“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. 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. 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. 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 doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. 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. Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto- Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. 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. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. (A note to collectors: Different cover art appears on the Virgin and Elektra releases.Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. Perhaps with such a message, the medium needed to be simpler and more direct. Both here and on White Eagle, Tangerine Dream ushers in the promise and the peril of a new world where reality has caught up with science fiction. Future albums channeled Froese's activism to environmental concerns, which dovetailed with the band's by-then new age sensibilities. It's worth noting that Edgar Froese's social conscience fuels much of Exit - copies of the record were made available to a cross-section of Russian citizens free of charge to promote an open exchange of ideas at a time when nuclear annihilation was taken seriously. As Schmoelling and, later, Paul Haslinger exerted their influence on Tangerine Dream's music, the emphasis shifted from dark and moody commentary to more positive subjects. With one foot in the excesses of the past and one clearly on the road to a more concise sound, Exit is a transitional work. Exit ends on a surprisingly dark note, the alien and foreboding "Remote Viewing." It's on this track more than any other that Tangerine Dream returns to its past, invoking Phaedra and the sequencer-driven works that followed, as if to tell fans that Exit's changes weren't the result of a new band, just a new direction. That's not to suggest that Tangerine Dream has stopped creating eerie, evocative music both "Pilots of Purple Twilight" and the stately "Exit" will feel familiar to fans, and the opening "Kiew Mission" is a captivating commentary on nuclear war that includes vocals after a sort (a woman's voice reading locations in Russian). On Exit, listeners are introduced to electronic music's next generation, notably on "Choronzon" and "Network 23," which brought the sound of the dancefloor into the mix (it hasn't left since). Johannes Schmoelling's influence is really felt for the first time here Tangram, for all its crispness and melody, was simply a refinement of Force Majeure's principles, and the soundtrack to Thief not an album proper. Exit marks the beginning of a new phase in Tangerine Dream's music: Gone were the side-long, sequencer-led journeys, replaced by topical pieces that were more self-contained in scope, more contemporary in sound.
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