Category: reports/essays

There may not be a band whose name invites casual derision more instantaneously than Tangerine Dream.

Discount from consideration Top 40 fly-by-nights and casino-circuit has-beens, and Tangerine Dream reigns in the band-as-punchline competition. For the general populace, its four syllables invoke the most spiritually bankrupt misdeeds of the new-age community. Any considered effort spent tracing the group’s musical achievement is undermined by the very presence of the band’s name. Thirty-plus years of record releases have not bought the group much good will.

Anyone who has cautiously nestled a comic book in a copy of Scientific American will appreciate the following procedure. Tangerine Dream’s name will not be mentioned for the remainder of this summary/appreciation. Instead, a pseudonym will be employed: Sequent.

The name Sequent serves as a proper touchstone for the band’s accomplishments. It’s the title of a brief composition from one of the group’s strongest studio albums, Phaedra, released in 1974 at the height of their association with Virgin Records (the full title of the song is actually “Sequent C'”). Haunting, a-melodic, circumspect, it’s everything their worst music loses sight of. The word also sounds like a truncation of “sequencer,” an essential tool in the production of today’s electronic music, and brings to mind the hi-tech wordplay of Autechre and Aphex Twin, young electronic acts that float comfortably in the wake of the band’s legacy.

And, to be frank, most of the group’s other song titles reinforce its conventional reputation for aether-headed froth (another Phaedra track is titled “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares,” and here’s one from the album Exit: “Pilots at Purple Twilight”).

First formed in the late ’60s, the group Sequent has released dozens upon dozens of albums, among them soundtracks to films such as Risky Business and Thief. Accounting for gatefold sets, the band’s biographer, Paul Stump, estimates, in his book Digital Gothic, that Sequent has recorded some 220 LP sides in total. That extensive recorded output ranges from noodly sound experiments, to dig-acoustic hybrids, to sinuous ambient near-classics, to the peppy, histrionic garbage that earned the band a reputation for peppy, histrionic garbage. They’ve also recorded the occasional Pink Floyd-style prog-rock song (check out the album Cyclone if that’s of interest; it features vocals by Steve Jolliffe, who has recently been collaborating with the band Eat Static).

As with most ambient godfathers (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno), the CD era has done Sequent a service. The tabula rasa of digital reproduction lends the group’s quieter albums a hiss-free listening environment. It’s also allowed large-scale works, like the two-part Rubycon and Ricochet albums, to be heard without flipping the LP.

The one constant element throughout is founder Edgar Froese. The Lithuanian-born composer and musician is to Sequent what Robert Fripp is to King Crimson, what Dennis Franz is to NYPD Blue: the last man standing, the one who spurred his collaborators to do some of the best work of their careers, a challenge that may have worn out several of those collaborators in the process.

Froese and his shifting roster of associates deserve enormous credit for popularizing the Moog and other mood-inducing instruments, for experimenting relentlessly in the relative cultural vacuum that preceded today’s fascination with electronic ambience, and for retaining the free and improvisational spirit of much ’60s and ’70s European rock’n’roll.

5 Recommended Tangerine Dream Albums:

Electronic Meditation
(Relativity, 1970)
The band’s first album is not a good starting point for new listeners, due to its chaotic, meandering content, but it’s definitely helpful in appreciating the group’s career arc.

Zeit
(Relativity, 1972)
Four tracks, each in the 16-to-20-minute range. The distinguishing factor is the inclusion of a cello quartet — those deep strings meld perfectly with organ and Moog.

Phaedra
(Virgin Records, 1974)
Perhaps the peak of their association with Virgin Records. If albums were categorized by the movies that they’d best accompany, Phaedra would get filed under The Abyss and Fantastic Voyage.

Rubycon
(Virgin, 1975)
Ambient music with a beat. Pulsing, bouncing, endless travelogues in a minor key. More philosophical than mournful. Fortunately lacks the treacly, flamboyant melodies of the band’s lesser recordings.

