Tangerine Dream has long held an exceptional dual status as one of the most popular and productive bands to have emerged from the Krautrock scenes of the 1970s. With over 100 live or studio albums and over 60 soundtracks to its name, the task of covering Tangerine Dream’s influence and legacy is formidable.Footnote ¹ Initially part of the arts scene of West Berlin, the band were formed by Edgar Froese in 1967; their founding thus preceded the student revolutions by a year. However, Tangerine Dream’s musical productivity has been unceasing since then, moving far beyond the classic 1970s era of Krautrock. After a turbulent and experimental early period, the band managed by the late 1970s to attain heights of popular status that stretched from Hollywood films to world tours. With respect to Krautrock’s experimental aesthetics and countercultural ideals, this commercial success and the band’s resulting shifts in musical approach have repeatedly drawn criticism.Footnote ² And yet, as an originator of the ‘Berlin School’ of electronic music, Tangerine Dream have garnered high praise and a devoted fan following to this day.

Froese remained the bandleader until his passing in 2015, leaving an extraordinary legacy in his solo work and as the driving force behind Tangerine Dream. The band have also continued to perform, curating Froese’s legacy as managed by Thorsten Quaeschning, with the guidance of Froese’s widow, Bianca Froese-Acquaye.Footnote ³ Still, given such productivity in terms of musical releases and media presence, a critical ambivalence regarding Tangerine Dream is practically unavoidable. A tension resides within Tangerine Dream between such distinctions as Krautrock and New Age, ambient and cosmic rock, synthwave and trance, and electronic live-act and soundtrack. Listening for that tension, whether in terms of cultural status, media, or musical style, can arguably be the most fruitful way of appreciating their achievements. The band’s influence on these genres and practices has resulted in a unique cultural constellation that other Krautrock bands did not touch in the same way – with the exception of Kraftwerk.

In this over-arching respect, this chapter provides an account of Tangerine Dream that expands beyond the traditional focus of the Krautrock 1970s. To be sure, Tangerine Dream made their most compelling leaps in audio experimentation and production during this time, with four classic albums released by Ohr between 1970 and 1973, followed by Phaedra (1974) and Rubycon (1975) with the band’s move to Virgin Records. We will first address Tangerine Dream’s musical transformation in the context of the 1970s. Our account then moves beyond this classic Krautrock study in the following respects. First, Tangerine Dream’s live career through the 1980s will be highlighted, involving multiple ground-breaking performances that had both geographic and political consequences: from iconic events at European cathedrals to concert spectacles across the United States, and landmark tours in the Eastern Bloc during the 1980s. A parallel tradition of live albums, inaugurated by the classic Ricochet (1975), demonstrates that the band maintained some of their better experimental traditions in the live context.

The final sections continue with this expanded frame by addressing Tangerine Dream’s legacy in music for visual media. Tangerine Dream’s numerous film scores, especially during the 1980s, have been as consequential as their live and studio albums. Far beyond a commercial footnote, this Hollywood career has helped to solidify the band’s legacy while reaching new audiences. Such a perspective, which highlights the 1980s as much as the 1970s, requires a leap beyond orthodoxies that focus primarily on the early albums as the band’s Golden Age. This original view was arguably cemented in Julian Cope’s landmark Krautrocksampler, where he focused almost exclusively on the early albums. Indeed, Cope even omitted Phaedra, long seen as a definitive album, from his list of the top 50 Krautrock albums. He finished with Atem from 1973Footnote ⁴ – although in fairness, he gave some praise for the later albums of the 1970s. Regardless, the critical tension between freeform Krautrock and the sequenced future of Tangerine Dream’s later albums is implied here.

To a certain extent, this desire to focus on early Tangerine Dream is related to the band’s overwhelming productivity, which is matched only by Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze, coincidentally the original members on the debut album from 1970.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography can seem daunting, as though one is climbing a cosmic Mont Blanc. Reasonable concerns about a dilution of quality are also evident here. In this sense, if Kraftwerk achieved cult status on account of their minimalist approach, Tangerine Dream occupy the other extreme of abundant overload. And yet, this dive into discographic oceans of sound might also yield its own benefits, and not just for the most committed Tangerine Dream fans. While a canon of landmark albums exists for legitimate reasons, especially between 1972 and 1977 when the band established their definitive sound,Footnote ⁶ this wider discography should also be revisited. Some surprising outcomes can result, from the spectacle of live performances to a world of visual media.

