Electronic music This article is more than 5 years oldReviewTangerine Dream review – despite loss of leader, the Dream continues
This article is more than 5 years oldUnion Chapel, London
For their first UK show without founder member Edgar Froese, the synth pioneers enlivened their proggy ambience with techno, but still created the same cosmic grandeur
Is it thinkable for a group to carry on when its creator and sole continuous member has died? Could the Fall conceive of carrying on without Mark E Smith? Of course not, no more than the Jimi Hendrix Experience could have regrouped following Hendrix’s death. Could Kraftwerk continue were their only remaining founder member Ralf Hütter to die? That’s a difficult one, but not impossible and not to be bet against.
Tangerine Dream’s founder Edgar Froese died in 2015 and, despite the qualms of his son, Jerome, Tangerine Dream have put the proposition to the test. Such is the nature of the group – more of an organic, ever-shifting and evolving sonic structure than a vehicle for an autobiographical ego – that they, if anyone, might just be able to pull it off.
Not that there isn’t a weirdly cultic awkwardness when Froese’s widow Bianca introduces this gig, dedicating it to “our master” Froese. One instinctively looks to the exits to check they haven’t been barricaded. The group’s most recent album maintains Froese’s spirit by working from sketches and ideas he had in gestation prior to his death. Band leader Thorsten Quaeschning is Froese’s “chosen successor”.
Tonight, he is part of a threesome that also includes violinist Hoshiko Yamane, a welcome presence in a room whose white, male middle aged-ness is crown green bowls-like in its dominance. Unfortunately, her sporadic, conventionally meandering contributions don’t add much to the mix. Essentially, Tangerine Dream now thrive on the creative contrast between the earnest prog presence of Quaeschning and the more modernistic Ulrich Schnauss – a man steeped in My Bloody Valentine and Berlin techno – on sequencer and rhythms. Schnauss’s influence is what makes 2017’s Quantum Gate the Dream’s most interesting release in years.
In the first half of the set, the band rove from present to past, taking in numbers such as Dolphin Dance, from 1986. Not that Tangerine Dream, unlike Kraftwerk, are a greatest hits-style band. They are more experiential. In the 70s, despite the ostensible gloom of teetotal Froese’s philosophy (anti-hedonistic, depicting a cosmos majestically indifferent to the trivial concerns of humanity), they filled, if not stadiums, then certainly cathedrals with their impressively impersonal spectacle of stacked synths and laser shows. Whereas other krautrock bands were impeded initially by their German-ness, no such qualms affected Tangerine Dream’s popularity. There are visuals tonight – luminous jellyfish, exploding orbs of light, 80s Top of the Pops-style video graphics – but we are more jaded by such sensations in 2018 than we were in the 70s. Still, Schnauss’s vaulting rhythms, occasionally reminiscent of New Order, add fitfully thrilling spikes to the sometimes ponderous grandeur.
The second half is a throwback to the band’s 70s heyday – lengthy dialogues between scampering curlicues of sequencer and remote waves of analogue synth. It’s the stuff to please the old brigade but if Tangerine Dream are to have a post-Froese future, they should pay more homage to their earliest works, which, unlike their output from the 1980s onwards, are timeless in their anticipation of dark ambient. Combine that with the cutting edge of Schnauss’s rhythmic sensibility and Tangerine Dream could be more than a travelling period piece. They could be a genuinely regenerative proposition and carry on speaking to new generations.
Rendered stateless when his native East Prussia was erased after the second world war, Froese constructed an imaginary, electric abode in the skies. It deserves to live on after him.
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