Sorcerer (soundtrack)
(MCA, 1977)
Less perky than their Risky Business soundtrack, less remote than their Thief score, this was the perfect complement to the first Hollywood film directed by William Friedkin after The Exorcist.

Originally published, in slightly different form, by Pulse! magazine, September 2001.

[Note: this essay served as the introduction to a pamphlet on recommended electronic CDs, published by Pulse! magazine]

1. Visualize This

Were this introductory supplement an industrial slide reel designed to edutain new initiates into the brave, utopian world of electronic music, it might start with grainy, sepia-toned images of “The Early Years.”

An anthropomorphic cartoon transistor might introduce itself by way of an off-color joke, and then launch into a cursory summary regarding the carbon-based precursors of contemporary electronic pop sounds.

Slide images would shuffle by, while the background noise of the slowly approaching dawn of the 20th Century plays quietly under the narration: railroad cars and conveyor belts, Morse code and semi-automatic guns.

Slides of Samuel Morse (1791 – 1872) himself, the accomplished painter whose supremely lo-tech telegraph united nations across vast territories — that rat-a-tat-tat setting the metronome pace of revolutions yet to come. Slides of Morse’s telecommunications descendant, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931), and his hare-brained plan to employ the new technology of phone lines to distribute music into homes. Slides of Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943), toiling with his coils and musing about the music of the spheres. Of Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937), smiling beatifically thanks to his wireless innovation. Of Leon Theremin (1896 – 1993) and his brash new music-making machine, which he named after himself (though he originally called it the Etherphone), and which one operates by gesticulating in a compact electrostatic field, producing sounds that still seem futuristic decades after the instrument’s introduction. Of George Antheil (1900 – 1959), the protege of Igor Stravinsky who wrote large-scale works for mechanical instruments and, being a distinguished precursor to punk rock, titled his premature autobiography Bad Boy of Music.

The final olde-timey slide, a picture of a Victrola the size of an elephant’s ear, would linger on the screen while our narrator talks a bit about the birth of jazz, about the glorious commotion of ragtime and Dixieland, about the fury of bebop and its attempt to rationalize the heightened cultural activity of the burgeoning American metropolis.

Then suddenly the screen would fill with color: paintings by Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) rotate through, intended to make visual sense of the rollicking, electric world that was just coming into being. The images are grids of colors, part stoplight, part billboard, part skyscraper, part avant-garde musical score.

The narration would cease and the slide reel’s soundtrack would get louder, as the background noises (the first on-screen words of Al Jolson, the aquatic sonar that won World War II, the glitchy inter-machine handshake of the fax, the welcoming tone of the Windows operating system) play on, first in succession and then beginning to loop, playing atop one another, building into a thick but — now that you think about it — not unpleasing cacophony.

Meanwhile, the Mondrian grid would get smaller and smaller, until those familiar building-block-colored boxes come to look like pixels, the building blocks of the modern computer screen. The hard-edged soundtrack would segue into something familiar, what the kids call “techno,” and the pixelated image on the screen would take the shape of a giant, yellow, circular, slightly sinister-looking smiley face.

2. Genre Wars

If the slide show went off without a hitch, it would have made its point: If you think the current bounty of electronic music is overwhelming — the soundtracks to movies and advertisements and video games, the critical acclaim for people who make music with turntables, the idea of folks lining up around the block to listen to someone play with a laptop computer — just try and figure out where it all started.

The purpose of this publication is to provide some groundwork, but before venturing forth please take into consideration that amazement is as benevolent and powerful an intoxicant as is information. There is something for everyone within these pages, but there is little that will please everyone. Better to be overwhelmed than lectured to, better to have a handy guide (“Please, just tell me which freakin’ drum’n’bass collection to buy”) than an exhaustive database. The trainspotter, you might say, stops here.