The Ohr Years and kosmische Musik

This multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream was not foreseeable at the band’s inception. With their initial years in the late 1960s as part of the Zodiak club scene in West Berlin, involving related bands such as Ash Ra Tempel and Kluster, Tangerine Dream initially had a constant turnover of members – It was a feat that Edgar Froese managed to keep the band active. Still, practices of professionalisation and productivity were established for the band early on by Froese. He was older than the other band members, as he was born on D-Day in 1944. Froese grew up in West Berlin playing piano as a teenager and initially focusing on sculpture and painting. His talents eventually led to a brief period of study at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He experienced the 1960s Beat era and toured with his first band, The Ones, which resulted in a life-changing experience. In Spain, Froese met Salvador Dali and was inspired to devote his artistic efforts to the experimental Berlin scene, with a kind of sonic surrealism that combined psychedelic rock and Dali.Footnote ⁷

After founding Tangerine Dream in 1967, the band went through a number of formations before recording their first album, Electronic Meditation (1970), on Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Ohr label. At this time, apparently in response to Kaiser, Froese also began using the term kosmische Musik to describe the band’s musical vision.Footnote ⁸ With Schulze and Schnitzler, Tangerine Dream’s freeform rock was already on full display on Electronic Meditation, though Cope astutely sums up this album as ‘really neither electronic nor meditative’.Footnote ⁹ Kaiser himself offered elaborate esoteric descriptions in representing this new cosmic music of the Berlin School, stating at one point: ‘[K]osmische Musik more narrowly relates to the specific direction of musicians who, as a medium, realize life’s molecular processes directly through their instrument of electronic vibrations.’Footnote ¹⁰ Tangerine Dream’s audio experimentations also gradually involved more electronic equipment. Ulrich Adelt describes these ideas about the synthesiser and Kaiser’s vision as aiming at a ‘deterritorialized, postnational cosmological identity’.Footnote ¹¹ While the origins of the term are unclear, it was Kaiser who popularised this idea by adapting it for one of his record labels, founded in 1973. However, Froese would later become dissatisfied with such psychedelic rhetoric and reject the idea of kosmische Musik. He decided to abstain from drugs and maintained an artistic discipline that ensured Tangerine Dream’s prolific output, which included splitting from Kaiser and the Ohr label at the right time.

Still, the 1970s legacy of kosmische Musik has accompanied Tangerine Dream with associations of science fiction and space music. Following Electronic Meditation, the albums Alpha Centauri (1971), Zeit (Time, 1972), and Atem (Breath, 1973) all had distinct cosmic trappings, and eventually achieved marked success, especially in Britain and France. The influential British DJ John Peel named Atem his album of the year for 1973, placing it in heavy rotation on his radio show. Such reception would make Tangerine Dream one of the most internationally successful German acts of the decade. Zeit was a landmark release, the glacial outlier to the more rhythmically driven albums on Ohr. An extended double LP, Zeit explored outer space – and head space – to its sonic limits. Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh joined in with his Moog synthesiser on the opening movement, ‘Birth of Liquid Plejades’, and Tangerine Dream would carry cosmic electronica even further on such chilling tracks as ‘Origin of Supernatural Possibilities’. With such titles and extended forms, Tangerine Dream became a kind of Berlin answer to Pink Floyd and other British progressive rock acts. The progressive scene in France was likewise devoted to Tangerine Dream’s music.

