Having remained impervious to punk and new wave, digital music pioneers Tangerine Dream seemed to sort out the 80s head-on. Extensively considered a formidable return to their roots after the prog-inclined Cyclone, their final missive from the 70s, Pressure Majeure, spent two months within the UK’s Prime 40, whereas, in its wake, TD mainstays Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke additional strengthened their armory by recruiting gifted new keyboardist Johannes Schmoelling.
A virtuosic but extremely adaptable musician who saved an eye fixed on developments in digital expertise, Schmoelling proved a perfect (if belated) alternative for the long-serving Peter Baumann, who stop the group after their acclaimed US tour in 1977. Certainly, after integrating into the band over the winter of 1979, Schmoelling endured one thing of a baptism of fireplace: performing his first gig alongside Froese and Franke when Tangerine Dream crossed the Berlin Wall for his or her historic present at East Berlin’s Palast Der Republik in January 1980.
A stylistic volte-face
Schmoelling’s first studio periods with the group produced 1980’s Tangram, a crisp, melodic, and warmly obtained LP, however one primarily consisting of fabric Froese and Franke had been shaping previous to his arrival. Schmoelling, nonetheless, exerted a far larger affect on the contents of September 1981’s Exit: a stylistic volte-face of a document which jettisoned a lot of Tangerine Dream’s sonic staples, together with Edgar Froese’s expressive, David Gilmour-esque guitar solos and the 20-minute epics which dominated earlier LPs corresponding to Rubycon and Pressure Majeure.
By comparability, Exit offered a contemporary and strictly digital sound with tightly structured melodies usurping the experimental strategy of yore, and a lot of the tracks clocking in round a user-friendly five-minute mark. Although nonetheless wholly instrumental, “Choronzon” and the Hello-NRG thrum of “Network 23” nonetheless flaunted a dancefloor-friendly pop sensibility redolent of newly rising synth-based acts corresponding to Depeche Mode and Delicate Cell, whereas the evocative “Pilots Of Purple Twilight” could have copped its deal with from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,” however it mentioned its piece eloquently and left the constructing after a concise 4 minutes.
Not that Tangerine Dream had totally given up on grandeur. Certainly, Exit’s most affecting set-piece was arguably its 10-minute opener, “Kiew Mission”: a tense and extremely persuasive observe inspecting the doubtless menace of atomic warfare-instigated annihilation at a time when the world’s nuclear clock was teetering solely minutes away from midnight. After a lot of the mainstream-inclined positivity previous it, the sinister “Remote Viewing” additionally supplied a curiously pessimistic postscript, with the observe’s eerie spatial remoteness and juddering sequencers – admittedly not unfavorably – recalling parts of each TD’s proto-ambient masterpiece Zeit and their later industrial breakthrough, Phaedra.
