A Record A Day Keeps The Blues Away
Ob more than 90 studio albums, Tangerine Dream has cultivated slowly unfolding, floating, electronic music.
Raum is the second album the group has released since Edgar Frose's death, and he is present in spirit as well as sound. Band members Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick have full access to Edgar Froese's arrangements combine them with sequencer-driven, haunting soundscapes that alternate with anthemic, warm synthesizers.
Raum is just as spacey and soaring as you'd expect from a Tangerine Dream album Tangerine Dream still knows how to crank up the tempo and change the rhythm here and there. On the whole, Raum is certainly not comparable to Phaedra or Rubycon, but its simple, elegiac beauty pays homage to those classic LPs while remaining grounded in the then and now. In doing so, Tangerine Dream show that they don't need to reinvent the wheel. But neither are they content to rest ontheir laurels.