This mix of psychedelic rock, German romantic tropes, and surrealism formed a compelling intersection of cultural references for fans of Tangerine Dream. As mentioned earlier, Froese did not partake in the mind-altering drugs of the sub-culture, but the psychedelic connection is undeniable. After all, the band’s name comes from having misheard the lyric ‘tangerine trees’ in the Beatles’ LSD-inspired song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.Footnote ¹² The band’s custom of performing in cathedrals in the 1970s reinforced the spiritual, mystic aura around them and their music. The 1973 album Atem proved to be an extraordinary musical moment that represented the band at the pinnacle of their Krautrock phase, with freeform drumming and sonic experimentation that evoked the sublime, featured especially on the twenty-minute title track of the album.

The band line-up had also crystalised by this time. As mentioned, Edgar Froese had always been at the heart of Tangerine Dream, though most fans view the classic trio of Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Bauman as central to the band’s sound. This trio worked together from 1971 through 1977 for most of Tangerine Dream’s classic albums, from Zeit (1972) to Sorcerer (1977). Franke had been classically trained at the Berlin Conservatory before joining Froese in 1971 to record Alpha Centauri, and Baumann, an accomplished pianist who knew Franke and joined by the time that Zeit was recorded, completed the trio. Together, they also made the leap from Ohr to Virgin Records.

This trio of Froese, Franke, and Baumann is thus comparable to Kraftwerk’s classic quartet formation from 1975 to 1987. While Baumann had already left by 1977, Franke stayed on as a key member to shape Tangerine Dream’s sound in music and media of the 1980s until his departure in 1987. Between 1971 and the move to Virgin in 1973, the trio gradually acquired new equipment and, Franke especially, worked tirelessly in the studio to develop the definitive sound. The band’s close association with Krautrock is also confirmed by the fact that Alpha Centauri, Zeit, and Atem were all recorded in Dieter Dierks’s iconic studio near Cologne and released on Ohr. But with their extraordinary international success, a young label owner named Richard Branson would become interested in signing Tangerine Dream, which would result in some radical changes.

The Virgin Years: Sequenced Success

The album that most fans and critics view as Tangerine Dream’s most influential release followed their move to Virgin Records – the aforementioned Phaedra (1974). It could practically be seen as Tangerine Dream’s equivalent to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn – as its new sequenced patterns on the fully electronic title track, an electronic statement comparable to ‘Autobahn’, would mark a new definitive style for the band. By signing with Virgin, Tangerine Dream also gained access to the Manor Studio in Oxfordshire to record their next releases. The instruments the band would have had access to at the time were the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) VCS3 synthesiser, a Mellotron, the Minimoog, a phaser for achieving various effects, and a rhythm controller called the PRX-2. These were the instruments primarily used to record the band’s LPs of this era, including Atem and Phaedra, followed by Rubycon (1975),Footnote ¹³ which had similar critical and commercial success. With this series of albums, the experimentation with synthesisers and the complete discarding of traditional instrumentation on PhaedraFootnote ¹⁴ became crucial to the new sound.

Musically, Tangerine Dream offer listeners a particular kind of experience – usually expansive with tracks regularly clocking in at ten to twenty minutes. These were sometimes more meditative, such as on Zeit, and sometimes propelled by rhythmic sequencer patterns. Froese described their compositional process as follows: ‘We could start very simply, with a bass line, the function of which is like the old basso continuum [sic] in Bach, and then move into nearly a classical counterpoint structure with up to five or six independent voices … if you do this in popular music today, most people would not realize what really goes on.’Footnote ¹⁵ If Froese here is referring to the sequenced synthesiser bass line that appears in much of their music, it seems he mistook the term basso continuo for ostinato, which is a more fitting label in this context. When their music is not conjuring ambient cosmic soundscapes, the ‘basso continuum’, in Froese’s terms, gives the music a dance-like momentum. Exotic melodies and atonal elements, from Mellotron choirs to white noise, were also distinctive marks of Tangerine Dream’s signature sound, which would overlay the sequenced synthesisers.

