New Music From Tangerine Dream – ‘Raum’

Tangerine Dream shared this music video for Raum, taken from the upcoming EP, Probe 6-8.

Probe 6-8 is scheduled for release 26th November 2021 on Kscope/Eastgate Music. The EP is a preview to a March ’22 album release, which will be the group’s second studio album after the death of founder Edgar Froese.

‘Raum’ translates roughly into ‘space’ or ‘realm’.

The album features the lineup of Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick, who created the album based on a combination of “classic studio productions and late night real time compositions”.  The trio say that they composed and produced the EP with full access to Edgar Froese’s Cubase arrangements and Otari Tape Archive, with recordings from 1977 – 2013.

The music video to ‘Raum’ was shot on a Canon Super-8 camera, during the band’s recording sessions, at their Berlin studio space and the surrounding neighborhood, in 2020 and early 2021. The choice of shooting on film was an homage to Edgar Froese’s vintage Super-8 videos.

Video by Felix and Julian Moser.

Music composed, produced and performed by Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, Paul Frick, Edgar Froese.

33 thoughts on “New Music From Tangerine Dream – ‘Raum’”

    1. Agreed. Apparently the single edit is about half the length of the album track, so looking forward to hearing the full track.

      Love seeing all the great gear in their studio, too.

      If this is a preview of the sound of the new lineup, I like it. Is Ulrich Schnauss officially out? There’s no mention of him at all.

      2. Quote from FB: TANGERINE DREAM – 22. Juni ·
        Due to the current situation, Ulrich Schnauss has decided to step back from playing live with Tangerine Dream. Thanks to Ulrich for the last live concerts with the band! Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick are looking forward to playing the upcoming concerts. More info and more music coming soon…

        1. That’s exactly why I’m wondering if he’s still a member.

          First they said that he was dropping out of playing live and now he’s not part of the new album.

  2. I think the band in the 70s and 80s had a magic that you can’t recreate properly. I know there’s a lot of bands and amateur guys releasing music in that style, and even the new version of the band seemed to be trying here, but that old magic is gone, it’s unattainable, even the original members can’t get close anymore.

    1. You’re hoping for novelty, and that’s gone.

      In the 70s, electronic music was still a novelty and those of us around back then were spacing out on the new sounds.

      The novelty is gone for the most part and isn’t coming back. If you look at new bands that have been influential – like Boards of Canada – a lot of their sound is about nostalgia for that lost novelty.

      1. Real novelty isn’t even required, let’s remember, you’re also not a teenager anymore probably so it won’t be novel to you but might be for someone else 😉

      2. I’m not talking about novelty, I’m talking about the compositional skill and use of sounds in TDs early work. It’s unparalleled even now in the Berlin School genre. The modern guise of TD is trying to capture it but their choice of sounds if quite plastic, and the musical magic is just not there.

        1. TdFanatic – respect the opinion because I grew up with and loved the Franke Froese Baumann lineup.

          But however much we may love albums like Phaedra & Rubycon, but it’s a stretch to say that there’s some unique compositional brilliance going on.

          Those albums are great because creating rambling improvised music with electronic instruments was a new thing in the 70s and TD did it well.

          The times were different in the 70s, too. Listeners were open to 20 minutes of musical wandering. Even TD realized by the late 70s that the times had changed and they started making more tightly structured compositions.

          The current TD is responding to the fact that there’s an audience again – maybe of older fans – that are open to a more laid back, meandering sort of music. I think it would be wrong for them to try to recreate the sound of the 70s. There are already bands that do a great job of that (see Brendan Pollard or Analog Overdose). TD’s challenge is to be TD without the constraints of 70’s technology.

          1. You keep telling me about how it was in the 70s, ok sure, but I was born in the 90s and experienced none of that. My opinion is based on originality, sound choices and design, and when I’m talking about compositional skill I’m referring more to the 80s albums such as Poland.

            1. Everything that was good about the Franke Froese Schmoelling era, post Thief, was cribbed from Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians.

                1. So much of their music from that era has that Reich influence – specifically the use of shaker, syncopated African bell patterns in their sequences, the interlocking sequences, marimba patterns, etc.

                  And it’s not just Love on a Real Train from Risky Business that directly borrows from MF18M, it’s all their actual new music for that film.

