While Kraftwerk have attained the wider recognition for their innovations with synthesizers, it’s Tangerine Dream who were the true progenitors of electronica, forming in 1967. It’s perhaps difficult to grasp just how huge they were in the 70s – practically every household had a copy of ‘Phaedra’. This was the era of ‘Tubular Bells’ and ‘Oxygene’. They’re still huge now, but the face of music – and media – has changed beyond all recognition, meaning it's possible to be huge and still slip under the radar of the media, and most people for that matter.
In 1975, Tangerine Dream – then composed of Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke – played a number of concerts in cathedrals, including one night at Coventry Cathedral, which has been hailed as a legendary performance (although the later DVD release overdubs the footage with studio sound, and has a running time of just 24 minutes).
In 2022, the current lineup - Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick –returned to that same sacred space to perform ‘a monumental, era-bridging From Virgin To Quantum Years’ set, which is now being released to mark the 50th anniversary of the occasion. And the full release is a 3-CD beast of a set (although an abridged 2-CD edition is also available), certainly more in keeping with what one might expect.
One has to wonder – as the guy who introduces the start of the performance – how many present at the revisitation were also there in 1975? Even if it’s just one, it’s still more than there were band members. Which then leads one to wonder, exactly how true to the spirit of 1975 is this whole thing?
It’s true that a proportion of the material is contemporaneous, but then, alongside pieces like ‘Stratosfear’, ‘Ricochet’, and ‘Phaedra’, there’s a substantial amount of material from 2022’s ‘Raum’, and while the older material holds up well by any standards, the later material sounds, well, more modern, expansive bubbling ambience propelled by dance beats that are distinctly post-millennial. It is something of an inevitability that an artist who breaks ground and becomes a definitive source of influence should ultimately come to sound derivative as those they’ve influenced push things forward, and this is very much the case for Tangerine Dream.
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‘From Virgin To Quantum Years: Coventry Cathedral 22’ is, predictably, polished, and while applause between tracks make it apparent it’s live, the sound quality is studio. In other words, it sounds great, but unless you’re a serious fan, or were actually there, with abridged versions of some true epics (‘Richochet’ is whittled down to 5 minutes from the album’s 2 parts with a joint running time of 40 minutes, for example) it doesn’t offer anything that’s not more fully realised on the studio albums. The third disc contains a sequence of untiled, seemingly more improv-based works, and these arguably provide the most compelling reason to invest in this release, being not only otherwise unavailable, but also offering an album’s worth of layered ambience that’s well-structured and engaging.
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