The music at times became a pastiche of concert and art music echoes, such as Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which is practically quoted on part 1 of Rubycon (at 13:30–14:05), or György Ligeti’s Atmospheres, evoked in the haunting choirs of the Mellotron on part 2.Footnote ¹⁶ The same year as Rubycon, Froese further cemented his reputation with the release of his second solo album, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975). An ambient landmark, this solo album was listed by David Bowie as one of his favourites, and an important influence especially on the B-sides of his own Berlin trilogy. Bowie and Froese would also meet and become good friends at the time of the English star’s move from Los Angeles to West Berlin in 1976 – quite a new mark of recognition for the Berlin School.Footnote ¹⁷ Along with these new networks, Froese’s own solo career would evolve in the coming years.

However, following Tangerine Dream’s next landmark album, Stratosfear (1976), it must be admitted that the band’s output gradually became uneven. In strictly compositional terms, Tangerine Dream lost some of their edge by the end of the 1970s, and particularly with the last major release on Virgin, Hyperborea (1983). New Age sounds and attempts at pop vocals and more standard structures gradually crept into these studio albums. In this context, in its most unfortunate examples the music descended from cosmic heights to planetarium ‘Muzak’, although still boasting standout moments that anticipated techno/trance. By taking on such an overwhelming number of projects in the late 1970s and 1980s, Tangerine Dream seemingly lost their experimental edge.

Franke comments: ‘We did not have the time to explore our minds or the great computer instruments we had at our disposal … I began to feel our quality was dropping.’Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, by having so many projects, including major releases on other record labels, a split with Branson and Virgin occurred in the mid-1980s. Johannes Schmoelling, member of the band from 1979 to 1985, deeply regrets losing Branson’s support and business acumen, as he felt that ‘after Branson, it petered out’.Footnote ¹⁹ The efforts at record promotion by other labels and Froese himself could not match Virgin’s support. Indeed, it is ironic here that such corporate trajectories would eventually make Branson – now famously – the first billionaire space-voyager in 2021 as head of Virgin Galactic. However, he certainly owes this partly to the success of Tangerine Dream’s cosmic music in building his Virgin brand.

From Australia to Poland: Tangerine Dream on Tour

We do not have space to discuss the expanded discography in detail, although across the late 1970s and 1980s, as mentioned, Tangerine Dream continued to release a wide variety of studio albums, ranging from the initial adventures in song structures with Steve Jolliffe on Cyclone (1978), to the proto-trance pop of Optical Race (1988). To be sure, Froese maintained an excellent discipline in seeing these projects to fruition, while rapidly expanding Tangerine Dream’s work on soundtracks and keeping the band on tour. However, following the split with Branson around 1985, the second major blow came, with Franke’s departure in 1987. Froese thus had ever more challenges maintaining the band’s studio innovations into the next decade. As Paul Stump states: ‘The departure of Franke, the engine-room of the Tangerine Dream mothership … was something else entirely. He was the man responsible for the trademark sequencer squiggle, chatter and thud that was the Tangerine Dream sound.’Footnote ²⁰

But that signature sound and Froese’s own innovations, along with other key band members, left a major mark in two significant areas also during the 1980s: the realm of live performances and of film scores. Indeed, the parallel importance of Tangerine Dream’s influence as a performing act is difficult to overstate. Tangerine Dream constantly toured at a level that had important social and cultural consequences, which reflected back on Krautrock. A tradition of live albums thus evolved in parallel with the studio albums. With Phaedra, a major UK tour took place in 1974, to be followed up by an additional UK tour and an Australian tour in 1975.

The most symbolic events at this time were a series of concerts in European cathedrals. These first occurred in Reims, France on 13 December, 1974, at the conclusion of the first UK tour, with a performance night also featuring Nico.Footnote ²¹ Though Tangerine Dream were later banned from playing additional Catholic churches, this event was a landmark success, attended by 6,000 people. It was followed by two performances in Anglican cathedrals, at Coventry Cathedral on 4 October 1975 and Liverpool Cathedral on 16 October 1975, both part of their second major UK tour.Footnote ²² These three events, along with additional performances at concert halls and arts venues, established the iconic imagery of Tangerine Dream as an electronic trio.

