Pilots of Purple Bandwagons, pardon, Twilight: The new Tangerine Dream box set

 

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...

Fifty switched-on years: Wendy Carlos, a modular Moog... and Bach

The 1968 original cover

In October 1968, the seminal album Switched-On Bach was released. Wendy Carlos, using an era-defining Moog synthesizer, has surprised audiences with pioneering electronic renditions of selected Bach compositions.

In 2018, this may sound absolutely banale - even if in 1968 none other than the legendary pianist Glenn Gould held the ground-breaking performances in the highest regard. We are  nowadays taking electronic instruments for granted, and synthesizer reworkings of classical pieces have been ubiquitous...

One really needs to put Wendy Carlos's unprecedented achievement in technical, musical, and also cultural context.

Electronic instruments, even with the arrival of Robert Moog's classic synthesizer, have been laboratory curiosities until then. Even if some electronic works so-to-speak escaped into the popular realm well before 1968, synthesized sound has not truly exploded into popular consciousness until then.

The technical challenges were numerous, and one can get an insight into this by consulting countless notes and interviews done with Carlos and others. The list is quasi-endless, from notoriously unstable tuning to the often overlooked fact that the synth on which Carlos performed the Bach pieces was essentially monophonic - i.e. it could produce sound for one note at a time. Custom "chord generators" had to be made, with chained-together oscillators, such that Bach's chord structures could also take shape.

We must not forget, this was Bach actually played on the Moog - no automation or programming of any sort has taken place. A revolutionary touch-sensitive keyboard allowed very articulated performances. Still, it necessitated an almost superhuman way of playing when faced with a monophonic keyboard - something that Carlos modestly called "detached" playing, as each key had to be activated on its own. Try and keep an eminently fluid and spirited performance going, playing on such an instrument...

These technical difficulties, heroically overcome by Carlos, lead us to the musical achievement.

This may well be a switched-on and fully electronic Bach, but it is very switched-on from musical performance perspective, too. As much as some voices denigrated the results, even "serious" musicians, like the aforementioned Glenn Gould, and the unexpectedly numerous public embraced it.

Even now, half a century later, Carlos's performances (including the particularly superb choices made in terms of the arrangements, i.e. synthesized timbres) range from eminently subtle to joyously bouncy.

The cultural impact and its effect on the public's perception of the new electronic instruments have been immense.

The first cohesive and large work, with truly world-wide popular success, recorded entirely with synthesizers was not a stereotypical pop or rock tune (like Telstar in 1962). It was an entire album of popular works by J. S. Bach... as a result of a stunningly audacious adventure centred around a synthesizer monster that was just about emerging from its laboratory environment...

Wendy Carlos in 1968

Have all negative preconceptions, by now simply anachronistic prejudices, related to electronic instruments been put to rest during the fifty years that followed?

Yes and no.

Both utterly high-brow and utterly popular music widely employs synthesizers, and so does pretty much everything in-between... Very often, the artificial delimitation line between non-electronic and electronic instruments is entirely blurred or non-existent, as audiences may not even be able to tell the difference between some samplers and the instruments they sampled. Also, often complex processing of traditional instruments' sounds makes those sound eminently electronic when they are not...

However, some still see electronic instruments as tools for creating "sterile", "not human", "machine" etc. music. Some sub-genres of electronic music, which heavily rely on robotic rhythms or entirely intentional robotic aesthetics, certainly do not help in shifting these out-dated misperceptions.

Even within the Berlin School of electronic music, e.g. Kraftwerk represents a diametrically opposite aesthetic and artistic intent compared to e.g. Tangerine Dream. Former had a specific message centred on technology, whilst latter explicitly used technology as merely a creative tool and never let it take over. See Kraftwerk standing immobile with their laptops, and see Tangerine Dream still, 50+ years on, jamming in lengthy live improvised sets... The concept and the intent behind their respective art is vastly different - and the resulting music also shows the radically different, even opposite, approaches to synthesizers.

The great Romantic passion in works by Vangelis are quite different from the energies unleashed by any of the trance or techno acts, and comparisons are unfair to make - as there are no valid comparisons between eminently different musical intentions and aesthetics.

