A Tangerine Dream gig is always worth investigating, while a one-off concert at the Shepherd's Bush Empire is positively compelling. Christopher Holder chats with Edgar and Jerome Froese about the new and the old days, and their 'stone age' equipment.

Probably the enduring image of a Tangerine Dream concert must be shadowy figures crouched over exotic synths, dwarfed by bank upon bank of Moog modules, bristling with patch cords and alive with flashing LEDs. In fact, for many this is probably the enduring image of the ménage à trois of men, machine, and music, and certainly one of the original.

Tangerine Dream are almost single-handedly responsible for taking synthesizer technology out of the laboratory in to popular music and on to the concert stage. In fact during the '70s and '80s, Tangerine Dream pioneered the use of almost every emerging music technology, including sequencing and sampling — and if they didn't help make the gear themselves, then they certainly demonstrated to the world its full capabilities. But they were more than just rock musicians with different looking toys, the oft-changed personnel always seemed more like a product of Europe's cafe culture, an exclusive philosophical collective brought together to discuss the arts and sciences, while dabbling in the production of multi-million selling records. Sure, the band's music itself is what will stand the test of time and not the ethos behind it; but then and now you sense that equal gratification is gained by why and how that music is achieved as what eventually appears on the next album.

Membership of this 'society' reads like a checklist of anyone of any importance in electro and high-tech avant-garde music, with the likes of Klaus Schulze, Peter Baumann, Christoph Franke, and Johannes Schmoelling all filling the ranks at various times. What has remained constant is the presence of Edgar Froese, the band's progenitor and rudder that steered TD's artistic direction. Tangerine Dream's latest incarnation sees Edgar and his son Jerome teamed up with Linda Spa, for the recording of a new CD, Goblin's Club, and the first significant live date for some four years at London's Shepherd's Bush Empire.

METAPHYSICS AND CROYDON

I freely admit that at no stage did I ever sweat over the preparations for this interview; after all if you've been part of a high profile band for over 25 years, you probably have something interesting to say.

"I remember playing Croydon, it was in 1976 I guess, and we were banned from the hall, because we reached 134dB, which was the loudest concert ever at the Croydon Festival Hall, which is pretty funny," reminisces Edgar with a smirk. "But I think the problem that we and every band have these days working with a big PA in theatres — like the gig on Saturday at the Empire — is that there are people on the third balcony who are complaining 'can't you turn it up a bit, because the sound doesn't reach me here', and while they're complaining of the low volume, people on the front row are screaming, 'oh my god, they're damaging my ears'. So okay, then you think about putting in delay towers, but that's not the perfect way either because you have to build the same system that you have at front of house in the middle of the hall so they have the same sound, otherwise what you get from the delay tower is just part of the frequency spectrum. There isn't a perfect solution.

"What we wanted to do, and what got Sony very interested, is what we call a headphone concert — namely give all 2,000 people a pair of headphones... obviously the perfect solution. We conducted a test with about 100 people, putting headphones on them, in a place near Vienna, and watched the reaction. The reaction was terrible! We dumped the whole idea, simply because if you've got headphones on, you lose the psychological aspect, you are totally isolated."

"The other thing was you don't have the body reaction," points out Jerome. "When you hear deep bass, the whole body works it out; if you just have headphones on, everything happens solely in your head and not with your body."

So goes most of the interview, where the informative and anecdotal can soon mysteriously turn to the metaphysical.

Edgar again: "Most people don't realise that what you hear with your ear drums is only one part of audible sound, the higher frequencies. The mid-range you hear with your bones — your jaw going down to your chin — and there are certain frequencies you receive with your skin, while very bottom ones, move from down in your stomach up to the sternum... "

As I say not just your average musicians. In fact, the words 'Good evening London, are you ready to rock?' couldn't be less appropriate; perhaps 'Good evening people of London, are you prepared for the implications of rock?' would be more suitable.

TUNING VS SYNCHRONISATION

Tangerine Dream concerts are notorious for their ambition, particularly in the '70s and early '80s, where the TD team would be coaxing and cajoling lorry loads of unstable analogue equipment to operate in ways not thought possible — namely, cohesively and predictably. I wondered whether the challenge and thrill remained, despite the reduced threat of imminent meltdown that today's gear provides.

"The thrill is still there, but it has reached a different stage," says Edgar. "One thing that does remain the same is that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. In the older days, we had to fight against oscillators drifting out of tune because of the rising temperature within the hall. So even a few seconds before you started playing the sequence on the old modular system you had to put on your headphones and tune the oscillators against each other, and then the other three or four to the pitch you wanted. That was pretty complicated, because during the set they went out of tune again, so you had to do the whole bloody thing again and again. This was incredibly crucial and was always very enervating, sapping your strength to the point that some concerts were more like taking a shower than a musical experience.

"Today the tuning problems have gone, but the problem we now have is called synchronisation. On a gig like Saturday's, we have three different work areas that all need to be connected up to each other. The problem lies in when you start up a sequence, then for whatever reason there if is a malfunction in one of the units, you can forget about the rest. We had to do all sorts of emergency checks in the studio to deal with every possible eventuality. What would we do if two of us were out of sync, for instance? We would have to shut those two off immediately while the other one goes on regardless, then the second station has to be reset by the master unit with the equipment still running, then the third is reset, and so on. So there are still elements in a concert that make for an adventure."

NOT YOUR AVERAGE MIDI RIG

The on-stage Tangerine Dream setup is by no means an average MIDI/sequencer system and would give even the likes of MIDI primemovers, Orbital, one of those nightmares where you wake up sweating with your head in a pillowcase.