Ricochet brilliantly inaugurated their tradition of live albums, as it was based on the materials from these tours in Britain, Europe, and Australia. This album would also be used as the soundtrack to Tony Palmer’s BBC film, Live at Coventry Cathedral, with vintage footage of Froese, Franke, and Baumann in performance.Footnote ²³ To be sure, the performance at Coventry, a cathedral that had been bombed during World War II and now houses an International Centre for Reconciliation, was also a symbolic moment of political transformation and the emergence of a new musical culture in the 1970s.

Illustration 8.1 Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral, 1975.

© Michael Putland/Getty Images.

Ricochet would be followed by Encore, the live album based on Tangerine Dream’s first major American tour of 1977. Of the Krautrock bands, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had been receiving the most press in the United States at that time.Footnote ²⁴ While the band’s German identity remained a topic of fascination, this helped rather than hindered interest in America. Indeed, the tour represented Tangerine Dream’s transatlantic success in popular music, and the tour appropriately took place in the same year as their crossover to Hollywood soundtracks. With a lightshow provided by Laserium, a pioneering technology launched by Ivan Dryer in 1973, the spectacle of Tangerine Dream live took on new dimensions of laser visuals accompanying the synthesiser consoles. It should be noted though that the stress of touring and production resulted in new friction, as Baumann famously split with the band in Colorado while on tour.Footnote ²⁵

Along with such tours that crossed oceans, the other major influence that Tangerine Dream would have on live performance was their extensive Eastern European tours during the 1980s, singular among Krautrock bands. On 31 January 1980, this bridge across the Cold War divide was inaugurated with the iconic performance at the East Berlin Palast der Republik as part of the East German radio station DT40 ‘Youth Concert’ series. Tangerine Dream were formally introduced with a practically diplomatic announcement, involving a discussion of the band’s discography and new currents of ‘electronic rock’.Footnote ²⁶ East German concerts in cities such as Rostock and Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) followed in 1982, along with concerts in Hungary and Yugoslavia. An Eastern European tour in 1983 brought Tangerine Dream to new cities in East Germany and Poland. This last tour resulted in another landmark in their live discography, Poland: The Warsaw Concert (1984), and these tours made Tangerine Dream an important influence on East German and Eastern European electronica, foreshadowing the explosion of techno music and rave culture in the 1990s.

Tangerine Dream continued to tour extensively through 1988, though by the 1990s, the band’s activities and musical innovations comparatively declined. Nevertheless, the band continued to tour in subsequent decades, and dozens of bootlegs of the live performances have been collected by fans under the Tangerine Trees and Tangerine Leaves bootleg series. Such recordings have also circulated online to invite listeners into new directions of Tangerine Dream’s almost endless discography. This legacy also involves a performance schedule that continues to this day, involving a new generation of band members. The international networks of Tangerine Dream’s formation and reception, as a perpetual work-in-progress, have thus extended to new dimensions in the context of their iconic live performances.

Hollywood Scores: 1977, 1981–1988

The influences of Tangerine Dream’s film scores should likewise be seen as more than an addendum to the studio albums or live albums, even if the scores sometimes consisted of reworked sections of those albums. Through film music, just as with their live tours, Tangerine Dream have attracted new audiences from multiple generations to the band, and to electronic music and Krautrock generally. In film music alone, the group were one of the key forces behind Hollywood’s shift in the late 1970s and 1980s towards scores with driving synths and electronic textures. To be sure, Popol Vuh also had an extraordinary influence on film music history on account of their classic soundtracks for Werner Herzog’s films.Footnote ²⁷ However, these soundtracks were in the context of New German Cinema, whereas Tangerine Dream became the primary Krautrock influence in Hollywood itself.

No other Krautrock groups had such extensive careers in film music. The closest examples of German electronica in Hollywood at that time were the ‘Munich Machine’ producers Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express (1978), Flashdance (1983)) and Harold Faltermeyer (Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Fletch (1985)). Their combined talents were then featured on the song hits and score for the blockbuster Top Gun (1986). Tangerine Dream, Moroder, and Faltermeyer thus became the primary examples of 1980s composers in Hollywood that crossed over between Krautrock, new wave, and Euro-disco. Tangerine Dream were also certainly part of the larger trend of electronic composers, most prominently Wendy Carlos and Vangelis, who transformed Hollywood film music during the 1970s and 1980s.