However, one could say that views that consider electronic music to be "sterile" have been conceptually wrong from the very beginning.

Even in 1968, people looking at (as some never listened or wanted to listen to) Wendy Carlos's monster Moog synth as a tool for "machine" music were committing a fundamental error.

Not because of subjective pros and cons and tastes... but because it is an (intentional or not) confusion of three different things: instrument, medium, and content.

Synthesizers, as obvious it may seem when rationally thinking about them, are merely instruments... One can make, and has made ,sterile or cerebral music with a flute, too...

As the late, unparalleled Isao Tomita said once, synth-made electronic sound is as natural as the sound of thunder made by nature's electric discharges... After all, what creates the sound doesn't matter - the boundaries and preconceptions are in our minds only...

Across centuries & continents of musical traditions - Vangelis at 75

One could try something unusual for the 75th birthday of one of the most prolific synthesizer artists: instead of reviews of selections from his musical output spanning many decades, some factual information alone could depict the significance of the almost impossible phenomenon in electronic music that is Vangelis.

Regardless of one's taste or preference for certain sub-genres of contemporary electronica, there are a few unique facts related to his body of work, its impact and significance in synthesizer music.

Having shot to fame as the keyboardist and one of the musical brains of Aphrodite's Child, his musical output soon ventured far outside the confines of progressive rock, and far outside what nowadays one understands stereotypical "electronic music" to be.

Even in 2018, it is a curious fact that one is unable to name another synth artist whose musical output spans the following categories, styles, genres and sub-genres - whilst uses electronic instruments as creative tools to connect and blend these vastly varied genres...

There is early music, specifically Medieval and Renaissance secular and sacred music. There are Far-Eastern, African and Celtic, Greek and Arabic influences and deep ethnic flavours.

There are choral-symphonic oratorios with resonances of Penderecki or Orff, but at the same time Medieval characteristics that are returning to the days of early polyphony. There is jazz-rock and even good old-fashioned rock & roll.

There are space rock suites, ambiental tone poems and abstract sonic paintings. There are "new age" and mainstream electronic vocal-instrumental works.

There are minimalist works with the shamanic and hypnotic traits of Reich and Glass. There are eminently experimental electronic adventures with echoes of IRCAM sonic collages and tone paintings.

There are Greek ballads and folks songs from the Middle Ages transposed into spacey electronic works. There are futuristic soundtracks with era-defining impact from cult film classics.

There are piano poems of twenty-plus minutes comfortably sitting within symphonic and electronic structures. There are ancient Middle-Eastern arrangements coupled with electronics, that evoke worlds that are distant in time and space.

One can travel from the dark processions of the Inquisition to the peak of Mount Everest, from delicate Chinese ornaments to vast Gothic vaults, from African tribe's ceremonial polyrhythms to the hustle and bustle of a modern metropolis's nerve centre, from intimate folk ballads to the unleashing of colossal powers by ancient and future deities and demigods...

Above list is not exhaustive, but all this can be found in the discography of one man who looked at synthesizers as creative tools serving any musical imaginings... instead of specific instruments for a specific genre limited to specific sound worlds.

Looking back at many decades of musical output, perhaps the central characteristic that made all this seemingly impossible musical range a reality was and is the refusal to treat technology as a dominant factor in the creative process.

First and foremost, there is a, as some said, great Romantic in front of those keyboards - hence comes an eminently human passion that puts technology in the service of the imagined sound worlds that refuse to listen to artificially imposed boundaries of styles and genres.

It is an interesting quasi-paradox in the case of Vangelis: treating complex, and often trailblazing, technology as just any other conventional instrument, allowed him to produce the most unconventional results that move freely across the musical traditions of many centuries and many thousands of miles.

Vangelis in electronic music demonstrated what the late Ray Bradbury demonstrated in literature: using the characteristic tools of the most futuristic outer realms of a chosen art form, one can create eminently evocative, passionate and hence emotional works that are not hampered, but instead are augmented, by the possibilities of the chosen creative tools.

Someone asked a few weeks ago on a synth music forum, what genre does his music belong to. As all music journalists and reviewers struggled over the decades, so did the numerous forum members... except for one answer, which was: "the genre is called Vangelis"...