Tangerine Dream – Zeit

#TangerineDreamTuesday Week 3: ZEIT.

For many years, I naively assumed that Tangerine Dream were purveyors of mostly new-age chillout music. It's true of their later works, perhaps, but by no means Zeit. Because Zeit is terrifying.

First Movement: Birth of Liquid Plejades. Overpowering cellos take centre stage, establishing a deeply ominous atmosphere. These give way to a funereal organ and, for the first time in a TD album, a Moog! (Played by Florian Fricke of Popul Vuh fame.) Hypnotic organ ends the track.

Second Movement: Nebulous Dawn. A claustrophobic drone pulses away over eerie space effects. We are completely alone, and it's not a comforting thought. Swirling, crystalline sounds slice jagged paths through the ambience, and eventually the track dissolves in bubbling, synthetic noise.

Third Movement: Origin of Supernatural Probabilities. A gentle guitar provides a brief reprieve, but is quickly lost in the vastness of a forbidding cosmos. Drones and space effects continue. In its last minute, the track finally returns to some semblance of melody, completing the circle.

Fourth Movement: Zeit. The German word for time, and it's fascinating how this track seems to bend it. Any sense of prevailing mood like in Plejades has been obliterated; instead wind effects howl with chittering alien birds in an all-consuming black hole, where traditional instruments are abstracted beyond recognition, and conventional music theory remains little more than an afterthought. Zeit is the void, and ends as it begins - from nothing to nothing. A fitting conclusion for TD's ambient masterpiece...

Fin.

Wünderbar. Set a high mark for ambient that eno failed to reach. Too bold ? Listen to this with the lights off and prove me wrong

Arguably the first long form ambient / drone album ever. Sadly, the first edition on Ohr (as many others from that period) suffers from issues with the lamination peeling off.

If planet Earth projected the song Echoes by Pink Floyd out into the cosmos, and then the cosmos projected back a response, it would surely sound something like Zeit by Tangerine Dream.

Truly a monumental work of deep, deep-space ambience, and a beautiful journey to sit and let yourself become immersed in.

Have a copy of the original German first pressing and the music emerges stunningly from dead-silent wax. A stellar production.

I have a memory of a picture disc edition of Zeit but cannot find it here! Can anybody help me please? Thanks, best wishes, David P Housden

A couple of cellos and a VCS 3 synthesizer (which Jean-Michel Jarre would make famous a few years later). The VCS 3 is actually not an instrument, but a sound machine. The cellos repeat their theme, while the VCS 3 superemposes lots of electronic sounds. Depending on your mood, it sounds more or less threatening between Alien and parts of Apocalypse Now. Those who do not know the films and their music can easily discover the 1972 avant-garde. All in all very worth hearing, even if it is nerve-wracking.