After some shuffling of personnel and musical style, this is the album where Tangerine Dream arrive not only at the classic Edgar Froese/Christopher Franke/Peter Baumann line-up but also land on their ambient synth sound that continues through albums such as Ricochet and Stratosfear.
It’s not quite as pulsing as it becomes on those albums; here the sound is a quieter kind of ambient. The driving electronica beats are still present, but they underlay a more ethereal sound, of rushing winds or evocative of travelling through (inner and outer) space.
It’s kind of hard to pick out any particular tracks with Tangerine Dream, particularly as some of their later albums are all one piece – I suspect that were it not for the physical constraints of vinyl they would have written a single 40-minute track and not two 20-minute halves for albums like Ricochet. As with ambient music in general, this is great for putting on in the background – they helped me through a lot of study time at university many years ago.
You can hear some of the elements that Franke would bring to his soundtrack work on Babylon 5 twenty years later, even at this stage. Because, to be honest, once they hit upon their sound, Froese and Franke will do much the same kind of thing for the rest of their musical careers. Which is fine, there have been a few bands on here that do one thing, but do it well. It makes me wonder if one of the later Tangerine Dream albums will also be on the list; I hope so. It made me want to revisit some of the old albums that I’d not heard for ages.
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