Tangerine Dream
Zeit

With "Zeit" the Tangerine Dream conceived a mythical space epic in the style of "2001: A Space Odyssey" dedicated to the philosophical concept of time: "Zeit." This is the album in which they complete and define the intuitions they began to explore in "Alpha Centauri", namely long cosmic electronic "suites" for synthesizers. The difference is that "Zeit" is a genuine electronic "trip" without melody, very minimal, that hypnotizes for its entire duration and from which one wouldn’t want to detach: perhaps even the Tangerine Dream themselves would have liked to keep playing this electronic "mantra" without stopping! The atmosphere is dark-cosmic and it is all too easy to imagine that all subsequent "ambient" music in all its branches and evolutions stems from this planetary nightmare. The album was released as a double, and the dark cover already presaged endless interplanetary voyages that were the ideal soundtrack to accompany the reading of a book like "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur Clarke or the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

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

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

"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 track worthy of a saga-dark SF among galaxies and unexplored worlds. The title track "Zeit" closes this science-fiction 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 that could continue indefinitely if not for the unfortunate end 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, setting new parameters: it is here that all subsequent electronic music, from ambient to industrial, took inspiration. It is an epoch-making album that should not be missing from any collection.