Tangerine Dream Photo Gallery

Is live also live when it is not “now” does live remain ?

Answered by Edgar Froese

Good advertising slogan. In many old fotos and in films you can see that all three band members are having a very slow Revox tape machine. Of course, you might come to the idea that the music you can hear there comes from the sound storage media. The truth is very simple: At the beginning of the seventies, we had already charged an engineer from Berlin with transforming the motor control unit of the ribbon draft into a variably adjustable speed mechanism. So it became possible to variably duplicate the notes of a sequencer in triplets or other rhythmic parameters with the record and play button of the tape machine. When three synchronizing sequencers generated rhythmic patterns in this way, we had already reached the exact ideas of an earlier polyrhythmic sound landscape. So a tape machine was transformed into an echo machine – this had nothing to do with backup tapes. Today you can reach the same result in five minute’s time with a commercially available software sequencer – provided that you know what you want to produce.