Last night, I went to a venue (which I discovered was located conveniently close to my new place) to see the venerable German electronic band Tangerine Dream live in concert.
Originally the brain child of the late German electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese, the Tangerine Dream project spans an incredible six decades and numerous lineups with Froese as the only fixture, but has since Froese's death in 2015 existed as a trio with Thorsten Quaeschning acting as band leader, fellow German electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss and Japanese composer and violinist Hoshiko Yamane. What exact time and in what context I was first exposed to the music of Tangerine Dream escapes me, but I have come to associate the band with lengthy cosmic soundscapes dominated by ethereal, dreamy synths.
The Tangerine Dream trio live in concert
That said, when I went last night, I arrived at the venue with an expectation that was limited to largely that and I had no expectations at all to what the set list would include and whether or not we would get to hear only contemporary Tangerine Dream or some Froese era stuff as well. I had been listening to the newest album Quantum Gate a few times prior to the concert, but first of all, the sort of 7-10+ minutes instrumental electronic compositions which can be found on Quantum Gate works well as a full album experience with the parts flowing together to form a coherent whole, rather than as distinct single track experiences, making them hard to tell apart. Second of all, the rest of the Tangerine Dream discography is Insane: The list includes more than 160 distinct albums! This, admittedly, includes a lot of live and compilation albums, but even these often include original and not previously released material. This means that if I wanted to get the full overview of the discography I would, even with my current exposure, have to quit my job and do nothing but listen to Tangerine Dream for the next six months.
Thorsten Quaeschning and his impressive setup
As such, when I stood there among a couple of hundred others at around 8 PM looking at the stage filled with computers, keyboards and synthesizers bathed in blue and purple lights, I was more or less a blank slate in terms to what to expect, so when the music began, I was pleasantly surprised. The first composition started out ethereal and dreamy with layers of weaving melodies disappearing into one another delivered in that wispy, alien synth tone that is often used in this genre of music. Just as you are standing there starting to feel enveloped by the lofty melodies, the tempo picks up, the bass starts hammering and the melodies become more energetic. The melodies and tempo now conveys a whole difference sense of space; where the first parts felt like your mind was drifting aimlessly through the dark cosmos, the energetic parts felt like flying at increasingly high speeds over an endless ocean bathed in an alien sunset.
Hoshiko Yamane
The rest of the concert followed more or less the same formula: Slowed-down ethereal compositions with melodies that felt alien and distant followed by more upbeat and harder compositions with sharper, more mathematical melodies that ditched the ethereal synth tone for more Amiga-esque ones, which helped to make the whole set more dynamic and largely (but not entirely) prevent it from occasionally feeling flabby. Every once in a while, the stoic-looking Yamane would join in with a solo on her electric violin, but I could not help but feel like her violin was under-utilized in the main set (and very badly mixed, as it was barely audible). Her time to shine, however, came in the encore, where her blistering violin solo with great intensity tore through both Quaeschning's and Schnauss'es synths and the hearts and souls of the audience alike.
Ulrich Schnauss
(My apologies for the picture, but mr. Schnauss did most of his art with his back turned to the audience)
The turnout to the concert was interesting as well. It was first of all a relatively small crowd of a couple of hundred people at most, which I guess makes sense given the relative obscurity of band, but it meant that everybody, even vertically challenged gentlemen like myself, with relative ease could find a good spot from which to watch the concert. The age distribution very much reflected the venerable status of Tangerine Dream: Most attendees were male and looked to be in their 50's, who came together with their significant others and sometimes their young teenage children as well with a significant subset being around my age, who came with their friends or girlfriends, and judging from the conversations I picked up on, seemed to be working in IT. Go Figure. Despite being a band that has operated for so long and has produced such a large body of work, or perhaps because of it, it made me happy to see that their music seemed to transcend age barriers and that Edgar Froese's demise and (I assume) the subsequent change in musical direction did not seem to have scared off the older fans.
After three hours of being thrown through cosmos and back again, I left the venue with a content smirk on my face. It was an unusual concert experience for me, as I rarely go into a concert with so little to go on when it comes to the discography of the band in question, but the music and the stage show definitely instilled the feeling in me that I am sure that is very much in the spirit of what Edgar Froese originally set out to do with Tangerine Dream.
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