Soundscapes

Ad Stellas Per Musica

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars is an overview of music of the 1970s that referenced, overlapped, or otherwise advanced science fiction. As such, it gives us a unique musical history that sidesteps much of what dominated the Seventies, but which was central to what made that decade unique in contemporary, pop, youth, and/or rock music, however one registers the soundscape of the period.

His take-off point is Davie Bowie’s appearance as a kind of avatar of unapologetic science fiction concepts through music, especially his Ziggy Stardust persona. Given the chronology, I can’t argue with that, even though at the time I was only marginally aware of Bowie, and when I did notice him I was not especially impressed. But Heller touches on many of the bands and performers who did exemplify that strain of music for me.

Reading Strange Stars, I’m reminded of how much it is possible to miss, even while—or perhaps because of—living through it all. For instance, George Clinton and the whole Funk movement passed me right by. I was aware of its importance only in retrospect. Likewise with a great deal of Glam. It seemed to me at the time to miss the point, but I can’t say why exactly since I paid it little attention, intentionally or otherwise.

But Heller is right that the Seventies encapsulated the emergence of science fiction in popular culture in ways it never had before, and in popular music it came to the fore in unique and unexpected forms. There were precursors, of course—the instrumental bands like the Ventures and the Tornados, the novelty acts, and then the whole psychedelic movement that gave us bands like Pink Floyd, which, despite Heller’s dismissal of them in later albums due to a lack of overtly SFnal lyrics, remained aesthetically connected to SF compositionally—that led to a flowering and full embrace by 1969-70.

Heller searches for and finds ample connection to science fiction through lyric content, Easter eggs and unapologetic references to classic SF and thematic explorations, and certainly all that was present, especially in a lot of Bowie from that early period of his career. But for me, it was the composition and performance itself, regardless of lyric content, that spoke to my geeky SF fan backbrain. All those novelty songs from the Sixties, which Heller catalogues, never said “science fiction” to me because musically they were still products of 1950s rock’n’roll and rather cheesy and absurd, albeit amusing and catchy.

He catches this when he tags Bowie and, especially, King Crimson as the first full on manifestations of a SFnal aesthetic. What I recall listening for was, in a way, a departure point, perhaps a gateway into a future like those I found in novels by Heinlein or Clarke or Norton or Asimov. As the decade continued, I felt that many of these bands were acting as guardians at the gate of a tomorrow we might actually live in. If we were mindful. If we were careful.

So for me, it was Yes that signaled the future. Yes and Genesis (up to A Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Especially ELP with Emerson’s embrace of synthesizers and compositional experiments like nothing else in Rock till then. I heard this music in the same way I read science fiction, as manifestations of different worlds.

Emotionally, I imagine that the first time I heard Tarkus I felt—reacted—the same way audiences back in 1913 heard The Rites of Spring. Something so unexpected, so divergent, so….tomorrow….that it was like a wrench.

For whatever reason, Bowie didn’t do that for me, for all that I liked Space Oddity. But Heller’s thesis is valid just the same. After Star Trek it became a popular aesthetic movement that more and more took on the surface, at least, of science fiction. The music perhaps has been an underappreciated aspect of that. I remember as an earnest adolescent searching for the next bit of music that fed that need for the next phase of civilization. (I found a great deal of it in what later became known as Electronica, especially with Tangerine Dream, whose albums were all racked in Rock along with James Taylor, Chicago, The Doors, and Joni Mitchell.) When I settled down to listen to an album or go to a concert, I was looking to be transported. Often it was just rock and I loved all that offered, but there were those acts and albums that, for me, were gateways in the same way many of the books I read were.

I very much enjoyed Heller’s book. It took me back. I learned things I never knew (like that the backing band for an obscure album by Ramases, Space Hymns, which is a curiosity more for its cover art than for its music, later became 10cc), and so many creations I never knew about. One is limited by time and, often, money. I didn’t have the budget to acquire most of the albums I would have loved had I known about them. It was a rich period of musical ferment and worth a new look. You could do worse than use Heller’s book as a guide.

