“New Age” (for lack of a better term) space music seems to break down by nationalities, primarily German and Japanese. (The fact that we firebombed one of these countries and nuked the other some fifty-odd years ago is purely coincidental--anybody even attempting to make this music back then would have been executed.) Although strains originating from other countries seem to have subpersonalities all their own, the broadest stereotype would be that the Japanese stuff (Kitaro, Osamu, Stomu Yamashta) is “light”--happy, zen-like, flowing and contemplative, while the German variety (Tangerine Dream, Adelbert Von Deyen, Eberhard Schoener--who collaborated with the pre-release Police, by the way) is “dark”--heavy, intricate, mechanistic, existential. From the sound of some of this stuff, you’d think it was the Germans who’d been nuked.

This krautrock can be tough going even if you have a taste for it. There’s an entire realm of it (often more rock-oriented than the more purely electronic people mentioned above) I haven’t heard nearly enough of to comment on just yet. I suspect I’ve been hearing the wrong bands. (Amon Duul I instead of Amon Duul II, for example. There is a difference.) Eloy, Grobschnitt, yeah they’re OK. Kraftwerk? *shrug*, whatever. Michael Hoenig? Now we’re talking, but he’s only got one great album. Klaus Shultze? He has a bunch, but what I had I taped over. Guru Guru? I’ve got a great bootleg tape sitting around...somewhere...Some genres aren’t nearly as easy to get into as you’d like them to be; some of them refuse to connect with you even when you’re trying to connect with them. The typical import CD costs $20, so this isn’t something to explore casually. (We complain, but the fact is that people in Europe pay the equivalent of $20 per CD in their own countries, for a piece of aluminum that costs less than 5% of that to manufacture.)

So gawdbless the Tang boys--you can find them anywhere; they have 40 albums out, and so long as you pick one with a pre-1980 date on the back you’ll be fine. No matter how elusive their countrymen could be, Tangerine Dream always managed somehow to bring it all back home.

My first glimpse into their enchanted realm was back in high school--a friend and I had been nearly expelled for reasons I’d still rather not go into, but we lived to laugh another day. In fact, right after we came back from being suspended there was a big multimedia project due in which (typically) we found one more way to rub the noses of the powers that be in...oh, well, anyway we opted for a slide show. I happened to have a huge collection of Star Trek filmclips, as well as stills from various other TV shows, movies and cartoons. (I mention it just in case you think I have weird hobbies now.)

The project was entitled “Dreams: A Journey Through Your Inner Self.” So we bought a dream book from the supermarket checkout line for 25 cents and proceeded to fit slides to dream-interpretations. What wasn’t in the book we made up.

This being a multimedia presentation, we needed music, too. It being 1979, there was a problem--the library of psychedelia I own today is precisely the collection I desperately dreamed of owning back then, but I only had two or three truly, suitably weird records and there was only so much of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request that would be sufficient, since we wanted a different soundbyte every minute or two. Fortunately my older bro stepped in with a copy of Rubycon. It saved the day; even people who didn’t show up stoned for class like we told them to came up to us later and asked us where we got the slides, and the dreams...and that weird music...!?!?

I wanted to know where it came from myself. How sad it was to find that TDream had already peaked creatively and were just then beginning their slow, downward slide into the submediocrity that plagues them to this day. To my ears, everything they did in the 70s is at least decent (maybe not Green Desert, here’s one instance when an outtake actually is less interesting and revelatory than the canon). And something like Zeit is beyond decency--the sonic equivalent of a dark night of the soul. Gustav Mahler’s soul, perhaps, trapped in amber, hanging from an asteroid and chiming along with the solar wind.

You could go back even further to their first, Electronic Meditation, back when they were still some kinda rock band. I have a radio session from even earlier, even scarier days; the further back you go, the darker things get. Whatever these guys were chanting in the womb, it must have been an apocalyptic foretelling so hideous that their mothers’ lips are sealed to this day.

This day? Urrrrrp. Whatever happened to these guys, I don’t know, but brzzzz-BAP!, brzzzz-BAP! it makes the most sense to blame it on the advent of the drum machines. The frantic footstepping of their journeys through their own burning brains was traded in for a silicon hotwire; their hearts no longer pulse with the feedback of the spheres--they merely pump formaldehyde: brzzzz-BAP!, brzzzz-BAP! As soon as they plugged in their new toy and began to jam, an epiphany of sonic vistas opened before them. Unfortunately, the path this led them down turned out to be a cul-de-sac of disco soundtrack whoredom. It’s a good gig, I guess, and they’re churning it out to this day. Off to work they go, hi-ho, hi-ho.