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Ugh! German synth rock pioneers Tangerine Dream may have influenced a whole generation of keyboard artists and electronicists, but this hybrid concert film/art rock video doesn't exactly make the case.
Tangerine Dream was founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese, then a student at the Berlin Academy of Arts. At the time, he was under the spell of French surrealism and modern classical music, including Satie, Ligeti and Debussy, as well as Hendrix and Pink Floyd. With its shifting array of members, Tangerine Dream gradually abandoned psychedelic rock and moved toward more experimental sounds. They were early adopters of the synthesizer, Moog and mellotron, and in many ways defined the way these synthetic sounds were integrated into rock, prog and experimental music.
Yet by the early 1990s, when this DVD's film was shot, Tangerine Dream had entered a difficult phase in which founder Edgar Froese was the only long-standing member still in the band. He was supported by his son Jerome Froese on keyboards, saxophonist Linda Spa and new age guitarist Zlatko Perica. Organist Peter Baumann had been gone since 1977, while keyboardist/composer Christopher Franke had exited in the late 1980s. Even Paul Haslinger, Froese's collaborator since 1988, had left by this point to begin work on Future Primitive. As a result, although the band revisits defining works like "Phaedra" and "Logos" on this DVD, even these cuts are flat, unexciting and hamstrung by the absence of critical players.
The show opens with "Two Bunch Palms", a shapeless melange of new age guitar noodling, computerized atmospherics and drum machined climaxes. If you were looking to parody the bloated, self-satisfied excesses of prog, you could hardly do better than this cut. Band members are stony-faced and serious, nearly immobile -- except for the guitar player, who writhes and rocks in obvious astonishment at how skilled he is. Can't quite catch the expressions from row 12? You're in luck. There's a giant TV screen behind the band that offers close-ups of every grimace. Still not exciting enough for you? Check out the light show, beaming slashes of blue illumination across the stage in rhythmic patterns. It's not a concert... it's a happening!
The next track, "Dolls in the Shadow", is illustrated even more lavishly, with cuts from a film used as a backdrop during Tangerine Dream's live show. The cut shows Froese, pere and fils, plus Linda Spa, careening across the desert on a bicycle, spiritual washes of keyboard sounds and computer-altered voices providing the backdrop. Band members are wearing long black capes as they pedal along, but miraculously, these capes do not become entangled in the bike chains. There are more video enhancements to "Treasure of Innocence", a stop-motion montage of children playing in a street, a man dumping water onto cobblestones and, yikes, more bicycles. The visuals, clearly historic footage from wartime Germany, are actually quite nice, and they do take your mind off the synthy tripe that's playing in the background. "Oriental Haze" mixes concert footage with time-lapse photography of car lights moving down a highway, with a driving, percolating rhythm that almost makes up for the Kenny G-ish sax solo.
Tangerine Dream plays "Phaedra", the landmark track from their first Virgin album, about halfway through the disk. It was this cut, originally recorded in 1973, that launched the group, putting the newly invented Moog at the center of their sound. Many reviewers have commented that the original "Phaedra" takes some warming up to -- that while it sets the stage for modern ambient and techno music, it has none of the dramatic development of synth-based prog. At best, it envelops you in a laid-back mesh of sound that doesn't change much over its course. This version feels flat as a pancake, and offers no indication of why the original was so influential. It is decorated, if that is the right word, by abstract and changing geometric forms that are slightly less entertaining than the iTunes visualizer.
Tangerine Dream opts to honor Seattle's local hero with a cover of "Purple Haze" near the end of the disc, and it's this track, more than anything, that solidifies my distaste for the band. They have, quite simply, doused the fire at the song's heart, layered it with mindless shreds and sped it up with a hand-crank. Hendrix, whose soul shone through every impossible lick and bend, whose skill never got in the way of his heart, would not have recognized this robotic cover for his own.
Live in America's second disc is an audio version of these same tracks, minus the bikes in the desert and bloated theatrics. It's a slight improvement, but not enough.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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