Tangerine Dream - Zeit: Classic or Dud?

http://www.progreviews.com/reviews/images/TD-Zeit.jpg

I'm serious about this one. Two listens in and I really cannot tell if I like it or not. Was expecting something more along the lines of Phaedra, but Zeit really is the sound of outer space blackness, dark and depressing and occassionally beautiful. No rhythm or melody, just one cool ass cover and a bunch of drone. It's not exactly the most eventful album in the world, and it's not really fitting my car listening routine at all nor does it appeal to me while on shuffle or anything like that. Was wondering what the weirdos of ILM thought of it (and you have to be weird to listen to this more than once) - fire away

classic of course

one cool ass cover and a bunch of drone used to be enough.....

kids today....

I sort of got the same feeling listening to this that I do when watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" in that it was just made in a different era and that this kind of music could never really be done today. Newer droney bands like GYBE usually have a lot more going on than this. Was a different time back then when it was okay to just space out in front of your record player for an hour+ at a time.

Loved this record by far the most of the first four. Haven't heard it much since I became a fan of their work up through 1984 or so.

Classic in every single way, Phaedra et al are more accessible albums but I always come back to this one. Florian Fricke's contributions to this cannot be understated.

I wonder if it's possible to make a record that sounds like this without smoking lots and lots of weed.

"Alpha Centuri" sounds quite good to me right now, especially the first side

there's dronier eventless records than this one still being made today - check out some eliane radigue.

relatedly, spent a fabulous 45 mins listening to charlemagne palestine and oren ambarchi play one (complicated) chord on the melbourne town hall organ and oren's setup last sunday. transcendental indeed.

but, yes, a classic synth record. i still go back to ricochet more than this, though.

maybe I should clarify, by "couldn't be done" I don't mean literally, I mean that it couldn't be done as a mainstream sort of record, IIRC Tangerine Dream was quite popular in their early days, there's nothing really like that now

Super classic, what's wrong with you. Listening to this album on headphones all the way through in the dark feels like going on a journey into outer space. Top that.

Amazing and very classic, and a touchstone for a lot of stuff happening right now (analog synth drone-ish music is no insignificant thing at the moment)...

I sort of got the same feeling listening to this that I do when watching "2001: A Space Odyssey"

There's a good reason for that. To the guy who asked if it's possible to make a record that sounds like this without smoking lots and lots of weed, I don't believe Ligeti touched the stuff. Total classic, by the way.

Ligeti is more composed though! Although I think TD show their avant-garde composition roots on a lot of records, it's not just cosmic meandering synths like a lot of people that came after them. I doubt if they scored it out exactly but Zeit has a definite overarching structure, just not one most composition bods would recognise as such.

Maybe it's called "Time" for a reason, the temporal structure being one of the main aspects of the composition. Maybe I'm reading too much into it now.

I doubt if they scored it out exactly

I think they just sat down and noodled about till they came up with something they liked, which is fine by me. I don't think there is much link to modern classical composition other than them hearing stuff like Ligeti (I'm guessing) and then, in the course of their noodlings, thinking, "Hey this sounds a bit 2001, let's keep doing it."

trying to read some of the reviews of TD on allmusic.com is pretty awesome:

Catch Me if You Can is an accessible soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. As soundtracks in general go, this is an excellent CD. As Tangerine Dream soundtracks go, this is a below-average disc. They have done much worse; they have done much better. This is for Tangerine Dream completists only.

like, with a few tweaks, that could be a review of anything

anyway, could anyone tell me how this compares to, say, Klaus Schulze's Cyborg? both seem to be the same concept but right now I'm enjoying Cyborg more.

you already did it all by yourself!

Classic classic classic, an album to lose yourself in, deep dark immersive droney goodness.

Was expecting something more along the lines of Phaedra, but Zeit really is the sound of outer space blackness, dark and depressing and occassionally beautiful.

this is basically what I like about Zeit, except that I think it is nearly always beautiful.

this is great to listen to driving on a german autobahn at night. i remember finding the music quite organic. i wrote about it in my blog a couple of years ago. here is an excerpt:

But then I listened to it full blast at night on the German Autobahn with the cruise control on 150 km/h. And suddenly some very low notes (probably from Florian Fricke's moog synthesizer on the second piece Nebulous Dawn) hit me. There are absolutely no drums or percussions on this album but I somehow felt a kind of earth beat. The sound of the earth turning around itself.
http://musik.antville.org/stories/614000/

not exactly the most eventful album in the world

DOWN WITH EVENTS, UP WITH NONEVENTS

Just got the 2011 deluxe reissues of Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem in today's mail. Tons of great info in the booklets, and Zeit and Atem are both 2CD sets with complete live concerts on the second disc. The one appended to Zeit is two tracks, 80 minutes, from November 1972. In the Zeit booklet, there's a lot of talk about tensions between the TD guys, who were very into improvisation and seeing what they stumbled upon, and Florian Fricke, who was much more about compositions.

i hope they louderized the silent parts

What label are the 2011 reissues on? xpost

They're on Esoteric, through Cherry Red.

cool, thanks

I'm a fan. I agree with you that this is not shuffle-music though. spending an afternoon with this is nice though.

they really pull off this marvelous sense of fluctuating otherness

like, you're not enveloped, you're not having a cinematic experience, you're not JUST 'going on a journey', the record doesn't take over your space and you don't always enter into its space, but you intermittently seem to encounter it as a thing in its own right

Lively discussion of this album on the Noisextra podcast today.