WSPC SESSION NOTES FEBRUARY 2015: WORDS FOR EDGAR FROESE

FROM THE DJ's STUDIO DESK:

It has been a while dear readers and listeners...far too long since I have checked in with you. But now, Synesthesia returns with some words for a key musical figure who has forever influenced my life.

On the morning of Saturday, January 24, 2015, I clicked open my Facebook account to find the following message posted on the official page belonging to the legendary electronic psychedelic band Tangerine Dream:

Dear Friends,

This is a message to you we are very sorry for…

On January 20th, Tuesday afternoon, Edgar Froese suddenly and unexpectedly passed away from the effects of a pulmonary embolism in Vienna.

The sadness in our hearts is immensely.

Edgar once said: “There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address."

Edgar, this is a little comfort to us.

Yours,
TANGERINE DREAM TEAM

Oh man...

Dear readers and listeners, we have truly lost one of the GIANTS in music, and for me personally one of the GIANTS who helped to created extremely significant portions of the musical soundtrack of my life and existence.

For the uninitiated, songwriter/guitarist/keyboardist and synthesizer pioneer Edgar Froese (who passed away at the age of 70) will forever be known, remembered and revered as being the founder of Tangerine Dream, which formed in in West Berlin, Germany in 1967. Over the course of just shy of 50 years and a wide amount of rotating band members of which Froese was the sole, consistent member, Tangerine Dream has released over a staggering 100 albums. They were at the pivotal forefront of the "Krautrock" movement as well as what would have once been considered as "New Age" music or now more commonly know as "Ambient," while also threading in elements of rock, blues, classical, jazz and fusion music into their electronic wonderlands.

The compositions of Tangerine Dream as led by Froese typically would stretch the boundaries of music itself through their elongated passages of electronic psychedelia taking the listener upon sonic journeys that captivated the mind as their appropriately dreamlike music could soothe and transfix while also remain eerie, distorted and disturbing. It was music that was provocatively shape-shifting and completely enveloping, qualities that most certainly contributed to the band becoming fervently sought after film composers, most notably during the 1980's.

My auspicious introduction to Tangerine Dream arrived sometime in either 1981 or 1982, when I was in Middle School. It was during one of my many visits to the record store, the now defunct JR's Music Shop in Chicago's Evergreen Plaza, to be specific. My days in that particular record store undeniably shaped me and provided me with so much music that would become the cornerstones of my life. I bought most of my music, from childhood all the way through high school, in that store and as I write, I am marveling at how many hours I must have spent in that store not buying music as well. It was a period during which I would just wander though the aisles with no musical destinations in mind, looking at one album after another, and allowing the album jackets to communicate with me.

As I have said many times on Synesthesia, music chooses you and on one such record store visit, and thumbing through the film soundtrack section, I came across the following album...

While I did know about this film, a crime thriller directed by Michael Mann and filmed in Chicago, I had not seen it yet (and actually wouldn't for a few years afterwards), the name "Tangerine Dream" was completely foreign to me. Yet, as I looked at this album jacket, that name conjured up some images that didn't simply pique a certain curiosity, I really believe the name itself stirred up something relatively primal within me. It was a name that immediately burrowed itself into my brain and it remained as part of my consciousness for quite lengthy spell until the point when I actually did purchase the soundtrack album, and again, without having seen the movie, plus not having read any reviews or knowing anything at all abut the band or the music itself.

On first listen, Tangerine Dream's soundtrack album to "Thief" (Released 1981) was a game changer for me. As I have written about on this site regarding albums by Todd Rundgren, Genesis, Prince, Pink Floyd and J Dilla, Tangerine Dream's "Thief" was an album that completely made me re-think precisely what music's possibilities actually were and could be. The entirely instrumental album captivated me with the very first song entitled "Beach Theme," as funereal synthesizers fade in and slowly build to a crescendo revealing a sort of interstellar blues. On a plush bed of synthesizers augmented by thick sounding drums with crystalline ride cymbal, the track begins to soar through the cosmos with the arrival of some incredible guitar work, that kind which created the feeling of being lost in space. I was hooked. I was transfixed. I was instantly mesmerized and just did not want the song to end but thee was the remainder of the album to voyage through.

From the drum machine propelled and dirty guitars of "Dr, Destructo," to the percolating and poly-rhythmic synthesizer textures of "Burning Bar" and "Scrap Yard." From the floating in the ether textures of "Trap Feeling," to the intensely metallic "Igneous" and the album's masterpiece, the 10 minute tour de force of "Diamond Diary," I found a new album that enraptured me so seismically that I played it to death!

