#kscope

So much ink has been spilled on Tangerine Dream’s vast and varied catalog, including what has transpired since founding member Edgar Froese’s 2015 passing, that any summary here would be superfluous. Only points of reference seem appropriate. There are the obvious ones, like the various violin exhortations harkening back to the cello quartet musings of Zeit, maybe Tangerine Dream’s first truly artistic statement. Raum is also replete with those deeper layers that defined the gloriously repetitive and constantly mutating Phaedra as well as the studio and concert recordings attendant to it and now readily available in the In Search of Hades box. As the titular track demonstrates, the band has returned to that formula, a move strategized by Froese as far back as 2014, but to state that is both to accentuate the obvious and to undervalue the many subtle variations on offer. “Raum” swirls into life but only blooms from there, each chord a complex layering of patches in flux as they define and defy space on the stereo spectrum. As with much of Tangerine Dream’s best work, the beat then emerges but from inside that amorphous soundscape, a convincing take on timbre and syncopation as one macrocosmic unification in instantaneous flux. All other elements inhabit a similarly conjoined series of spaces. Rhythms are generated by the elastic implications of loop, sweep and melodic articulation. Melodies peek out from the harmonies they’re echoing and defining by turn, just as the subtle sonic bait-and-switch juxtapositions of electronics and violin guide the second half toward its gaseous nebula conclusion. The band pioneered these mergers, and, as when Gong and Magma update acquaintance with trails they blazed, the results are gratifying and still somehow unique.

If the rest of the album seems to distill elements of that title track, plenty of beauty and power result. The concentration of “What You Should Know About Endings” transcends its brevity, digging deep into stratified distortion and ghostly harmonic undulation, just as “You’re Always On Time”’s title portends the swinging tempo games the shifting rhythms play. The thumping bass left-right-center motion adds body and heft to the track’s ethereality. “In 256 Zeichen”’s nearly 20 minutes offer the group aesthetic in serialized formation. Tone and rhythm meld and diverge until a climax at 4:50 leads to violin counterpoint in gemmy fragments augmented by slowly igniting electronics. None of this prepares for the gorgeous crescendo ultimately giving way, at 11:05, to a few moments of bare-bones straight-up rhythm. In that instant, just before the earth-shattering chords that halt time, just before the layers within and upon layers sample and hold harmony in continuously spiraling elucidation, a possibility is glimpsed. Stark syncopations foreground themselves, jostling and coexisting but delayed, technology in felicitous dialogue with the most ancient musical concerns imaginable. Like that long-ago and fabled piano miniature, eras combine to create the pillars of a portal opening on something as yet undiscovered. Strip away the cultural and technological notions of whatever preconceptions this music might embody, because one iteration or another of this 50-year-old organization witnessed their inception. Like the moment five and a half minutes into “Atem” or the majestically spacious opening of “Identity Proven Matrix,” the briefest soundscape depicts multitudes. Raum shows that they can still make it happen, vast swatches of sound, space and symbol coalescing along paths toward those points in time when Tangerine Dream sounds like no one else.