The band’s career in Hollywood took place in stages. Tangerine Dream’s opportunities were foreshadowed by their colleague at Virgin, Mike Oldfield, whose Tubular Bells (1973) became a massive hit following the use of its opening theme for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Friedkin likewise realised the possibilities of Tangerine Dream for Hollywood films. He met the band in 1974 when he was on tour in Europe to promote The Exorcist, having the luck to see a performance at an abandoned church in the Black Forest.Footnote ²⁸ Friedkin states plainly: ‘I was mesmerized. I met with them afterward and said I’d like to send them the script for my next film.’Footnote ²⁹ The tradition of live performances thus helped to bring about the new leap to Hollywood. Friedkin’s interest was understandable, as his musical experiences on The Exorcist were rocky. He had been dissatisfied with the score by Lalo Schifrin and chose a compiled soundtrack of music, which ranged from Penderecki to Oldfield. The Exorcist thus became a kind of horror-music answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

After this meeting in 1974, Friedkin followed through, and Tangerine Dream would eventually score Sorcerer (1977). He sent them the script after a second meeting in Paris, and late in the filming process, Friedkin received their musical impressions via tape. He purportedly edited the film ‘around the group’s music’ as inspiration.Footnote ³⁰ Sorcerer has also remained one of Friedkin’s most critically acclaimed works, despite an initially disappointing box office performance. The film had the misfortune of being released in the same year as Star Wars. Indeed, there is a certain irony that the first major film scored by the pioneers of cosmic music would suffer because of the science-fiction epic of Star Wars. Still, despite these challenges, Sorcerer would be held in high regard. Tangerine Dream released the vinyl soundtrack to Sorcerer that year, inaugurating their new tradition of soundtrack albums. For the liner notes to the soundtrack, Friedkin would claim: ‘Had I heard them sooner, I would have asked them to score [The Exorcist].’Footnote ³¹

The story of Sorcerer is a fatalist tragedy about characters unable to escape the consequences of their life decisions. Tangerine Dream’s ostinato figure, what you might call the main ‘theme’, musically symbolises the wheel of fate that carries the protagonists towards their demise. The climactic scenes of a terrifying truck haul through jungles and rough terrain also resemble a hallucinatory tripscape that is effectively underscored by Tangerine Dream’s otherworldly music. At this time, the band’s line-up still consisted of Froese, Franke, and Baumann, which would have consequences for all three artists.

As mentioned, Franke and Baumann contributed the most to shaping Tangerine Dream’s sound, especially Franke,Footnote ³² who was also involved in the major scores of the 1980s. He went on to have a lucrative scoring career – most famously for the TV series Babylon 5 (1993–7) and The Amazing Race (2003–19).Footnote ³³ For Baumann, Sorcerer proved to be his only score with Tangerine Dream, though he would likewise develop a scoring career. Indeed, Franke and Baumann, as well as Paul Haslinger and Michael Hoenig, would all eventually relocate to Los Angeles and score numerous films and TV series. The Berlin School of electronic music thus seems partly to have evolved into a ‘Berlin–LA School’ of visual media composers.

Tangerine Dream were naturally the most prominent representatives here, as guided by Froese and Franke during the 1980s, along with Schmoelling and Haslinger. Following Sorcerer, the most active and successful years in Hollywood were between 1981 and 1988. One familiar with Tangerine Dream’s music, with its mind-bending cosmic flavours, might expect that they would be confined to science fiction or David-Lynchian psychological horror. However, the band’s filmography boasts a surprising variety of genres, from neo-noir thrillers to teen comedies, and from action movies to sword and sorcery fantasies. Across this history, their sound became synonymous with a certain 1980s aesthetic, with its propulsive sequencer ostinati, dark ambient tones, and sustained Mellotron pads. With respect to the film industry, the band also took on all forms of projects, from major studio features to B-movie shlock to cult classics. Furthermore, they participated in some interesting shifts in the studio system, providing, for example, the music to Flashpoint (1984), the first theatrical release by HBO Films.

