, but from two decades of scuff mark from filing and re-filing.)
I have listened to T-Dreams first six albums well over hundreds of times, but the one I may have played over a thousand times is their third one: “Zeit.” I know it so well that I know every anomaly on the Sanctuary CD from the mid nineties that match the ones on the Japanese MLPS CD. Luckily, “Zeit” was properly cleaned up when Reactive/Esoteric issued the cleanest version to date in 2011. Not only that, but it came as double CD and the live concert on disc two, “Klangwald (parts 1 and 2),” from Cologne in 1972 proves the brilliance of Tangerine Dream as improvisers. It’s a performance that runs the gamut from deeply chilled ambience to noisy abandon and back through a huge patch of Kosmische territory that they had somehow managed to leave untouched until this performance. It’s transcendental.
The terrain Froese mapped during this earliest period of T-Dream I not only know by heart, but I’ve constantly been able to re-experience anew. Over and over again. For years now.
It’s going to snow tonight. It’ll be the snow falling all over the darkened earth, with “Zeit” playing in the background.
There is nothing like Tangerine Dream and it’s because there was no one else like Edgar Froese.
He’s literally -- and figuratively -- in my mind forever.
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