ZEIT

This is a good album, not great. For a TD newbie there is at least 5 albums you need to hear before this. You should never start here, unless you are already a big fan of Klaus Schulze's first two albums. In which case go nuts. Why Zeit gets recommended so much to people trying to get into TD is baffling. Do you want them to get into TD or are you trying to scare them away from this band? This is space music. Not even space rock. Realistically, this is avant-garde music, albeit avant-garde that would appeal to the bong-and-lava lamp crowd.

Peter Baumann makes his first appearance with TD here. Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke adds some of his Moog before he sold it to Klaus Schulze. There are some cello players here. This is TD at their most experimental, but overall I prefer both Alpha Centauri and Atem over this. Droning organs, spacey guitar and sci-fi sounds from the VCS3 are the main ingredients of the music here. "Birth Of Liquid Plejades" is the most interesting piece here, with the most prominent use of cello and Moog on the album. "Nebulous Dawn" is the most scary sounding piece and would be a great soundtrack for Halloween. I never liked the last two 'songs' as much as the first two.

Unlike earlier and later albums, there are no drums, Mellotron or sequencers here. The sound here is unique and again I can only compare this with Klaus Schulze's first two albums Irrlicht and Cyborg(another double-album with only 4 tracks). This is great space music, but not necessarily great *electronic* music. If you are attempting to get into the music of Tangerine Dream, I suggest you put this near the bottom of your shopping list. Ricochet and Force Majeure would be much better starting points than Zeit for most proggers. This is like a painting in a museum...you enjoy looking at it when you are there, but you don't want to come back everyday just to see it. I can't give this any more or any less than 3 stars.