ZEIT

The early years of TANGERINE DREAM were a little tumultuous and rightfully reflected in its brash even hostile exhibition of nascent Krautrock that found founding member Edgar Froese's love of electronic sound experiments in competition with jagged guitar distortion and percussive bombast. It didn't take long for drummer Klaus Schulze to jump ship due to musical differences and the instabilities would remain for the the second album "Alpha Centauri" which found the quintet of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, Steve Schoyder, Udo Dennebourg and Roland Paulick to be too much personal to manage so by TANGERINE DREAM's third album ZEIT (German for "Time") the group was streamlined to a mere trio with additional guest musicians picking up the slack.

However it wasn't only the band's lineup that was streamlined. So too did TANGERINE DREAM rethink its trajectory in the burgeoning world of experimental electronic based music as the Krautrock scene was expanding quite rapidly and offering the same wild tape manipulations and electronic loops that Froese and company had engineered on its first two releases. The answer to avoid becoming irrelevant in a crowded room was simply to take things to the next level of ingenuity. The next advancements in TANGERINE DREAM's march to critical acclaim arrived on its third album ZEIT which was the first to feature the band's classic 1970s lineup with the arrival of Peter Baumann. Likewise the band completely dropped the guitar and percussion and pretty much jettisoned any traces of the rock paradigm altogether and instead focused on the sublime surreal world of electronic improvisational sparseness.

Augmented by the arrival of the moog synthesizer and an increased layering of atmospheric keyboards, ZEIT was the first step for TANGERINE DREAM to unleash its bizarre amalgamation of musique concrète sensibilities with the freewheeling autonomy of jazz improvisation that conspired to conjure up freaky cosmic journeys into a completely new musical world of free floating electronic wizardry. While experimental electronic and ambient music were hardly unique to TANGERINE DREAM, Froese wisely embarked on a more adventurous journey where cosmic expansiveness and ominously sparse and sprawling soundscapes differentiated the group from the more classically infused approaches offered by Terry Riley and Igor Wakhévitch or the space age pop crossover appeal of bands like Tonto's Expanding Head Band or Mort Garson. The space age had arrived and TANGERINE DREAM was leaving the Earth's gravitational pull altogether and taking its act to the stars and beyond.

An ambitious undertaking, ZEIT featured four spacious track which each swallowing up an entire side of vinyl on this double album release from 1972. Relying almost exclusively on the cutting edge technologies afforded, ZEIT showcased the expansive possibilities of taking the world of progressive electronic ambience to vast surreal soundscapes that tested the patience of the listener. While the previous albums had the more familiar contrast of guitar and percussion to anchor it to some sort of Earthly connection, ZEIT simply drifted off into the Oort Cloud and drifted on for a 76 minute transcendental journey. The album opens with the 20-minute "Birth Of Liquid Plejades" which features a clamorous string section courtesy of the Cologne Cello Quartet as well as a cameo appearance by Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke who conjures up the bleakest and most ominous moog synthesizer sounds allowed by law. The second feature, "Nebulous Dawn" drifts into space for a gurgling and percolating sonic equivalent of existing in the vacuum of nothingness.

"Origin Of Supernatural Probabilities" offers a more angelic redemption vibe with a softer even tangible connection to an ethereal realm that offers that invisible string to another realm. The title track on the other hand drifts into a nebulous gas cloud and showcases the utter insignificance of what we perceive as time with a seemingly endless procession through dark ambient atmospheres and gurgling electronic noises that crackle with life as if emulating the birthing process of life in the universe. Sure it's all very heady and almost impossible to grasp but that's not really the point. Comparisons to other musical forms is mute with TANGERINE DREAM. More of a sound collage than a musical score, ZEIT evokes a visceral emotional response that for some may find comfort and for others a repulsive disdain. Certainly one of the more divisive albums in the TANGERINE DREAM playbook, ZEIT without a doubt was a significant step for albums like "Phaedra" and "Rubycon" to follow. Sure it's a cold and dark journey through these corridors of space but a unique and hard earned enjoyability factor is attainable. Perhaps not the best the group had to offer but a stroke of brilliance none the less.