Tangerine Dream – 50 years strong and coming to Hong Kong
With more than 150 albums under their belt, the remaining members of Germany’s Tangerine dream are bent on bringing to fruition the last vision for the band formulated by creative visionary Edgar Froese before his death
Tangerine Dream were electronic music pioneers: among the first to translate the potential of synthesisers and electronic technology to create endlessly shifting, otherworldly soundscapes, they gave birth to ambient and new-age music, all sorts of down tempo and electronica, and indirectly assisted the development of techno and trance.
And the band’s inspirational founder and creative visionary, Edgar Froese, who died in early 2015, continues to influence the future, leaving the remaining band members a detailed blueprint to continue his legacy after his passing.
After all those years, the band’s gig at Baptist University on February 26 still marks their Hong Kong debut. It’s the final performance in the city’s Krautrock festival, which began in November, but which doesn’t really describe their music: Tangerine Dream split off early from the more rhythmic Krautrock style to create the more spacey, cosmic “Berlin School”.
One of the most prolific acts in history, with more than 150 albums to their credit, the band also endeavour never to play the same music twice – the modular, repetitive, layered, endlessly shifting nature of their music making it possible to ensure through a degree of controlled improvisation that every single concert would be different, so that their work has been more than four decades of non-stop evolution.
Tangerine Dream songs creep up on you, endlessly combining and recombining simple elements to develop and evolve in new directions. Masters of mood, tone and atmosphere, their music constantly shifts from warm and lush to tense and moody to yearning and evocative.
Froese’s musical ideas, says Bianca Acquaye-Froese, Froese’s widow and also the band’s manager, “were triggered from an almost endless source. Edgar couldn’t live or be without music – not for a single day. Even when we went on holiday he took his small keyboard with him”.