Tangerine Dream
Everything we have written about Tangerine Dream: the listening guide, then each record in release order.
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Tangerine Dream: where to start
Start with these five, in this order. Then the albums worth coming back to later. For people who have never heard a note.
The night Tangerine Dream got banned from churches
Three thousand expected, six thousand came, and the coronation church of the kings of France got Tangerine Dream banned from Catholic buildings.
Phaedra
Calling it a classic undersells it. The record that gave the Berlin School its sound: a country house, a Moog that drifted, a tape left running.
Ricochet
The sleeve says live. More than half of it was rebuilt in a studio. Tape from the autumn 1975 tour became two pieces and thirty-eight minutes.
Rubycon
A year after Phaedra the same three men went back to the same country house. The power kept failing. The most complete record they ever made.
Stratosfear
Berlin, August 1976. Machines broke down and tapes vanished, and a harmonica brought in as a joke ended up on the record. The album where Tangerine Dream turned towards melody.
Sorcerer (1977)
Friedkin's doomed masterpiece, four men hauling nitroglycerine through a jungle, and a score written before a single frame was shot.
The Virgin sleeves, 1974–1979
Six covers, one photographer, and why these records looked like nothing else in the shop. The design that made a German band look like the future.
Force Majeure
Tangerine Dream down to two, plus a drummer and a cello, at Hansa in Berlin in 1979. A mixing-desk accident left on the tape, an 18-minute piece that ends in Corelli, and fragments that went on to Hollywood.
Tangram: Tangerine Dream in 1980, and a new man's first album
Three months after the theatre sound engineer Johannes Schmoelling joined, an improvised night in East Berlin fed into this record.
Tangerine Dream now: after Froese
Edgar Froese died in Vienna in January 2015, and Tangerine Dream did not stop. The records and shows of Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick, and the dates still to come.