Of course, for every subgenre profiled within, there is a coterie of highly informed, ruggedly opinionated, and deeply incensed detractors ready to convince you otherwise. Folks who came of age during disco will be hard put to see past their suburban junior-high memories of “The Hustle” to appreciate the cultural movement taking place, simultaneously, in the city. Folks who suffered years of therapy ridding themselves of memories of Saturday Night Fever are loudly pumping the soundtrack to John Travolta’s recent hi-tech thriller, Swordfish, which features a continuous mix by DJ Paul Oakenfold. Folks who don’t dig the so-called “big beat” of Fatboy Slim will scream “sell out” so loudly that you’d be hard put to hear the music over the admonishment. Folks who study the quasi-random compositions of John Cage will be called on the carpet for diminishing the hallowed tradition of authorial intent and, for that matter, a little something we like to call melody. Folks who cheerfully glimpsed a picture or mention of James Brown or Chubby Checker will wonder what, exactly, they’re doing reading about a dreadlocked guru named Lee “Scratch” Perry and a bald-headed descendent of Herman Melville. Folks who (used to) like drum’n’bass will tell you that Photek went pop, lost his edge, lost his nerve. You’ll ask who Photek is and, chances are, they’ll walk away.

We won’t walk away, though. Like the narrator of the slide reel, we’re evangelists with visual aids. We’ve made our lists and checked ’em twice. We’ll tell you which five Brian Eno CDs are the cornerstone to a solid record collection, which aesthetic crossbreeds (electrofunk, trip-hop, third-world trance) survive outside the laboratory, who taught Trent Reznor to screw with samplers like an animal.

We’ll tell you which Tangerine Dream records are musts to avoid (most, frankly) and which Depeche Mode albums are the band’s best — and, hence, we’ll invoke the email wrath of countless readers. We’ve risked it all for you. We’ll spend time limning the extensive catalog of bassist-producer Bill Laswell, knowing full well that his remix disc of Miles Davis’ electric-era albums is treated like The Satanic Verses in some jazz communities. (Just wait till folks get hold of his imminent finagling of the Santana catalog.)

3. Hear, Now

This supplement arrives at a specific moment in time, during a kind of blessed lull. The publicity machine that once touted “electronica” as the next big thing has quieted down, as has much of the backlash by technophobes who took pleasure in electronic music’s inability to produce a Bruce Springsteen or a Madonaa — you know, the kind of consensually determined public figure who gives a human face to a genre.

Electronica has its near-stars, folks like Moby and Fatboy Slim, whose names, if not their facial features, have helped the mass audience orient themselves toward this growing cultural force. And it has its legends, folks like Brian Eno, the ambient progenitor, and Robert Moog, inventor of his synthesizer namesake, who lend the music a living legacy and, therefore, a palpable history.

But the strength of electronic music is not simply a matter of its handful of acknowledged name-brand proponents. Its strength is its breadth. Electronic music is no more easily circumscribed than jazz or classical music. What follows is less a syllabus than an overview, less an entrenched canon than an engine of discovery.

Explore the work of people who make new sounds with homemade instruments, and of people who produce complex clusters by layering samples of music by others. Follow the paths, make the connections. Note how Brian Eno started a record label that released music by Michael Nyman and other minimalist composers, and later produced albums with David Bowie, which were later transformed into chamber symphonies by another minimalist composer, Philip Glass, who would in turn work with Aphex Twin, who would remix music by Gavin Bryars, one of the composers who first had their music released on Eno’s early label. Get lost in the variety, and then hook onto sounds that entice you — the exotic zone of dub, the heavy abstractions of British upstarts, the forwarding-looking chamber music of Satie, the hypnotic textures of Steve Reich, the seductive stomp of techno — and see where you end up.

Originally published, in slightly different form, by Pulse! magazine, September 2001.

Kraftwerk are the German naifs of electronic pop music. They hail from a more innocent moment, before hip-hop became the lingua franca of American teenagers, before the World Wide Web made computers an inextricable part of our lives. And now that electronica has become a significant segment of pop culture, Kraftwerk’s abiding innocence takes on a unique, prescient air.

