TD review...ouch!
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TD review...ouch!
ZEIT *
Year Of Release: 1972
Okay, let's cut that terminological not good. This album IS ambient. It's also revolutionary and super-ambitious, a double album with but four compositions on it, and issued two years before Yes dared to repeat the basic structure. It's also almost totally unlistenable when taken as foreground music and almost totally unsettling and disturbing as background music. It gets a really low rating. But it's also supposed to get a review, I daresay. For this record (and for a rather long subsequent period), Froese and Franke were joined by Peter Baumann, who had the idea to add up some strings to the band's by now traditional synthesizer drone. The idea itself was good. Unfortunately, there were other ideas as well - one of which was the usual "pull-all-the-stops" idea that inevitably reaches every talented and untalented artsy band and makes them gruesomely overrate their talent and make themselves the laughing stock of the critics. (And Zeit was ridiculed by the critics, and this at a time when it was hard to imagine a Krautrock album getting a negative review - in Germany, at least.)
Like I said, four compositions here are strewn over four LP sides; however, unlike the compositions on Yes' Tales From Topographic Oceans, these aren't so much compositions as they are just extended sonic landscapes. Froese and Co. explore Sound as a conception, and their wish to have themselves a huger canvas to do that in detail is understandable, but it doesn't make up for pleasant listening. The first track, 'Birth Of The Liquid Pleiades', has, I think, a total of three or four different notes extracted over a twenty-minute running course; there's one basic synthesizer playing one basic, simple "pattern", and at times it is joined by other, equally minimalistic noise-making gadgets in different speakers. The main idea here is that no note should last less than two or three seconds - revolutionary at the time, yes, but much bettered since then. 'Nebulous Dawn' comes next, almost bursting my speakers' bass level - this is Tangerine Dream borrowing some industrial ideas from Kraftwerk and Faust. If the dawn is indeed 'nebulous', then the 'nebula' must be a euphemism for smog: the only picture I can get in my head from listening to this are the high chimneys atop coal-burning factories. And that drip-drip-dripping sound must be radioactive waste polluting our rivers? Brr, don't ask me... If you've heard thirty seconds of it, you've heard all seventeen minutes of it. Of course, that's the point, so don't take that as a complaint. 'Origin Of Supernatural Probabilities' kinda baffles me. Are the 'supernatural probabilities' supposed to have originated from a boiling cauldron? Cause that's what those synth loops sound like. At least, the previous two tracks had a certain 'celestial' sound to them; this one sounds more hellish to me. Finally, 'Zeit' is just indescribable because it doesn't actually have a base. They're probably alternating between different synths on there, and they do return the 'celestial' atmosphere, but they do that at a loss of the foundation. Overall, that was less than a dozen lines of text for an album that goes on for almost eighty minutes. And what's the result? A feeling of loneliness and disturbance, and also a feeling of pity at having wasted more than an hour of one's precious time. (It goes without saying that Zeit does not require more than one listen - chop up each composition in ten sections and you get ten exact same songs, so one could say I'd already listened to the album ten times. Or more). A certain loony part of the population might enjoy this stuff; I vehemently protest against it. Ambient music is auxiliary music by its nature, helping one relax and creating a becalmed mood - something that, for instance, Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon is supposed to do. Zeit is not so much a relaxative album as an explorative one - but as almost every "purely explorative" album, it had very quickly become dated. I mean, I can't really relax to these tunes. They're bass-heavy! They're unsettling! They're, in fact, ugly: 'Nebulous Dawn' buzzes along in such an annoying manner I could listen to a bunch of bus noises with equal effect. But if I can't relax to these 'tunes', am I supposed to treat them as 'serious music'? Never in my life. So what good is this album? No good at all. Together with Kraftwerk 2, it's the worst Krautrock album I've ever heard, and definitely Tangerine Dream's lowest point. Good thing they'd abandoned that direction altogether.