The Seventh Sky
On Friday (29th September) I released The Seventh Sky on my Bandcamp page. So far it's been well-received with a few sales and some very nice comments, which is always very gratifying. The album is a deliberate throwback to those halcyon days of the mid 1970s when Tangerine Dream et al were releasing albums in the Berlin School style. This album is a very conscious and deliberate homage to those pioneers and style.
Picture the scene: it's late 1977 and the second wave of punk is exploding on the scene. My friends were still listening to either the pop songs of the day, the old rock classics or the emerging punk scene. Me? I had just bought Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene because I'd heard it on the radio and it was unlike anything I'd heard before. On a trip into Chelmsford I persuaded mum to let me pop into Parrot Records (a glorious sanctuary sadly long gone) and I was flicking through the records - I miss that thrill of flicking through the records in anticipation of finding something new - when I came across an enigmatic album/
The cover was a sort of bluey-green colour and featured droplet hitting the water surface. The band was Tangerine Dream and the album was Rubycon. Reading the credits hooked me. Two tracks, one per side. Three German guys (no photo) and instruments I'd never heard of - what exactly was a VSC 3 or an EMS Synthi A? They sounded exotic and other-worldly, like something out of Doctor Who or Star Trek. Who were these guys with their slightly odd-sounding names (to me at the time). How exactly do you pronounce Froese?
So I bought it just because it was enigmatic. When I got home I popped it on the record player and was instantly immersed into strange worlds and sounds. It took the listener on a journey without explaining anything. Mum and dad hated it, of course, which is always a winner. But this music was hypnotic and strange. There were none of the usual hooks or forms normal music had. No lyrics, no guitars, no chorus, nothing you could hang your hat on.
Curiously, years later of course, it occurred to me that the music of early Tangerine Dream, like that of Klaus Schulze and others, was the aural equivalent of a Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch movie. They defied the accepted way of doing things. They refused to explain the meanings behind the sounds or the motives of creating them. They conjured up surreal worlds with their own internal logic. They left it to the listener to come up with their own narrative, just as Kubrick and lynch left it to the audience to come up with their own theories as to what the movie was about.
It's no great surprise that music and sound were very important to Kubrick and Lynch. Think 2001 for the excellent use of contemporary and classical music. The fact that Lynch is also a musician and often the sound design is done by him shouldn't be too surprising - he did the sound design for Twin Peaks: The Return.
Needless to say I was hooked. There was something about that weird sonic journey that I liked. So I started buying their back-catalogue (at that time was only five albums). This lead to exploring the solo releases of the band members: Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler. This led to discovering Krautrock and Brian Eno and many others.
To say that Tangerine Dream are an influence on my music is somewhat of an understatement. But equally so is the music of Schnitzler and the music of the mid-twentieth century composers like Stockhausen and Henry.
Of course it wasn't the first time I'd heard electronic music. Doctor Who and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop introduced me to that a few years earlier. When watching the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton versions (when they started coming out on video) it struck me how experimental and daring a lot of the incidental music was - something the show lost through the 70s and 80s. These days it's rather generic orchestral music, which is a shame really.
So it's thanks to Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann (initially) that I produce the sort of music I do. Obviously my classical training plays a part as does all the other musicians I like. Jarre was the spark that led me on my musical journey but Tangerine Dream shaped the course.
The Seventh Sky was meant to evoke that mid-70s feeling that those albums produced. The long tracks, the enigmatic track titles and so on. It's not the same, of course. You can never repeat the feeling of coming across such a discovery. But it's my little homage to them and what it made me feel like.