The Color of Sound

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ages ago, it seems, I stumbled onto a band that opened up for me the possibilities of what music could be.

Band. That word connotes things which seem oddly inadequate for this.

Back in 1973 I bought two records from a local store I favored (Play It Again Records, now long gone). I may have been advised to get them or it may simply have been the covers and the length of the tracks. I used a number of questionable metrics back then to find music, because not all of it was being played on the radio, and frankly almost none of my peers were into some of things I was into.

What I was into  I later learned was called Progressive Rock. In 1973, my favorite bands were, in no particular order, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Santana, and Chicago.  But I also owned Switched-On Bach and someone had told me about Beaver & Krause.  As my record collection expanded, odd records started showing up.

One of the things about most of these bands that appealed to me (not Santana or Chicago, no) was the use of synthesizers.  I played keyboard then, and bands that featured prominent keyboards caught my attention.  As time passed,  the aural landscapes created by synthesizers became more and more central to my musical æsthetic.  Curiously, much of this led me back into classical music (even as the better keyboard players reintroduced me to jazz, which it turned out I liked from a period before my adolescent record-collecting phase).

I loved synthesizer music.

Those two records I bought that day were by Tangerine Dream—Phaedra and Rubycon.

I was drawn into them completely.  There was structure, certainly, but little traditional formatting. Soundscapes. When I think of the term “tone poem” this is what comes to mind. Waves and currents of sound, overlapping, blending. I listened to those two albums constantly. This, to my ear, was Pure Music.  It was a separate reality.  I could drop the needle, lay in bed, and experience…

I have never done drugs. (Yes, this comes as a bit of a shock to people; even my father didn’t believe this.)  Chemical escape never appealed to me.  But this, I imagined, was pretty close to an hallucinogenic experience. Immersive, escapist, expansive.

Over the next few years I acquired a few more Tangerine Dream albums, but none of them captured me quite the way those two did.

Tangerine Dream became a band I would check up on from time to time. They went through periods of radical transformations, even as they remained true to their basic mode. Synthesizers were always primary, but eventually they began to sound more like a “band”—drums, guitar, the occasional saxophone, and compositionally shorter pieces that mimicked “songs.”  While I liked much of it, there were only echoes of what they had accomplished on those first two albums I’d bought.

Once the internet opened up and such things were searchable, I looked for what else they had done, and discovered a long history.  And, yes, distinct periods, often the result of changes in personnel.

Tangerine Dream alumni have gone on to do other things (Christopher Franke notably did the soundtrack for Babylon 5) but the single constant had been Edgar Froese.

Froese died in 2015. He, with the then current line-up, had been working on a new album.

When work had begun on this album in 2014, Tangerine Dream was a four-piece—Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Ulrich Schnauss.  Another new period, another re-imagining.

The longest surviving bands, unless they adopt a condition of perpetual stasis as a review act, constantly re-presenting their heyday, undergo continual change, both in personnel and in approach. Sometimes this just happens, an emergent property of natural evolution. Sometimes it is intentional.

Froese died before the project this new Tangerine Dream was completed. His wife, also Tangerine Dream’s manager, saw it through.

So here I have been listening to the result—Quantum Gate.  I’ve been playing it a lot.

It is possibly the most successful mix of what I found in those two albums from long ago and the various changes they embraced over more than 50 years. I hear the lushness, the abandon to “pure” music, but packaged in structures that allow the tracks to be heard as coherent pieces—not quite songs, as such, but perhaps sonatas.

The quality of the compositions and their execution are perfectly matched.  The range of sounds does not overwhelm.  Nor is this wallpaper, bland ‘scapes designed to be heard but not listened to. Close attention is rewarded, and surrender to the directions offered accomplishes the immersion that makes this kind of music so satisfying. The brain is massaged.  Coming out the other end…

I haven’t found a recording I’ve enjoyed on constant replay as much in years.

Tangerine Dream is a fascinating workshop, a pocket of unique music that fits no preconceived niche, not easily. There have been imitators, certainly, but few as successful or as continually interesting.