Edgar Froese – Ages

There is RSD 2023 Version with obi and colored vinyl, pressing is good but not excellent.

Only hipsters would call this amazing piece of electronic music "Krautrock"*. Some call The Scorpions Kraut (actually, their 1971 debut was...), whereas others called TD, Kitaro, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze et al "New Age" in the first years of the 1980s (it was new only to Americans...). But this is analog, electronic music (called "space music" in the 70s) by way of Berlin School, ie. sequencer driven and mostly instrumental keyboard music with the Mighty Mellotron playing a key role - primarily used for its triple string sound - painting landscapes and moods with their own, homebuilt synthi until the market finally put out portable equipment that didn't fill a truck for a stage show; TD put 90% of their income in new instruments in the 70s - and improvised all their concerts. And of course it's a sin that there's still not a DBL CD version with 'Golgatha And the Circle Closes'...

*) Krautrock (or German Progressive Rock) was heavily inspired by Pink Floyd 1966-69, and so was Edgar Froese (born during WWII in today's Russian enclave Kaliningrad in 1944, opposite Sweden's largest island Gotland). But the similarities end here. Whereas he also loved Jimi Hendrix and often took the chance to play the guitar, both in the studio (as heard here on 'Icarus') and on stage, he was also a student of legendary, German electro acoustic/electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), and on a friendly basis with artist Salvador Dalí. And whereas Edgar Froese (who hated drugs just as much as Frank Zappa) studied art and electronic music in the 1960s, the flower children took "trips" (real or drug induced) to other worlds...well, other countries eastward at least (on land via Turkey, Irak and Iran - it was another era, pre 1973 and the first oil crisis...), preferably in a VW van or even hitchhiking, depending on your economic status and your geographical knowledge. This was "The dawning of the Aquarius", and a time when KKK (Kabul, Kathmandu and Kuta [Bali]) were THE places to go. Some got stuck in a purple haze of syringes - much like the leftover kids in San Francisco after the summer of love ended, and some 200,000+ youngsters returned to school in Aug./Sept. '67 and never came back, A few survived into modern times, but moved to Goa, Morocco or Ibiza, where some still can be seen grazing, listening to old Grateful Dead tapes.

Progressive Rock was born in UK in the late 70s via bands like The Nice, Yes, Argent, Pink Floyd and Van der Graaf Generator (and many more, too many to mention here), and in Germany and the cosmopiltan West Berlin (that never belonged to West Germany, contrary to common belief), those who returned from the East met with those who never left, and many of them brought a lot of new strange instruments and tapes of local music. Amon Düül started drumming as a commune in Munich/München, but whereas some never stopped drumming, others really wanted to create new music, and thus Amon Düül II was born. Can, Faust, Konrad Schnitzler, Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius, Achim Roedelius, Klaus Dinger, Ralph & Florian have their own stories, but probably had part of the 1968 student demonstrations that spread throught the world. Add to that the Prussian marching tradition (just listen to Marlene Dietrich "singing"...), and I find it highly logical that some Krautrock sounded like monotonous factory noise in the beginning.

And you don't even have to read German history or know that GRD (West Germany) was a fascist police state with Berufsverbot ("professional ban") to know what triggered some young people in May/June 1967: The shah of Iran visited Berlin and West Germany for 9 days, and when peaceful demonstrators got beaten up by the Iranian body guards - while German police at best stood watching, and at worst shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg in Berlin - the seeds of RAF and the political ultra left was born, and they got support from a surprising (?) amount of young people, despite murdering innocent workers. Just watch Bernd Eichinger's/Uli Edel's powerful drama 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' (2008), where you get the political take on these years (and where fashion model-turned political activist by way of Jane Fonda) and Rolling Stones/Jimi Hendrix "friend" "Uschi Obermayer" - all German women/girls named Ursula are called Uschi - gets ridiculed by "Renate Knaup" of Amon Düül II...).

A Krautrock classic. Unlike his other solo albums there is a drummer, but not at all “ruined” by it, just different. There are so many fat analog synth sounds, this alone will make it appealing to many. But there is everything else that one would and should expect from an electronic Krautrock album, meditative repetition a la Berlin-school, plenty of Mellotron, the album is just not as “spacey” as some of the other Froese and Tangerine Dream releases of this 70s era. I’d hate to think of life without this album. Pay extra for a NM 2xLP!

This is from the original double vinyl set, not the 'remixed' one.

Of course, it is different tastes that EF speaks with his endless tinkering of classic period TD, and his solo catalogue, and I'm not going to judge that here.

Suffice to say, this was released at about the same time as Cyclone was causing disquiet. Strange, since 'Ages' shows EF with a very distinct style of his own. Far more TD than 'Aqua' or 'Epsilon', and yet a different sense of structure. It doesn't try to be commercial or challenging, or self-indulgent, as so many solo albums get to be. Even the track names are different to the TD style ones!

If you're wanting to get a good grounding of EF's solo style, this is a good starting point.

The only real problem with this release is the loss of 'Golgatha and the circle closes'. This is a bad error, as with any editing of double albums to cram them onto single CD. Please, its no big deal to release a double CD for a double album.!

Great solo album from the founder of Tangerine Dream. I especially like the older releases because the soundscapes of electronic sounds are very good combined to a mental journey. I also like the dark and a raw atmosphere with typical TD strings in here. A lot of these tracks are comparably to the '70-'80 album of Tangerine Dream. Buy it blind if you see it...