Tangerine Dream are a vast, elemental force, an electronic music group whose grandiloquent synthesizer soundscapes tower over the pithiness of pop convention. Wherever you look, Tangerine Dream operate at scale: They have released more than 100 albums since forming in Germany in 1967, surround themselves with prodigious racks of synths on stage, and their songs routinely nudge the 20-minute mark. They are, in many ways, the Grateful Dead of electronic music: a hippy band of brothers, eternal and somehow always themselves, their music an endlessly extending ray of cosmic light.
Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. According to Thorsten Quaeschning, who has been with Tangerine Dream since 2005, Froese and his wife Bianca made plans for the band to continue after his death, and Raum was produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive of recordings from 1977 to 2013.
Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto-Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. Their first studio album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured eerie found sounds among more conventional rock instruments, and from 1971’s Alpha Centauri onward—three years before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn—Tangerine Dream threw themselves into electronic instrumentation. In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. Raum doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. After 2014’s Phaedra Farewell Tour, Froese decided that the group should return to the formula of synths, sequencers, and electric violin that Tangerine Dream employed in the ’70s and ’80s, “not copying it but recreating that style with present technology,” said Quaeschning.
Raum’s 15-minute title track, in particular, is a throwback to the omniscient ambience of 1972’s Zeit, a shimmering Moog bassline summoning forth synth sweeps as potent as rocket fuel, slowly tapering off into the elegant, dreamy drones of Hoshiko Yamane’s electric violin, before the Moog returns to guide the listener home. Tangerine Dream are grandmasters of space and melody, and “Raum” shows them at their architectural best, their work as airily palatial as a castle made of cloud.
“You’re Always On Time” makes up for its weakling eight-minute runtime with one of the album’s strongest melodies, a mournful synthesizer riff that is just unpredictable enough to keep it from lapsing into parody, while “Along the Canal” combines a gloomy chord sequence with a synth effect that patters like rain along a gutter, a mixture of form and function so emotively epic it could paint the Grand Canyon blue. By contrast, the opening “Continuum” sounds almost hemmed in by the conventions of percussion, its rather strait-laced drum-machine beats unworthy of the synth sprawl they sheepishly try to rally into place. And “In 256 Zeichen” spreads its melodic ideas too thin; the song’s mammoth stretch is an indulgence that soon grates.
For a band as endlessly prolific as Tangerine Dream, it’s hard to argue that Raum is in any way essential; it’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending.
