BEYOND THE STORM

Tangerine Dream's sole all-time member (and the brain, one might say) Edgar Froese started to release solo albums in 1974 but he hasn't been very active with them, unlike with TD output. This 2-CD set includes material from all his albums up to Pinnacles (1983), but the majority is new material (sketches of which date from a long timeline but he finished them for this release). Somehow this seems strange: why didn't he make it a new studio album? As a compilation of already existing stuff this is not very luxurious. Long tracks have been edited, several re-editings have been done to shorter ones as well, and some albums are represented rather minimally. Also, the listener has to see some trouble reading the small- print text to find out the source albums, since there are no logic in running order. This ambivalence between being a compilation and a new work utilizing existing material is of course not a fault exactly. Just a bit surprising solution.

The text has a lot to say about how Froese's solo albums were confronted. Many were faced with unfavourable criticism, and I think it's true that compared to TD, those albums were not that notable. Froese was using his solo career as sort of a workbench - testing new instruments for example - for ideas that would be developed further with TD albums. Some stuff here (I'm not talking about the new material, which is by and large better part of the package) leaves me with a feeling that he wasn't putting very much effort to the compositions. A nice exception is the adventurous 'Stuntman', but that album of the same name has much better reputation than several others. I think the tracks I liked the best were mostly the new ones.

The second disc is clearly better than the first, which includes a lot of uninteresting synth "rockers" (I use the silly word just in hope to make my meaning clearer), reminiscent of TD's worse 80's output. But there is quite good material worth of one full CD. So, even if the compilation side of things doesn't work the best possible way, this set proves that Froese was going strong in 1995 and that he has been an outstanding figure in the genre of Progressive Electronic.