After the magnificence and well deserved success of the box set In Search Of Hades, a new Tangerine Dream box set was a much coveted release.
Pilots Of Purple Twilight was to contain not just remastered classics from the Virgin Records era (1980-1983), but some previously unreleased material, too - including movie soundtracks that, by now, have an almost mythical aura.
And so it did... The ten CDs were an almost guaranteed success in terms of sales, especially as the mastering job plus the sublime (some previously unreleased) material on the preceding box set left fans in a state of awe.
There are some major positives in the POPT box set, too.
The Dominion Theatre concert in London is now finally enjoyable in its entirety. Previously some parts of it were available in the so-called "live" album Logos (which it wasn't).
Soundtrack of The Soldier is another previously unreleased gem, so are some tracks from TV series that TD fans have only come across on the bootleg circuit before, in variable quality of course.
And of course... the soundtrack to The Keep is the stuff of legends. After its decades of very troubled history, several bootleg and all kinds of versions of all kinds of soundtrack music snippets, it only had an official release in a limited run on the TDI label. This box set version was heralded as the definitive official release.
The remastered classics are by no means lesser players in this box set, especially as albums like Tangram or Exit are not just phenomenal, but they also have huge importance in the band's history & discography.
After all, Tangram marked a major shift in the band's style in 1980, and it is a spellbinding record even in 2020. Exit is an enduring and mesmerising demonstration of a then brand new technology. The use of the revolutionary PPG Wave synthesiser (the brainchild of Wolfgang Palm) is astonishing, and it stands up as a reference example even today.
However... in the wake of the ISOH box set, POPT has several firm signs of bandwagon thinking.
Sure, Tangerine Dream itself have enjoyed a well-deserved revival after the hugely regrettable passing of its visionary founder, Edgar Froese - and the band acquired many new fans who previously have not been exposed to their colossal discography.
The bandwagoning effect is detectable not in the attitudes toward POPT or the classic albums included in the box set... It is more glaring in how the box set was put together and advertised.
The Keep, as if it needed (or could possible acquire) an any more mythical aura than what it already had since the making of the movie, was heralded as a definitive version that would give us a first ever true experience of the movie's soundtrack.
Actually, contrary to the expectations whipped up to fluffy cumulonimbus heights & shapes, the released material is extremely close to the TDI release of yesteryear. This means that it is still lacks several key musical cues from the film... and some of those are quintessential Tangerine Dream in terms of their arrangement, style, and mood.
For example, what shows up on some bootleg versions as Glaeken Awakens is a stunningly beautiful, atmospheric, and (in its sound design) absolutely instantly recognisable Tangerine Dream track. This, together with other memorable musical moments (even the opening sequence) is missing from this version, too. But it is the version the band originally wanted to release, so... fair enough, but marketing hype vs. reality was quite an expectation management blunder.
The remastered versions of the classics are "OK", to use this highly technical word... Nothing that will strike one as a revelation. Once again, after the stellar mastering done on ISOH box set of sometimes very troubled original material, one could have expected something revelatory based on the hype.
Well... yes, there is some shine, some tinkering with stereo separation, and thankfully it does not compress the heck out of the records, as many new remastered versions of many big names in music almost always do. The dynamic range of the remastered versions is still fine, a big relief in the annoying loudness war that has been raging for a few decades.
The perhaps biggest and admittedly almost scandalous-looking element in the POPT box set is how decision was made to cram extra, well, "bonus" tracks onto CDs that contain remastered classics.
White Eagle is an experience. It is an album with its well put-together structure. It is a musical journey. One that ends with the truly sublime title track. It ends there, and leaves the room changed, the air is very different and we are different.
The POPT version is something that borders on the inexplicable, and betrays the approach taken by the publisher. Instead of adding another CD to the box set, for all the disjointed extras, the decision was to fill the space allowed by the physical medium with the bonus tracks - after White Eagle ends.
Sure, we can press the stop button quickly when, in our reverie, the title tracks fades out with the glistening sequencer notes... if we want to have that White Eagle experience without some other tarcks suddenly blasting the just settled air molecules in the room. But this is not the point.
Who in the right mind, unless just doing some rush job and/or maximising profit while cutting corners, decides to publish e.g. after Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles a bunch of other thrown-together stories just because there is some room left in the chosen binding for the book?
A rhetorical question. The approach is inconceivable at best, ridiculously amateurish-looking at worst.
Looking at the "bonus" material that was crowbarred onto that CD in particular, the whole exercise is just... puzzling, to put it politely.
The visual material is also puzzling, and again looks like a "who cares let's just sell this" exercise - even if it was not the real intention.
Some photos are woefully lacking the needed resolution to be reproduced in the size that they are printed at in the box set's mini-book. They look as if somebody did a shockingly amateurish job, taking some very obviously too small photos and badly upscaled them to printed sizes that were evidently beyond what anybody would define in graphic design stage.
It's a pity that a very commendable effort, with loving selection of unreleased gems and re-issuing of classics, has such shockingly amateurish and downright ignorant aspects.
Some may have had the misfortune of growing up in a society where one could only obtain music like that of Tangerine Dream via elusive "copy studios", who recorded onto cassettes some copies of legendary albums - as the originals were virtually unobtainable for common people.
If the enthusiastic kid gave them let's say a 60-minute cassette (which was cheapest and most easily obtainable in shops), then after the recording of the let's say 40-odd minutes of album material there was some extra music thrown in as a loving addition by the "studio". They may have been related to the album in some way, let's say in style or release timeline, or not related at all.
One just didn't expect to find such random acts in something like POPT - but, at least, the box set triggered some childhood memories of a surreal period in a surreal society, which made one appreciate even more being able to listen to a Tangerine Dream album. So, for that at least, thanks to the publishers...
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