On stage, the three members of TD were encamped in their own work areas, each with two master keyboards and a rack of expanders, samplers, and outboard. Two Macintosh Quadra 650 computers were used for sequencing purposes, running Opcode's Studio Vision software, the timelines displayed on three large screen VDUs, one for each performer.

TD and their support crew have worked for years to hone their on-stage modus operandi to the extent that they confidently left their Berlin studio for Britain with little more than a suitcase of disks, containing software and samples. The plan was to hire six Kurzweil samplers in the UK for a streamlined example in German efficiency. Of course, they didn't reckon on the 'sorry mate, can't help you' British ineffectuality. After frantically pursuing every avenue (and being told that the only source of six Kurzweils was Pink Floyd!), an emergency call was sent back to their Berlin studio, where their gear was unceremoniously flung into the back of a van and humped overland to London. 'Best laid plans' and all that, I guess.

Consequently, the ranks of their sound modules were swelled dramatically, with the likes of an Emu Morpheus, Proteus, and Vintage Keys being used, a Roland JV1080, a number of JV880s, and a U-220 were also hauled into action, as was a Korg Wavestation AD, Korg M1R, and Quasimidi Quasar.

Wot? No Moog modulars, no Oberheim monsters, no ARP esoterica? I'm afraid it was very slim pickings indeed for the analogue synth spotters, given that all the gob-smacking power of their filter sweeps and ecstasy inducing lushness of their choral pads were all taken from the TD sample library back in Berlin — a library that, I might add, is more than your average box of floppy disks; in fact, it's a database containing thousands upon thousands of meticulously categorised samples. But the problem with a 20 second filter sweep or a hugely long orchestral loop is that the sounds take up prodigious amounts of RAM in the sampler — where the latest samplers are still 'only' packing as much as 128 Mbyte of RAM (albeit that being a king's ransom of a cache to us lesser mortals). So the problem that TD had was to clear the RAM in time to load and trigger another massive sound. Finding the off-the-shelf units to be insufficiently nimble, they discovered that by storing their samples on a MiniDisc machine (a Tascam MD-801R) and writing all their own control functions and cueing data between the sampler and the MD-801 R (itself stored on a self-burnt CD-ROM), they came to a far more pleasing method of working. In what manner the sounds are loaded into the sampler, the reasons for using a MiniDisc recorder (fast cueing time perhaps?), and what exactly has gone into the writing of the CD-ROM commands would be interesting to explore further, but Tangerine Dream would rather be parsimonious with facts than have their ideas ripped off wholesale (have a look at the 'Akai and Burnt Fingers' box for more info).

From Jerome's terminal, the master clock is started, and the rest of the sequences are synchronised, via Opcode Studio 5 and Studio 4 units. Various components are triggered from hard disk, but techniques are used to ensure that the band are given the freedom to improvise and given real-time control. For instance, splitting keyboards will assist, with one half playing looped sample lines for instance and the other left free for the melody.

"We like to have those sorts of opportunities," explains Edgar. "On one piece taken from one of our soundtracks, I was hearing the rhythm and I thought 'hey wait a minute', and began playing a completely different tune over the top, the theme from Sorcerer right into it. So those opportunities are always there, and a bit like in the old days, there is a mixture between doing things out of the MIDI sequencer, or doing things out of the sampling units, leaving a range of possibilities."

THE HARD WAY

It's reassuring to observe that even with today's supposedly reliable and robust gear Tangerine Dream's insatiable ambition has continued to make life difficult for themselves — all in the pursuit of technical innovation, mind. Why?

"For us, it's about honesty. I know Janet Jackson was in front of an American audience a couple of years ago saying, 'so what do you want? Do you want me to dance? Then you know I've got a backup tape, or if you want me to sing, then I won't dance. I can't do both, so what do you want me to do?' That's honesty, but not the situation most performers will put themselves in — they have to make a decision as to what they want to do. Fortunately, we're working from the high-tech end and don't have the exact same problem, but to make people understand the way we work and appreciate the way we do things is very difficult."

So to a certain extent is it a matter of providing what people expect to see in a live gig even if it's not necessarily the best way of operating?

"Yes. Because of people's prior experiences of live concerts, they would not believe we were playing live if we arrived on stage with one storage unit and a black box, which might contain more than three times the sound capacity of all the gear we had on stage on Saturday night. They'll say, 'huh? Okay, so where's their DAT tape?' or 'where's their hard disk?' — they simply wouldn't believe it was live. This is what we call the information gap. In the last couple of years, the difference between what can be done in high end technology and what usually is done is growing, which then has implications on what people think is live music and what isn't."

Do you personally feel ripped off if you see a high-tech band perform with less stringent performance standards than yours? For instance, if you know they're playing almost entirely to a backing tape.

"I don't care much. Everybody has to make their own choice, and I don't consider myself a yardstick. I know what people do, I know exactly how people perform, but I'll definitely shut my mouth, because it's not my style to talk about others. Tangerine Dream perform the way we think is fair and right, the way which is most professional, and in a way that we think will allow the audience to receive an absolutely proper sound."

A read through this article and the words 'not average' bob up quite a bit, and for good reason. There's nothing average about Tangerine Dream, whether it's their longevity, their musical ethos, their technical approach, or their music itself. It's always been TD's style to set themselves monumental technological challenges, rise to those challenges, and change the way we make and perform synth and sample-based music in the process.

"From a technological standpoint, the challenge still remains very simple," said Edgar. "You create something, you've got an idea, you put things together, you hook all the gear up, and then you wait for a disaster to happen. If the disaster doesn't happen, then you count yourself lucky — it's a bit like Russian roulette. I don't know why, but we like that."