LIVEMILES

At the end of the eighties it's not easy saying which the true Tangerine Dream are: are they the space-rock band of the pink period, the sophisticated electronic gurus of their second period or just the authors of soundtracks to mediocre movies?

Looking at the difference between their studio and their live performances I'd say the second. As almost all the TD lives we are in front of two long partially improvised suites (one for side, of course) which are not spacey but just electronic and very melodic. So melodic that can be compared to newage artists like Yanni, who was starting realizing albums in that period, or the borderline Jarre.

We have to wait for the second half of the second suite to find some of the original TD sound, meaning as "original" the sound of Phaedra, not the sound of Atem.

It's a good "easy" album. The two tracks are too long to be pop, but as often happens with Froese and co. they are well connected patchworks of different pieces and a radio could have sent it on the fly with just a bit of "cut and paste". I will resist to the tentation of rating it high only because it's a little piece of true Tangerine Dream in the midst of commercial cinema works, but 3 stars are well deserved, specially for the second half of the Berlin concert that comes to the late 80s from a space-time hole.