Tangerine Dream 1990 – 2000. At the beginning of 1990, Edgar Froese was looking for a ...

At the beginning of 1990, Edgar Froese was looking for a saxophone and flute player. Friends in Vienna recommended Linda Spa.

The year 1990 began with the release of the soundtrack to the golfing film Dead Solid Perfect, directed by Bobby Roth, who also directed the film Heartbreakers. These soundtrack recordings, authorized by Tangerine Dream, were partly re-recorded to obtain listenable tracks from the musical extracts. The band was very sceptical about the record labels who released their music straight from the master tapes without further post production. In addition, Edgar said this when interviewed in 1994: "Soundtracks are composed for a film or for a television programme and do not necessarily belong on a record for specific reasons. This is mostly illustration music with sequences of 20 seconds, 1 minute 30, 1 minute 10, and so on. Who on earth would pay good money to listen to short sound extracts? We think it's idiotic. People release the music behind our backs in breach of copyright laws in a way which we just can't accept. We´re in it for the music and the cheque – but the music should come first. As a result, last year we had to deal more with the prevention of such products, than with any potential releases."

Dead Solid Perfect
After having scored Heartbreakers and Tonight's The Night, TD composed the music for the third film of director Bobby Roth.

At the beginning of 1990, Edgar Froese was looking for a saxophone and flute player. Friends in Vienna recommended Linda Spa. She appeared on stage with the band for the first time at the tour's only German concert on the 20th of February, 1990 in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in Berlin. Linda accompanied the band through numerous future concerts and was involved in seven studio and live recordings.

The concert in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle was also the first for Jerome with Tangerine Dream. Melrose was the first album which this formation recorded. Jerome brought a new touch to the music, and his influence can be heard on the albums Rockoon and Tyranny of Beauty. A video for the title track Melrose, shot by Jim Rakete, shows the band riding their bicycles in the desert and playing characters in silent movie scenes.

The cover photo was also taken during the photo sessions in the desert. At the end of 1990, Paul Haslinger left the group and moved to Los Angeles, where he began scoring TV series and movies. Among them productions like Underworld, Sleeper Cell and Halt Catch and Fire.

The soundtrack to the film The Park Is Mine, released in 1985 with Tommy Lee Jones in the starring role, was released as a sound recording in 1991. However the music to this film had been composed by Tangerine Dream long before then, in 1984, based on parts of the album Poland. Another soundtrack was released in 1991. It was the film music to one of Gunther Wallraff's books titled The Man Inside or L'Affaire Wallraff. Directed by Bobby Roth, it starred Peter Coyote and Juergen Prochnow.

On Rockoon, their next album, the tracks sounded harder and faster. Edgar defined their music as "a kind of urban sound, with electronics, guitar and saxophone parts." Guest musicians were Zlatko Perica and Richi Wester, as well as Enrico Fernandez. Edgar: "you can't hear any lyrics on the acoustic sections, but there is vocal experimentation here and there. We also integrated other musical elements, for example sounds from the South Pacific, but in a very surrealistic way. For us it was great fun." The album was nominated for a Grammy in 1992 in the category Best New Age Album.

The label Silva Screen released the TD soundtrack to the American television film Deadly Care, which was first shown in March 1987.

In 1993, another live album, 220 Volt Live, from the '92 North American tour was released. Edgar and Jerome appeared on stage with Zlatko Perica (guitar) and Linda Spa (saxophone and keyboard). Linda and Zlatko were not permanent, but "associated members" of the band. Press reviews at the time read: "Powerful and dynamic with sharp guitars and driving saxophone solos" (The New Times), Tangerine Dream promise to be "a celebration for the designers of digital sound" (The Boston Phoenix). With this album, the band received a third Grammy nomination. Miramar released the video Three Phase - Past, Present, Future which was produced by Michael Boydstun. The video clips consisted partially of old black & white clips from the 20's and 30's, as well as private film documentaries, recorded on tour. This production received another Grammy nomination in the category Long Form Music Video.

The studio album of 1994 was Turn of the Tides. Track composing and the development of musical ideas had already started during the '92 North America tour. Edgar recalled: "That was actually the longest time we had ever spent making a record. With a few short breaks of two or three weeks, we worked on it for nine months, and then we did the main work here in Vienna and in Berlin." Billboard magazine wrote: "an album rich with exotic sounds and vibrating rhythms." Turn of the Tides was also nominated for a Grammy in 1994 in the category Best New Age Album.

In 1995 TD released Tyranny of Beauty including a newly recorded 5 minute version of Stratosfear. The album finishes with the track Largo, a composition by the composer George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) and was their fifth Grammy nomination.

After a break of 14 years, Tangerine Dream played in Germany again, performing shows in Berlin, Bonn, Hanover, Hamburg and Frankfurt. Edgar and Jerome were accompanied by Zlatko Perica on guitar and the percussionist Emil Hachfeld. The concert in Frankfurt on the 18th of April, 1997 was broadcast world-wide via Real Audio on the Internet, albeit with a rather long time-lag (approximately 5 minutes).

The music to the 45-minute documentary film Oasis was released on the TDI label. Similarly to Canyon Dreams, the video shows landscape scenes to which Tangerine Dream wrote the musical sequences.

In 1997, Sony Music comissioned Tangerine Dream to compose the music to Luminous Visions, a computer animated video created by the Japanese artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi.

Tangerine Dream wrote the film music for a documentary about the Trans-Siberian Railway, released as Transsiberia in 1999. The same year, with Mars Polaris, the NASA Mars Polar Lander mission was put into a musical context and originally set to be performed by TD at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, on the craft's landing date on the surface of Mars. The band was ready to fly out to LA for this performance but unfortunately, as history tells us, the rocket missed Mars completely due to a mathematical miscalculation and got lost in space.