Sat Eye Candy: Tangerine Dream
By Team JamBase Jan 29, 2011 • 12:04 pm PST
Germany’s Tangerine Dream are one of the least name-checked yet most pervasively influential bands of the late 20th century. Without their pioneering work in the 1970s, alongside kindred spirits like Can and Faust, it’s hard to imagine STS9, Lotus and many of today’s revered livetronica acts coming into being. Tangerine Dream injected hemoglobin into modernist sounds, a breathing ghost inside the rising machine world around them. What they helped get rolling continues now in a fresh generation hungry for the same kind of interface with the world at large. Today is the 58th birthday of Peter Baumann, one of Tangerine Dream’s core members during their early-to-mid-seventies heyday. Baumann also started the popular New Age music label Private Music in the 1980s. We offer our birthday well wishes and present a few snippets of this landmark band in their prime. (Dennis Cook)
If this doesn’t give you a big ol’ analog keyboard boner we don’t know what will!
From meditative to positively ferocious runs this version of “Ricochet.”
And here’s a studio clip of the same piece.
A strange, alien elegance clings to pieces like this one.
This performance predates Baumann’s joining the group but it’s just too sweet a moment not to share. There were apparently freaky people everywhere in 1969.
Another pleasantly peculiar early video from the band taken from 1971. The whole thing verily screams, “Art!!!”
In the 1980s Tangerine Dream achieved much wider recognition worldwide, particularly in the U.S. where they toured extensively and provided music for a number of films. Here’s a rare clip of the band in the late 80s that encapsulates their gentler approach in that decade.
We conclude with a couple Baumann solo cuts including his minor New Wave pop hit.
