This collection is a forerunner of the "Original Classics" approach I was talking about on Friday, in that it offers five albums in full for a knock-down price. This was in 1986. What it has in common with the Them discography is that it's now pretty hard to track down all the originals, either on the streaming services, or on disc at a reasonable price.
What's interesting about these five albums, recorded over 46 months between 1969 and 1973, all have a distinctive feel, but don't move in a predictable direction. No two of the albums share the same line-up of the band. As I've mentioned before, it's tempting to try and map from the individuals to the musical tropes — but you're confounded at every turn. So 1971's Alpha Centauri sounds similar to what Klaus Schulze was doing on the first Ash Ra Tempel album (as far as I remember, from my one listen about a year ago). But Klaus had left before Alpha Centauri: in 1971 he was, in fact, making that first Ash Ra Tempel album. As Wikipedia observes, Side 1 of Zeit sounds like Klaus's later "floating" style — but by then Klaus was releasing his first album in that style. Side 2 is repetitively minimalist in the style of Conrad Schnitzler. You guessed it: Schnitzler had left by then, too. At times, I'd attributed the increased melodic elements of subsequent albums like Rubycon and Ricochet to Peter Baumann joining the band. Yet if that were the case, it's not in evidence on Atem, the album that set them on the path to some recognition and success, which to my ears is the least distinctive and interesting of all the records in the box.
So what we have here is a series of experiments, mapping alternative possibilities for making new sounds — combining rock, classical and synthetic instruments in different ways — innovating at each step and never settling. The absence of rigid connections between personalities and musical styles suggests these were ideas in early gestation, in flux, and that they were an emergent feature of the scene rather than of individual creativity.
Electronic Meditation is the least electronic of all the 100+ albums that Tangerine Dream have made, and it's not very meditative either, but remains an enjoyable pre-post-rock exploration. Alpha Centauri is probably the disc I enjoy most, especially Fly and Collision of Comas Sola: as well as Ash Ra Tempel, it sounds a bit like Pink Floyd of the same era — only better — and also anticipates Boredoms. The double album Zeit is the most restrained, ascetic thing Tangerine Dream have ever done (I've heard very little of their work over the last 25 years, but I'm nevertheless confident that they've not made any music as minimal as this in that time). Green Desert, which was released for the first time as part of this set, is the album that most prefigures the rich mid-seventies vein that Tangerine Dream were about to hit, whil Atem is, as I said, just a bit meh.
There. Now that I've reached my conclusions, I can allow myself a peek at the reviews I knew would be on HeadHeritage.co.uk: here are alternative takes on Alpha Centauri and Zeit.
I had a mishap with the Zeit discs on my set. One side of one disc had more surface noise than I thought a new record ought to have. So I took it back to Parrot Records on King Street. Bear in mind that I was living apart from my turntable at the time, so the gap between purchase and return may have been eight to ten weeks. I was insistent that they should replace just this one faulty disc, not the other five (I didn't want to risk getting a dodgy replacement for the five I knew to be good). Oddly, the shop indulged me in this and secured me the one new disc. It was only later that I realised I'd taken back Disc 2 of Zeit when it was Disc 1 that had the fault. I knew it was too much to expect them to replace a second disc, so I still have the extra surface noise to this day. Now it sounds authentically 1972, and I rather like it.
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