h e a t h e r

I never really liked music when I was a kid. I read voraciously, and I loved art, and drawing, and movies. But I disliked music. Music to me was bad early 80s pop singles, it was learning ditties in piano class, it was band class, where we played these stupid recorders, and I had to learn the French horn. My classmates liked music, all the popular songs of the day. I didn't like verse-chorus-verse, I didn't like those tunes that people would hum and sing, I didn't like the singers. Music just was something that was not for me. Later in life, I realized I did like music, but I liked music that explored and used the structures of music; I just didn't like plain old tunes. I think it was when I heard the Minneapolis or St Paul orchestra play Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" at a local high school that my ears first pricked up (and then I got into speed metal, God help me). Over time, I came to appreciate pop song-craft as well. Music, like art, and literature, has structures; it was just in an aural dimension. So, I grew to appreciate it, as an abstract system you can get lost in and explore like any other. Which is probably why I like Zeit. This music is huge, and it is music that is about size, space, silence, very gradual change, large-ness, distance. I think it would either bore most people crazy, that or scare them. But, to me, this is why music exists, why music is an art form and not just entertainment. It takes some basic musical ideas (space, rate of change, etc...) and runs with them, and most importantly uses them in an extreme fashion, creating an epic, a work of art. It seems that the goal was to create music to depict the size of the planets, and the vastness of space. I believe they have achieved this. They use oscillators, string instruments, organ, Moog keyboards. This is something that is hard to listen to regularly due to the length of the 4 sections (20 minutes each), and admittedly, I don't listen to it very often. But it is hard not to be awed by this music that one time of the year I do play it through. It is bigger than the room, and bigger than me. All you can do is look up at it and marvel at its size. review by Heather Mackenzie — 3-7-03 —

j o e

Tangerine Dream's third release was the first to feature their 'classic' line-up: Edgar Froese, Chris Franke, and Peter Baumann. Like Wendy Carlos' Sonic Seasonings and Soft Machine's Third, this is another album that beat Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans to the punch as a double-album with one composition per side. Also turning up here of note: transitional alumnus and Baumann predecessor Steve Schroyder on organ, Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke making a rare contribution on Moog (before turning his back on electric synthesizers), and the addition of a cello quartet. One of the cello players, as an aside, was Joachen von Grumbcow of Hölderlin, who released quite a different album that year, the folky Hölderlins Traum. The monolithic album cover of a massive satellite really goes well in conveying what you will hear. Subtitled "Largo in Four Movements," Zeit is music recorded on Jupiter: weighted-down notes unable to break free from the pull of gravity, painted in the broadest, barely shifting, legato strokes. The song titles belie qualities very present in the music. "Origin," "Dawn," and "Birth" convey a sense of the primordial and before-ness. "Nebulous," "Supernatural," and "Plejades" (the wintertime star cluster that appears with greater clarity out of the corner of one's eye than with direct contact) reinforce a feeling of astral wonder. This is one album that pretty much defies verbal description, but here goes anyway, with a brief summary of the four tracks. "Birth of Liquid Plejades" opens with sliding, skin-crawl drones played by the cello quartet. This sound is slowly processed and contorted, until fading into the band proper, who seize the baton with static organ maintaining the droning key of the cellos and a burbly, erratic synthesizer that sounds almost like it is malfunctioning. The piece makes its way into a final scenario of Hammond pulses combined with gently contorting sound tunnels. "Nebulous Dawn" is a tormented, incredibly eerie track. It starts off with elongated pulsings of buzzing, low synth and canyons of deep reverberations that really push the lower limits of your stereo system, before moving onwards. Take the furthest distance in space you can imagine in your mind, and then add on a couple billion lights years more past that, and that is where this music takes you—a territory completely removed from, and possibly hostile to, the human element. "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" deceptively begins with a more calming mood than its immediate predecessor, with the gentle strums of Froese's guitar almost like bristlings of a harp with low, dulled strings. However, it doesn't take too long before the humongous boom of pulsing space enters, alien bird-synths twitter and dive, and the feel is one of the universe shuddering in unease. The title track is the baby of the bunch at... um, a mere 17 minutes in length. Gentle voids of spectral sound. Space sits at rest after the engulfment and large-scale quaking of the preceding tracks, but remaining no less awesome and mysterious in scope, with an ndifferent gaze towards 'all things that delight or trouble foolish men.' There are plenty of folks who can't take this album. In all fairness, it is an extremely difficult one to just sit there and actively listen to, doing nothing else. If you are looking for Tangerine Dream's most impenetrable work, indeed one of the most impenetrable ever recorded by a 'rock band,' then look no further. Still, love it or hate it, Zeit is an impressively unique work that does have its own aesthetic, a logic of conveying inertia through sound. review by Joe McGlinchey — 6-5-06 —

m a t t

Zeit (that's German for "time"), the third album by Tangerine Dream, is an example of early electronic ambient music. As such I think it's difficult to have a strong feeling about it either way, although there are apparently some people who consider it a masterwork and some who really hate it. In any event, it's an album that challenges one's conception of what music is and what function music is supposed to fulfill. Like most of the early Tangerine Dream albums, Zeit plays like the soundtrack to cosmic occurances. The goings-on here, however, are happening really slow. If parts of Alpha Centauri reminded me of a journey through the stars, Zeit plays like the formation of one of those stars. Each of the four tracks are similar, though the first one, "Birth of Liquid Plejades," not only has the coolest name but also has interesting enough music that it merits my full attention whenever I put it on. In addition to the electric keyboards, Zeit was recorded with a cello quartet and the cellos are put to excellent use right away: "Liquid Plejades" begins as a sustained drone of cellos with minimal background electronic effects. After about seven minutes, the cellos are enveloped completely by a synthesizer and organ which then slowly wind along for another 13 minutes. The control of the tension throughout is superb. I think that the rest of the album doesn't reward focused listening (while sober, anyway) as much as "Liquid Plejades," but I don't think that was the purpose of the recording. The remaining three pieces are like sonic paintings, except that you have to "look" at them a certain amount of time before they're over. Sometimes the musical events happen so slowly that a normal ear (an ear trained to absorb musical events that occur over shorter durations) will have to make an in-flight adjustment. Sometimes there are just tuneless sounds and pulses. I would imagine that this kind of music won't be appealing to some listeners. "Just as something is about to happen, it doesn't," writes Paul Russell in the liner notes of the 2002 remaster, and 74 minutes of things not quite happening may well be too much, even for fans of other Tangerine Dream albums. But if you're open to the idea of ambient music, I think that Zeit is a very good album As sonic atmosphere, Zeit definitely works — at least for me. review by Matt P. — 2-9-06 —