Music Arcades: Edgar Froese: Kamikaze 1989 (soundtrack)

When we first started listening to Tangerine Dream in the early eighties, we — I think I mean me and Jeremy here, but I may just mean me — used to speculate about what musical elements the three members of the band brought to the mix. We thought Johannes Schmoelling was responsible for the lyrical (and accessible) melodies that started cropping up more frequently after he joined in 1979/80. We assumed that Chris Franke was responsible for the rhythmic sequencer runs — because we knew that he'd originally been a drummer. And we guessed that Edgar Froese was the teutonic foundation of the band, the cement that held it all together, responsible for the textures and the slow-moving layers of the music. That was mainly because he appeared so still and unanimated in concert.

While the cognoscenti of Wikipedia suggest we may have been at least partly right about Franke, listening to the solo works in later years showed that there was never a simple case of one being red, another green and the other blue. It was more like each of them being a part of — oh, yes — a hologram.

This was the first TD solo album I bought: it was "special low price" £3.29 in Their Price. And it shows that, for all his thick-set stoic appearance, Edgar was no slouch with a tune or a beat. The music is remarkably poppy; relatively speaking, of course.

I don't know of Kamikaze 1989 ever being distributed or exhibited in England, but some kind soul has put a clip, or clips, from it on Youtube.

I assume this has been edited especially to showcase the use of the music in the film. Either that or the film takes post-Alphaville lack of narrative coherence to fairly extreme lengths. On the basis of this trailer, it looks as though the film could almost be half decent, for its time. Fassbinder, looking svelte and snappily dressed (as well as the leopard skin suit on the cover, there's a chunky-knit string vest in the clip), was dead within weeks of completing the film.