Tangerine Dream
Underwater Sunlight

In the early '90s, one of the tracks from this album ("Ride on the Ray") was used by Rai2 as background music for the weather forecast: a fate that also befell Tangerine Dream, the "improper" use of an instrumental piece, from a band that made instrumental music the trademark of an extensive production.

And there is something meteorological in the atmospheres of this album, released in 1986, led as always by the founding duo, Edgar Froese and Chris Franke, joined for the first time by a Viennese musician, the then 23-year-old Paul Haslinger, who replaced Johannes Schmoelling, who had left the group the year before.

The enthusiastic youngster declared at the time, "I arrived at Tangerine Dream's Berlin studio and there were all the instruments I had always dreamed of. I disappeared for a year because I was always behind the keyboards, experimenting."

Keyboards that effectively simulate the timbre of the acoustic guitar, as in the opening track "Song of the Whale Part 1", a whale song in the underwater depths, populated by the melodic carpet of synths, a constant counterpoint of electronic percussion, and Edgar Froese's electric guitar, sharp and piercing, which often holds long chords with a distorted timbre that seem borrowed from rock settings.

"Song of the Whale Part 2" opens with a piano introduction, two minutes that then give way to the usual timbral panorama of keyboards and moments of solo guitar, like the solo that precedes the gathered and shadowy conclusion of the track.

The remaining four tracks, averaging 5 minutes in duration, do not add much to the atmosphere created in the first part of the work, but "Underwater Sunlight" remains a solid work, rich in melodic inventions, that makes constant atmospheric variation its main stylistic trait.