![]() Most of these can be picked up for pennies at your local charity shop – some of the best bang-for-buck space-rock on planet Earth. There’s an awful lot of Tangerine Dream music out there to explore, but I’ve picked out a few favourites from both the band themselves and their solo efforts. Rockstar Games took the decision to commission a Tangerine Dream soundtrack for their blockbusting game Grand Theft Auto 5 last year, proving that their chugging minimalism never really left the popular consciousness – there’s just something about those celestial lead lines and gently undulating pads that trigger instant flashbacks from all your favourite ’80s films, and the band’s records have been fed to plenty of samplers over the years as a result. Particularly successful during their years on the Virgin label, Tangerine Dream carved a path through the zeitgeist of the era that had been mapped out by albums like Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells – as unthinkable as it seems now, in the mid ’70s it was entirely possible to have a top 10 hit with an abstract, ambient choral soundscape, and no promotion campaign. Perhaps he had a point, since their music touches on a number of styles too broad to easily categorise: the chugging minimal synthesis of Kraftwerk, the space-synth explorations of Jean Michel Jarre and Vangelis, with folk and prog flourishes and baroque melodies that can be likened to bands like Gentle Giant and King Crimson. A prolific group, they released a huge number of records and soundtracks throughout the ’70s and ’80s, and are synonymous with the “New Age” music genre – a notion that Edgar Froese always frowned on, and struggled to accept. Tangerine Dream were the house band in this otherworldly space, and had a number of rotating members over the years, with the core members being founder Edgar Froese, and collaborators Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. Painted in black and white, the space served to incubate a number of formative Krautrock bands of the time, notably acts like Ash Ra Tempel and Klaus Schulze. Tangerine Dream came together at the famed Zodiac Free Arts Lab in Berlin, a space founded by modern artist and free thinker Conrad Schnitzler of the band Cluster. Beatnick pays tribute to the group and runs down some of their key records. ![]() ![]() On Friday 23rd January 2015, the music world mourned the death of Edgar Froese, founding member of Tangerine Dream, a German group influential in the development of krautrock and electronic music.
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