In addition to Friedkin, Tangerine Dream worked with several major Hollywood directors. The band’s reputation in Hollywood became fully established by working with Michael Mann on his first two films, Thief (1981) and The Keep (1983). Also in 1983, Tangerine Dream scored the teen blockbuster Risky Business, which established Tom Cruise as a major star. Firestarter (1984), based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel, prominently featured Tangerine Dream’s score as a blend of horror sound effects, a method comparable to The Keep. Two additional films with major directors followed – Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). While filmographies of Tangerine Dream tend to focus on these films, a few cult classics should be added to this legacy – the teen satire Three O’clock High (1987) and especially the apocalyptic sci-fi film Miracle Mile (1988), which features a Los Angeles fever dreamscape that is remarkably complemented by the score. Furthermore, Tangerine Dream developed a parallel career composing for West German film and TV, which had already begun in the early 1970s. During the 1980s, this included a number of episodes of the popular TV series Tatort, as well as Edgar Froese’s score for Kamikaze 89 (1982), which featured the final starring role for Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

As the band’s Hollywood reputation grew, they earned many commissions, and their arsenal of gear and scoring techniques became more sophisticated. This slew of new commissions meant more disposable income for the band, which they invested in the acquisition of new instruments and recording equipment.Footnote ³⁴ The Mellotron was still a favourite of theirs, but from the late 1970s onwards polyphonic synthesisers made it easier to layer sounds and achieve a more varied range of effects.Footnote ³⁵ In the 1980s, digital sampling and the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) made the compositional process even more efficient, but at the cost of the analogue grit that characterised their older material.

The lack of memorable tunes and the unyielding rhythmic ostinato also gave a homogenised feel to the overall sound, what Paul Haslinger describes as their ‘monochromatic’ scores, which all have ‘the electronic-analog trademark sound that TD had become famous for’.Footnote ³⁶ That is not to say their music fails in the context of film, or lacks quality of craft. Many of their scores certainly stand on their own purely as musical compositions. However, in comparing their music from this period to other electronic scores of the era, especially the monumental works by Wendy Carlos for A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Vangelis for Blade Runner (1982), Tangerine Dream does not achieve a commensurate level of musical depth or nuance in underscoring visuals and narrative.

Still, many of these soundtracks work so effectively because the music does not interfere melodically with the narrative. It consists primarily of rhythm and texture, which complements and enhances the tone, atmosphere, and pacing of the film. Haslinger, although he didn’t join the band until later in their scoring career, shares the sentiment that a good score should not obstruct the narrative: ‘[I]t’s not good if you notice a film’s music. If you don’t notice it and the effect is created, that’s what we are striving for.’Footnote ³⁷ The soundtrack to Risky Business (1983) is consistent with this philosophy, especially the track ‘Love on a Real Train’, which is a clear homage to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Their score for Risky Business also provides a compelling emotional contrast to the 1980s hit songs for the teen drama. As mentioned, Tangerine Dream’s last major score could be said to be Miracle Mile from 1988. While the band’s activities in major Hollywood studios ended at that time, Tangerine Dream left an impressive and often underestimated filmography to be added to the studio and live discography of a band that maintained an extraordinary pace across multiple decades.

Stranger Dreams: Legacies in Music and Media

Indeed, the legacies of Tangerine Dream’s music have traversed popular culture in subsequent decades. Most prominently during the 1990s, the band became recognised as one of the forefathers of electronic dance music, especially within the genre of trance music, but also techno and ambient chillout music. For example, on the ‘Intro’ to the 1991 album Frequencies, the British electronic duo LFO presented their own homage to house and rave culture, prominently including Tangerine Dream among ‘the pioneers of the hypnotic groove’. Numerous techno artists, both German and international, as well as post-rock artists, have also listed Tangerine Dream as a major influence. To this day, the band are repeatedly reported on in such prominent venues as the website Pitchfork, introducing new fans to the music.