Sure, like most acts experimenting with technology in the ’70s (Yes; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; David Bowie), Kraftwerk was a band of futurists, toying with new sounds. But whereas most science fiction embraces the future by trying to get there first, Kraftwerk seems to have understood itself as a cultural pupa patiently awaiting greater forces to transform the world.

With their multi-lingual, self-consciously jejune and plainspoken lyrics (“I program my home computer / Beam myself into the future”; “We’re charging our battery / And now we’re full of energy”), Kraftwerk was more than happy to take baby steps while everyone else feigned evolutionary leaps. Bowie hallucinated about “Diamond Dogs” while Kraftwerk focused on more pedestrian role models, like in the song “Showroom Dummies”; Genesis and Pink Floyd produced lengthy rock operas set in totalitarian distopias while Kraftwerk produced ditties about “Spacelab.”

For sake of chronological reference, it can be helpful to note that Kraftwerk’s first album was released in 1971, the year of the birth of Richard D. James, who would grow up to be Aphex Twin, a leader in today’s electronic music. Kraftwerk’s giddy, automated songs provided the pop-radio cocoon in which James and his generation came of age — the bounding joy ride of “Autobahn,” the B-movie squeamishness of “The Robots,” the digital-romantic effect of a piece named for composer Franz Schubert. (The close-knit band is led by founding members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, who seem to have determinedly kept their earliest albums out of print.)

Kraftwerk’s best songs, of which there are many, remain eminently enjoyable. They’re formal hybrids of bright little pop nuggets and proto-techno instrumentals. The first few minutes of “Spacelab” sound like a proper song, but five minutes along you realize you have spaced out entirely.

Ah, yes, techno. Kraftwerk’s strong influence on techno — the height of inner-city electronic music, largely courtesy of Detroit innovators — is one of the most fascinating cross-cultural stories in modern music. Just ponder for a moment the idea that a small group of almost uncomfortably clean-cut Germans could help trigger a musical revolution in the black community of a post-industrial American city. And this was not a one-way relationship. On “Boing Boom Tschak,” the first track on Kraftwerk’s Electric Cafe (1986), you can hear the influence of hip-hop; the song’s vocals sound like a European exchange student recounting for friends back home the wonder of the human beatbox.

Were Kraftwerk to arrive on the scene today, their minor hit “Pocket Calculator” would no doubt go something more along the lines of, “I am the operator with my Pocket PC with wireless remote Internet connectivity, real-time stock quotes and instant messaging.” Technology has quickly threatened to outpace our imaginations, but it’s likely we would have been dumfounded far earlier had Kraftwerk not prepared us in advance.

5 Recommended Kraftwerk Albums:

Autobahn
(Capitol, 1974)
Back before meaty SUVs became the icon of vehicular achievement, “Autobahn” captured the love affair between man and car with a hypnotic loop of minimalist romance. No road rage here.

Trans-Europe Express
(Capitol, 1977)
You’ll want this one for the popular title track, which continued the group’s car fetish, and for the Wendy/Walter Carlos-style elevator classicism of “Franz Schubert.”

The Man Machine
(Capitol, 1978)
Put simply, this is the album with “The Robots” (as in “We are the robots”), which sounds like invading techno-aliens trying to charm us into taking them to our leader.

Computer World
(Elektra, 1981)
Put simply, this is the album with “Pocket Calculator.” Five of the seven tracks have the word “compute” in the title, and no one’s complaining. Sounds like Devo on sedatives.

Electric Cafe
(Warner Bros., 1986)
Kraftwerk’s last proper studio album, and their most dated one. You might opt, instead, for the Balanescu Quartet album Possessed, which renders the band’s hits for strings.

Originally published, in slightly different form, by Pulse! magazine, September 2001.

