Tangerine Dream
Zeit

With "Zeit," Tangerine Dream conceived a mythical space epic in the style of "2001: A Space Odyssey" dedicated to the philosophical concept of time, Zeit indeed. This is the album where they complete and define the intuitions they had started to explore in "Alpha Centauri": long cosmic "suites" for synthesizers. The difference is that "Zeit" is a genuine electronic "trip" without melody, very minimal, which hypnotizes throughout its duration and from which one does not want to detach: perhaps the Tangerines themselves would have liked to continue playing this electronic "mantra" endlessly! The atmosphere is dark-cosmic, and it is all too easy to imagine that all subsequent "ambient" music in all its branches and evolutions derives from this planetary nightmare. The album was released in a double and already the dark cover foreshadowed endless interplanetary journeys.

The album is divided into four movements and begins with "The Birth of Liquid Plejades": the sound of cellos immediately lifts you off the ground for 7 minutes, here you feel the influence of Ligeti and his compositions for string quartet, then the Moog played by the illustrious guest Florian Fricke takes the stage, and the mind slowly begins to make a "journey" into the inner space, also aided by a minimal and transcendent organ, until the piece ends abruptly, leaving a sensation of awakening from a magmatic and hypnotic nightmare.

However, the journey is only beginning and continues with the dark "Nebulous Dawn", a kind of representation of the rise of a nebulous dawn on some planet that does not belong to our galaxy: in this sense, the reverberations of VCS3 synths by Franke and Baumann and Froese's generator reach the goal by slowly entering the listener's psyche.

"Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" is the third movement that opens the second side and begins quietly with Froese's guitar chords, continuing in a hallucinatory journey with synthetic pulsations and cosmic noises always reproduced by Froese's generator: a piece worthy of a SF dark-saga among galaxies and unexplored worlds. The title track Zeit closes this sci-fi epic in a dramatic atmosphere, it seems like the soundtrack of an astral disaster. It is the most minimal and dark-cosmic track of the album, which could go on indefinitely if not for the unfortunate ending that wakes us from this cathartic and enlightening journey.

Few albums like Zeit have marked a turning point in the history of 20th-century electronic music, establishing new parameters: it is here that all subsequent electronic music, from ambient to industrial, took inspiration. It is an epochal album that should not be missing from any collection.