Following the tragic loss of Tangerine Dream’s pioneering founder Edgar Froese, the band have regrouped and made an incredible new work, Quantum Key. The new line-up is Thorsten Quaeschning on keyboards and guitar, Ulrich Schnauss on keyboards and Hoshiko Yamane on violin and cello; they recorded Quantum Key at their Berlin headquarters in 2015 and early 2016 and it represents the best of the vision for electronic music inherited from their visionary leader before his passing in January 2015. Its four electronic meditations are beautiful, solemn, joyful and awe-inspiring. This is the first new material from the latest line-up, with much more to come.

Tangerine Dream formed at the end of the 1960s in West Berlin and changed the axis on which the world turns by pioneering incredibly adventurous electronic music at the dawn of the synthesiser age. Their 1970s albums Phaedra, Rubycon, Ricochet, Stratosfear and Force Majeure were all smash hits in the UK, Europe, the US and Japan and Australasia. The 1980s saw the band create some of the most memorable film music of all time, including the scores for Risky Business, Near Dark, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, Michael Mann’s Thief and The Keep, and Firestarter, among others. Today they remain one of the world’s most respected musical innovators and continue to write chapters in a history spanning nearly fifty years.
Review

The recordings of Tangerine Dream have made the greatest impact on the widest variety of instrumental music, ranging from the most atmospheric new age and space music to the harshest abrasions of electronic dance.