Exit
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Exit
One of TD's most popular albums with fans and reviewers alike (now that makes a nice change):
Way in, way out
TANGERINE DREAM 'Exit'
(Virgin V2212)****
IN AN ideal world, this lovely album would grow limbs and go out into the streets and rearrange the facial features of all those stupid, ignorant and plain spiteful (insecure) people who always pick on the Tangs in a desperate attempt to bolster, by sneering comparison, their dreadful A Certain Josef And His Echoing Orange Drops. I would personally hand it Dave McCullough's home address. I'd hand it your home address.
Of course, a few years ago it would have been after my home address, but I was big enough to say sorry. Nowadays, it's dangerous to say you like Tangerine Dream, and I'm a great one for these existential frissons.
If you've read this far you're probably still in the market for a Tangs album that poops on all those posturing, facetious criticisms. Step right up. The Tangs are bopping Tangerine Dream are GO!
Or a-go-go. It's still Tangerine Dream, naturlich, but they've just plugged into something, and this album goes roaring ahead with all boosters firing. The pieces are short, the sound is alive and positively bites, and the songs glow with a life and energy that makes 'Exit' an aural wet kipper in the face of all those faddish stage-yawning detractors.
After a carillon of aerial effects, 'Kiew Mission' (Cherman for Kiev, ja?) sways in on tiptoe, humane drum machine shuffling beneath staccato sparkler keyboards as a sensuous female intones a travelogue. This segues into a melancholy section, crystal forests of synth waving over a chopstick rhythm. It has a Forthright tone.
'Pilots Of Purple Twilight' (they're at it again) sucks and breathes, expanding time vertically with a bursting cornucopia of sounds, sizzling, rippling and seething synths making Busby Berkeley patterns. It pines grandly, and has a Fallibly Heroic air.
'Choronzon', the single, has a great time all by itself, flying a tricky funk formation while the lead synths swerve and career. It slips into a rising, ghoulish dub, and manages the occasional impressively offhand Epic observation. I'd dance to this anywhere, as long as Simon Draper paid for me to get in.
The title track finds them singing in the rain with Wendy Carlos, if you get the drift, and lopes along in a Red Indian fashion beneath great dark heaving stormclouds of sound. When it swings upwards, it vibrates with a passionate sense of Human Endeavour. Honest.
Seatbelts are required for 'Network 23', a big and bouncy, proud and bouncy affair, sequencers bouncing off the walls and lead synths jumping and shouting the Joy of Life. Poetic Verities aside, I'd also dance to this anywhere as long as etc.
OI' Gyorgy is sensed nearby on the last piece, 'Remote Viewing'. This delves into their darker side with warps, clusters and streams of atonal noise - it's like walking into a Clyfford Still painting -. before moving into a pastoral and merry dance, tinkling synths and fluting oscillators. It's a piece of Eternal Contrasts, light-and-airy/dark-and-muscular.
And here comes the nurse with the screens. I don't claim to have cracked Edgar Froese's DNA code, but more than ever before 1'm getting something off this Tangs album. The wacko comments in capitals are probably way off beam, but Tangerine Dream are finally getting through, and I like what I'm receiving. 'Exit' is strong, energetic, direct and has a point to make - all those qualities you never before associated with the Tangs. I feel something great and grandly metaphysical is happening on this album, and in a way that forbids snickering. It's important.
I've reached a point where I can take the Tangs for what they are. Are you still going to hang around with those people who wear their opinions like the latest joke badge?
JOHN GILL
Albums
The way-out
TANGERINE DREAM: "Exit" (Virgin 1/2212).
This is possibly the best album Tangerine Dream have ever done. Certainly it is the most confident, most totally coherent music I have heard from them since those dramatic days when ",Atem" and "Zeit" alerted those outside Germany to the new lyricism that Froese, Franke and Baumann had distilled out of electronics.
There is no logic to the defeatist idea that technology necessarily has to be dehumanizing, and those composers who utilize it only to emphasize the alienating effects of modern life are living in a past vision of the future that is as old-hat as Fritz Lang's "Metropolis".
So when I hear music like this, which lifts the heart and elevates the soul, I know that 1 am hearing something more authentic than the constructivist computer chic of their follow countrymen Kraftwerk, who have influenced the million copyists to let the programs dictate their musical thinking, rather than vice versa.
The album opens with the grand earhole-tugging crash of a gong, and for a moment I was worried that after such a grandiloquent beginning the rest of the music might descend into mere rhetoric, always a danger with a band like Tangerine Dream, who have never been afraid of the large gesture.
Here, however, they are contained within manageable proportions. No tune reaches ten minutes in length, and most of them are half as long or less. On the other hand, the sonic effects marshaled are tremendous, almost Wagnerian in their sweep, while Johannes Schmoelling's drums (sic...Karl...what were you thinking of?), I assume they are his, though Franke is also a competent percussionist) drive the whole thing along with a lightness that is denied any pre-programmed sequence.
Just when we were all prepared to consign them to the dump-bin of discards from the Sixties, they produce - an amazing album like this! An exit, you will recall, is one way out of a blind alley, which could give this album's title something of a prophetic flavour, both for Tangerine Dream and other contemporary composers. - Karl DALLAS