In related ways, Tangerine Dream’s legacies in music and sound for visual media have been just as prominent. In concluding our account, this intriguingly returns us to Froese’s original interest in visuals, but now in the form of TV and video games rather than modern painting. Froese’s final major project with Tangerine Dream before he passed away in 2015 was an extraordinary opportunity to produce music for a major video game in the new era of visual media: Grand Theft Auto V. The influence of this game is difficult to overstate, as it was for a time the best-selling video game in history. The significant opportunity, but also the enormous task, for Tangerine Dream to contribute music to this compiled score is striking. Thorsten Quaeschning explains: ‘For GTA 5, we composed and wrote 35 hours of music in 1.5 years. The deal was such that we had to upload 5.5 minutes of music every day, five days a week. The game mixes the music itself, so we upload the stems, the subgroups, layers, basses, rhythms, etc., separately.’Footnote ³⁸ Thus, the prolific maximalism of Tangerine Dream practically concluded with electronic music as a kind of minimalist craft of stems, woven into the tapestry of sound design. GTA 5 received numerous awards for innovations in video game design, and it can be presumed that many new listeners of Tangerine Dream were reached along the way.

Just as consequential to this legacy, Tangerine Dream also experienced a TV revival in the mid-2010s that has resulted in a re-evaluation of some of the group’s film scores. This is most evident through the band’s central influence on the Netflix smash-hit series Stranger Things (2016–present). An homage to the science fiction and horror genres of the 1980s, Stranger Things loops back to Tangerine Dream’s scores in multiple ways. In a feature for MTV, ‘Stranger Things and How Tangerine Dream Soundtracked the ‘80s’, Molly Lambert astutely observed these connections.Footnote ³⁹ The series’ Emmy-winning composers, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, cited Tangerine Dream as arguably the most prominent influence on their original music for the series – another indication of a Berlin–LA School of soundtrack influence.

Dixon and Stein’s score was a highly innovative expansion upon those synth soundtracks, since Tangerine Dream’s music was sometimes used in the temp track.Footnote ⁴⁰ Along with Sorcerer and Thief (1981), Dixon and Stein cite The Keep (1983) as a key influence. The music for the show’s title theme provides evidence for this influence, since it resembles ominous synth tracks like ‘Betrayal (Sorcerer Theme)’. Tangerine Dream’s own tracks ’Exit’, ‘Green Desert’, and ‘Horizon’ were also used on three episodes of the first season. Similarly, the plot of Stranger Things recalls Firestarter (1984), as it involves an escaped girl from a lab who has special powers. As mentioned, Firestarter innovatively used Tangerine Dream’s cues as sound effects for psychic terror, with a blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Similar innovations helped make Stranger Things – with superior production values, acting, and writing compared to Firestarter – one of the most popular series that Netflix has released.

Stranger Things has thus confirmed that Tangerine Dream’s sound is as inseparable from 1980s Hollywood scores as it is from Krautrock in the 1970s. It is appropriate here that the TV show highlighted this mix of science fiction and horror, to which Tangerine Dream’s soundtracks were ultimately best suited. This TV revival of Tangerine Dream has continued with the use of ‘Love on a Real Train’ on multiple shows, such as Mr. Robot in 2016.Footnote ⁴¹ And finally, the 2018 film Bandersnatch: Black Mirror, related to the critically acclaimed British series Black Mirror, used Phaedra as a key record in its musical and video game narrative. The main character actually receives Phaedra as a recommendation from a co-worker, expanding his musical tastes while doing creative work on video games. In such a spirit, with the weaving of Tangerine Dream’s legacy through new music and media, it does not seem that the band’s influence will end anytime soon. As former band member Klaus Schulze said: ‘It was Edgar and me who fought hard, who starved, who put our souls into electronic music … . Today, electronic music is a normal thing. We have won, if I may say so.’Footnote ⁴²

Essential Listening

• Edgar Froese, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (Virgin, 1975)

• Tangerine Dream, Zeit (Ohr, 1972)

• Tangerine Dream, Phaedra (Virgin, 1974)

• Tangerine Dream, Ricochet (Virgin, 1975)

• Tangerine Dream, Sorcerer (MCA, 1977)