Tangerine Dream in Copenhagen 3/4/2014

I was really close to missing out on this because I didn't buy my ticket until the day before, being very relieved to find out there was one left. What also surprised me that this is not just the first time ever that openers Dieter Moebius (from Cluster and Harmonia) and Neu! played in Denmark, but Tangerine Dream themselves too considering a group of their influence and stature. Then again, in electronic music there's a generation gap TD are on the wrong side of that Kraftwerk are on the right side of...

The show took place in the concert hall of an amusement park, curiously enough, which I don't mind at all considering TD's roots in 20th century classical music. Dieter Moebius' set showed a combination of the ominous, spacy drones of the early Cluster LPs with the more melodic work he did later on and rather involved rhythms. Had a curious feel that's at once "organic"-sounding yet obviously high-technological... conjures up mental imagery of the alien planets and futuristic cityscapes depicted by that other Moebius. (the late French comics artist)

Neu!'s set was much more noisy than the studio recordings of theirs I've heard, the rear-projected videos they played to the music reinforcing my belief they'd make perfect driving music for a roadtrip. The abrasive edge to the live sound could be a result of them embracing that the punks of the late 1970s and early 1980s account for a larger percentage of their fanbase than the culture they originally came from, somehow it actually added to the spacy psychedelic feel of their music.

As for Tangerine Dream themselves, their concert was introduced by William Friedkin who directed Sorcerer - the film whose score TD came to perform. Despite Edgar Froese, who now looks like some immortal Atlantean alchemist, being the only member left from their 1977 lineup and having switched to much more advanced synthesizers a long time ago, they did a very good job at recreating the sound from back then and then some... adding quite a bit of detail to the soundscapes beyond what I remember. Furthermore, since TD wrote the music around the Sorcerer script without having seen a frame of it resulted in them composing and recording twice as much music as was actually used the music played actually feels like one long narrative structure as complex and multifaceted as that of a film. Also made for a fitting contrasting bookend to the futuristic space-age feel of the previous two acts, with the unedited Sorcerer score performed instead having a very ethereal atmosphere invoking mist-shrouded rainforests and mountain chains far away from civilization. I haven't seen the film, of which there was a showing in a nearby arthouse theatre the following day I didn't have time or money to attend, but I imagine it takes place in similar locales.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - April 09 2014 at 13:47