TANGERINE DREAM HONOUR FROESE
Electronic collective celebrate their 50th anniversary with new recordings.
When Tangerine Dream release Quantum Gate on September 29, they want the album to achieve two aims: to mark the legacy of late mainman, Edgar Froese, and mark a new beginning for the band.
Froese died in 2015 at the age of 70, after suffering a pulmonary embolism. But Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss and Hoshiko Yamane, along with Bianca FroeseAcquaye, the founder’s wife, manager and co-creative, knew they had to keep the unit going.
Quaeschning tells Prog, “It was Edgar’s decision. I’m not sure I would have been in the position to say, ‘I’m carrying on as Tangerine Dream.’ I couldn’t have said, ‘I’m the guy.’”
According to the keyboard playing guitarist, Froese left detailed plans for the album after 2014’s Phaedra Farewell Tour. “Edgar decided to make a whole new concept, and he wanted to return to the more electronic feel. He was a guy who planned everything. I guess he had planned to work on his own testament – but he never told us.
“To be honest, in 2007-2008 his health was not good. He looked kind of ill because he’d had an operation. Afterwards, he seemed stable, and we never thought it would get worse. If you’d asked us even two weeks before he died, we’d have said he had 20, maybe 30 [more] years.”
Fans can rest assured that the founder’s work will be heard loud and clear on the upcoming crowd-funded album, which follows on from June’s Particles. “Edgar was a very hard working guy. He never stopped, not even at Christmas. So he left us, I think, 15 hours of music on hard disk, with arrangements, MIDI files... There’s a good third, maybe a little more, on the album, so you do hear Edgar.”
Asked what listeners can expect, Quaeschning says: “The Tangerine Dream-like sequences are back! I’m not the biggest fan of the early 90s Tangerine Dream – although maybe it’s more that I’m not a fan of the plastic sounds of 90s music. Hopefully, this album will please fans from the 70s and 80s, and people from today. It’s more electronic and more sequenced. It’s more what you expect from Tangerine Dream.”
Is there one of those wonderful long German words that describes how the band feel at the moment? “Good question,” Quaeschning says, and adds, “in freudiger Erwartungshaltung,” which roughly translates as ‘a state of joyful anticipation.’ MK
“Edgar wanted
to return to the more electronic feel.”