                  Another obvious example is Logos ‘Red’ – the section with the shaker, syncopated African bell patterns, interlocking sequences, marimba sounds, etc.

                  Note that I’m not dissing their borrowing and what they did with the influence – it’s their most interesting work of that era.

  5. Torgood has a point, but even as a long-term fan, the current band sounds good. Its T-Dream Classic with modern threads, just less analog saturation than we’re used to hearing. They helped set the standard for “magic,” so Edgar’s hand-picked few still work for me. No, I’ll never experience those first few psychedelic Mellotron moments again, but I have one in software now. T-Dream is a lot of why. An added plus: becoming an Ulrich Schnauss fan.

    1. Definitely like Ulrich Schnauss now too. There’s something blissed out about how he treats his pads. You could definitely hear his influence on TD, though as far as I know he wasn’t a ‘player’ per se.

      Will be sad if he’s out for good, but it certainly looks like that’s the case.

      Looking forward to hearing new compositions.

  6. I found most of their (early) compositions be be variations of Berlin-style noodlings, stretched out pieces along a same theme of slow-rhythmic-slow

  9. Nope! The late TD has nothing to do with the TD I once loved (Rubicon, Phaedra, Ricochet and some more). It was another time and those huge synth cabinets were unaffordable for the common. Nowadays they don’t sparkle anymore and I find them somehow mediocre. I don’t live in the past!

  10. I think there is a place for what was, what is, and what can be. What was provides the effects of nostalgia, This is a powerful force. If you mess with it, fans will almost always be critical because it messes with an ideal. What is: Well the what-was heroes of yesteryear’s TD have passed on, either to other projects, or other worlds. Because people on this forums are mostly musicians, we like to break down and analyze. It is sometimes nice to be reminded of what-was, by recognizing patterns, idioms, and timbres. What-was TD had more ‘space’ between timbres and notes. There was space to let individual timbres evolve, from initial attack, all until the final release of the envelope. I find that what-is, with newer-to-newest TD members have a tendency to create a ‘continuous, but evolving wall or wash of sound’. It can be pleasing, but distanced from some of Edgar’s compositional styles of earlier years. My thoughts about Raum are that this aims at that sense of nostalgia, through the use of old film equipment. But the sound is still ‘what-is’. So if you like the present sound, then embrace it. I like variety of compositional styles depending on my mood. However, I feel a bit of cognitive dissonance stemming from trying to tie it to nostalgia. I don’t condemn it, for I am occasionally as-guilty and am called on it. When I worked on some projects with Bernhard Beibl, he regularly called me on being too Froese-like. He wanted space to play his guitars the way he wanted to, with a real guitar tone and with the level of energy he wanted to inject into it. I had to step back from ‘what-was’ to let ‘what-is’ happen. I don’t dislike the result, and in the end, it made sense to just step back and appreciate what-could-be. In an attempt for Berni to meet me half way, he took out his electric drill and ran a specially shaped bit on his guitar strings. The result sounded even more early-school TD than I thought to create with my synths. All this to say, there is place to appreciate and enjoy the past, the present, and leave some space for the future. Critical cross comparisons of the eras can be a useful and interesting intellectual pursuit, but hopefully we don’t let it get in the way of appreciating the efforts of these artists.

  12. Thumbs up to Seq.Dreams for pointing out the role of nostalgia in music appreciation. It’s a BIG influencer on why folks “love” and “hate” different music. I recently bought an album from a few decades ago that I had never heard in its entirety, and naturally the tunes that I loved from “back whenever” carried a LOT more weight than the songs that I didn’t know, even though they were composed with a fairly similar style and arrangement.

    I’ve learned to distinguish between the two…songs I like because they remind me of a time and songs that I just like (regardless of the when it was created/released), but most folks (normal music fans) wouldn’t be able to explain the difference. They just “like or don’t like”.

    1. The hope for a lot of us is that there’s some hidden treasures in the vault from our favorite artists & era.

      I have been enjoying ‘In Search Of Hades’ for the last couple of years for that exact reason.

  13. Sorry, but: After many boring albums of TD from the late 80s on, Ulrich was the reason for me, to give TD another chance. Quantum Gate was a very good album. Many musical journalists in Germany were amazed about the new TD. Now it seems that this very good phase is over again. Very sad and too soon. But I will keep following Ulrich.

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