1. Supermodified
Amon Tobin
(Ninja Tune)
Much has been made of Tobin’s country of origin, Brazil, but what matters most is where he’s headed. He’s one of the electronic avant-garde’s favorite populists, and the dance floor’s favorite experimentalists.

2. Alina
Arvo Pärt
(ECM)
Classical music composed since the advent of the synthesizer isn’t necessarily informed by technology. The five austere, modern pieces heard here are electronic only to the extent that they were recorded with the consummate attention that listeners have come to expect from Pärt’s longtime association with ECM Records and its founder/producer, Manfred Eicher. That said, these are as stark and contemplative as any digitized ambience, and both fields — the techno-philic and the traditional — benefit from being heard in a common context.

3. Quondam Current
Jake Mandell
(Mille Plateaux)
Once of America’s strongest electric voices, Mandell has one-upped himself with this strong application of brittle sounds and buoyant beats.

4. Kid A
Radiohead
(Capitol)
Admittedly, something of a tough choice. A British band long (and deservedly) critiqued for ripping off the anthemic self-flagellation of U2 enters the 21st century by, all of a sudden, pixelating itself. In the process, it gets critiqued for ripping off the dyspeptic digitizations of Aphex Twin. True, the “newness” of this album will depend entirely on the range of the listener’s experience with so-called “intelligent dance music.” Anyone with a passing familiarity with Autechre or Oval will experience deja vu. Nonetheless, Radiohead deserves credit for not merely grafting electronic affects to pop songs, and for managing to bring considerable song craft to digital composition in a manner comparable to the electro-acoustic accomplishments of the Beastie Boys and Nine Inch Nails.

5. Rosa
Thomas Brinkmann
(Ernst)
Brinkmann produced a series of 12″s, each with a woman’s name, that involved a rarified flavor of techno music. This album collects an assortment of material from that project. Ironic takes on metronomic dance music are common. What’s special about Brinkmann’s remote techno is how downright catchy it is, how much fun he accomplishes with such meager materials.

6. Multila
Vladislav Delay
(Chain Reaction)
Yes, more haunting, near-anemic techno music from one of the more prolific musicians out there. It’s minimal, indeed, but slow as molasses, too, and distorted to the extent that any single element produces sonic consequences that ripple out toward infinity.

7. Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko)
Bernhard Gunter
(Trente Oiseaux)
An expressive, burnished ambient expanse, devoid of time signatures, exploring time slowed down to a deep wallow.

8. 3
Pole
(Matador)
Jamaican dub remains as close as electronic music gets to an organic, rootsy sound. Pole (born Stefan Betke) is dub’s strongest Information Age proponent, and his thick, blurpy instrumentals suggest the satellite surveillance of swamp life.

9. Clicks + Cuts
Various artists
(Mille Plateaux)
Two CDs packed with experiments in microsonic composition, stark music that explores the crevices within sounds with the same dedication that jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk brought to blue notes and that microtonal composers like Harry Partch brought to standard Western temperament. Contributors to this collection include Kit Clayton, Kid 606, Sutekh, and three musicians listed elsewhere in this top 10 of 2000: Pole, Jake Mandell and Vladislav Delay.

10. Requiem for a Dream
Clint Mansell
(Nonesuch)
Mansell brought a dark techno sheen to Pi, the debut film by director Darren Aronofksy. For the duo’s second creative collaboration, a tale of multiple drug addictions, Mansell managed to lure the esteemed Kronos Quartet into his studio. The resulting soundtrack is nearly three dozen miniature compositions combining Kronos’ well-honed strings with Mansell’s pneumatic beats and sampled noise. Aronofsky has since been attached to the Batman franchise, and the thought of him and Mansell taking on the Dark Knight is enough to give movie fans a little faith in the future of Hollywood; Aronofsky is reportedly developing a script with comics auteur Frank Miller. It’s also worth noting that Mansell was a founding member of the band Pop Will Eat Itself, who once sang an ode to one of Miller’s comic-book peers: “Alan Moore knows the score.”