DREAM MUSIC

It seems like after synthesizers became easier to use, Tangerine Dream lost much of their mystique. In the early to mid seventies, Tangerine Dream was popular, and known for their hypnotic electronic jamming. Into the eighties, as midi-contolled and digital keyboard became affordable to all, interest diminished for this band, and it seems the most widely known of their later music was their many soundtracks.

Here, a brilliant record company executive took excepts from three of those soundtracks and packaged them into this collection. I vaguely remember "The Park Is Mine" and actually saw "Dead Solid Perfect" (the third movie, "Deadly Care", I had never heard of), but I didn't recall hearing TD in the soundtrack. Unlike the fantastic soundtracks for "Sorcerer" and "Thief", the music didn't stand out.

Which isn't to say that there is no good music on this disk. Although the first and last tracks are just sound washes, and no more interesting than Frippertronics forays, a few of the middle tracks have that trancey, spacey sound I expected to hear from TD.

Especially good are Theme From "Dead Solid Perfect" and Taking Central Park. On the bad side is the very long Suite from "Dead Solid Perfect, which is actually a string of short pieces of unrelated incidental music, stuck together into one incoherent track.

2.5 stars.