Tangerine Dream with Edgar Froese at the helm was the band that actually made me fall in love with the synthesizer, no small feat as being a drummer, I had held these rigid attitudes about what music could and couldn't be and how it should or shouldn't be performed and realized (all the while not really knowing how many synthesizers were actually present in the music that I had already loved...but I digress...), What Edgar Froese and his collaborators illustrated to me was that synthesizers were not going to take music away from "real musicians." Synthesizers, like the guitar and yes, like the drums, were just tools utilized in order for composers to express themselves creatively and with Tangerine Dream, I heard textures and colors that I had never heard in quite that specific way before, and frankly, I have not ever even heard it in the same way since. The music of Tangerine Dream, has often been copied over the years, but it has never been duplicated, for how could it be without Edgar Froese at the epicenter?

After being held so tightly in the grasp of Tangerine Dream's "Thief," it was then that I began to try look up background information about the band and its (then) three members of Froese, Christopher Franke and Johannes Schmoelling. Since there really weren't any music magazines that I knew of at the time where I could find out about new or past Tangerine Dream albums, all I had to rely upon (aside from a rare album guide) was the record store, a source so invaluable to my musical development and whose importance still looms so largely over my life.

Back in my early adolescence and the prime of my teen years, I would scour the record store aisles again and again, looking through soundtracks as well as the band's own labeled section to procure any information that I could find about their music. But,"Thief" was, and remains, the album that will forever have a place deep within the confines of my musical heart of hearts. I fell in love with this band and the musical vision of Edgar Froese through this one, singular album, for so often, one, singular album is all one needs to be forever transformed.

So beloved this band became to me that I raced to see Writer/Director Paul Brickman's Chicago filmed teen satire "Risky Business" (1983) on opening weekend (and again knowing nothing about the movie) for the sole reason that the late Chicago Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert happened to mention their film score within his film review. And what a film score it was!! With selections like "The Dream Is Always The Same," "Lana," and the iconic "Love On A Real Train," Tangerine Dream brought seductive European sheen to the Chicago suburbs as this film score was a surreal, hypnotically erotic collection of pulsating electronic textures and soundscapes that somehow perfectly mirrored stages and phases of adolescent ennui, lust and longing as well as giving the cacophonous Chicago 'L trains a soundtrack that is irreplaceable and indispensable.

The music of Tangerine Dream filled my adolescence as I became devoted to studio albums like "Force Majeure" (released February 1979), "Exit" (released September 1981), a smattering of individual selections heard on compilation releases and especially the extraordinary "Tangram" (released May 1980), an album I listened to almost nightly for a large portion of high school while I did my homework at my desk underneath a small bright light in a darkened bedroom.

 

While I haven't followed the band since perhaps my early years of college, as I think the overall sound of their late 1970's/early to mid 1980's releases just hit my personal sweet spot, I have been so thrilled to know that Tangerine Dream has soldiered onwards, creating and captivating listeners around the world. Even now, long into adulthood, their music has ingrained itself into my soul. It does not matter if I happened to have not listened to a particular Tangerine Dream album for a lengthy stretch of time, for I can instantly recall all of the rhythms, textures and percussiveness of the interlocking synthetic patterns of sound. My moods or even just waking up in the morning and peering outside of my window to gather the climate of the day, there is always that inexplicable feeling that will make me think to myself, "It feels like a Tangerine Dream kind of day."

To this very day, I have never read an interview with Edgar Froese, nor have I ever heard him speak either. And perhaps, I never had to for he has been speaking to me for so much of my life through this extraordinary, and wordless, music that magically, mysteriously and majestically, all that ever needed to be said I was hearing and understanding anyway. To date, I still know very little about the man and yet, I feel I have learned all that I needed to know through hearing and living through this extraordinary, and wordless, music. Edgar Froese harnessed the power of music so heroically that words simply were not ever needed and that, in and of itself, is a feat obtained by a champion.

And so, I pay homage to Edgar Froese, his art and artistry, his music and musicianship as it has sustained me for so long and will continue to do so for the remainder of my life.

"A change of cosmic address" indeed...if oyu have never experienced the music of Tangerine Dream before, I urge you to go straight to YouTube and see what you are able to find and if you allow yourselves, you just may be able to hear from Edgar Froese from whatever cosmic addresses he resided at throughout his stay in the material world. And for those of you who are already fans, let's travel back to those cosmic addresses in tribute to a true musical visionary unlike any other.

EDGAR FROESE
June 6, 1944-January 20, 2015
R.I.P.