Doepfer LC1: Titania

Earlier in the month I had a look at the Doepfer LC1, a compact modular synthesiser case with 48hp of space for Eurorack modules:

48hp is just large enough to make a self-contained instrument, but unless you buy a load of modules from mini-modular maestros 2HP you have to make some hard choices. One oscillator and some modulation options? Two oscillators and no modulation? One envelope? Two? Do I really need a spring reverb?

To which the answer is yes, yes I really do need a spring reverb. Could I buy a third, even smaller case, just to house the spring reverb? Such as for example Doepfer's MC Mini Case, which is 32hp wide. But that way madness lies.

Apart from being sources of mental uncertainty smaller Eurorack cases are also useful as expansion boxes, and that's the topic of this brief post. The music at the top of the page was made with the following configuration of the LC1, plus a Behringer Model D, which I really need to dust off with a brush. And also a biscuit tin, because I couldn't see the monitor otherwise:

In this setup the LC1 houses a pair of Behringer 112 VCOs, plus some miscellaneous modules that provided moral support. I think I used the Doepfer A-166 a little bit, the other modules not at all. The oscillators are feeding into the Model D's external input, which is in turn feeding the sound through its own filter and envelopes. The end result is a MiniMoog clone with five oscillators, which is overkill - the MiniMoog was not known for sounding thin, the Model D likewise - but why not. All of the obvious synthesiser sounds, plus the SPROING! snare drum sound in the latter half, were made with this setup

The sproing snare drum sound was made with the Model D's oscillator modulation. It sounds exactly like a similar effect in Jean-Michel Jarre's "Calypso 2" and I wonder if he used a similar technique to make that effect, with whatever synthesisers where on Waiting for Cousteau (unusually, that album doesn't list his equipment).

Of course the track doesn't just use the setup above. There are some space effects, which are made with a cheap guitar delay pedal with the intensity control turned up so that it creates feedback. I was thinking of Tangerine Dream's early albums, when they only had a VCS3, and most of the synthesiser-style effects were made with organs and guitar pedals.

There's also masses of Mellotron, courtesy of GForce's M-Tron, which is by now twenty years old. Can a VST plugin be vintage? M-Tron is older now than most people on Reddit and by extension the internet as a whole. The latter half of the first movement uses GForce's Isolation Choir bank, which was recorded during the COVID lockdown. And of course Valhalla's Supermassive, a terrific and free reverb plug-in.

On a musical level I wanted to make something that was harrowing and relentless, because I was in a happy mood. It's inspired a little bit by Tangerine Dream's Alpha Centauri and "Thru Metamorphic Rock" from their much later album Force Majeure, and also by the colour black, and the thought of pencil lead and dry paper.

Tangerine Dream: Oscillators to Full

The sun rises, the sun sets, and when it rises again some of us have gone. We go on. Edgar Froese has died. He was 70. He was the driving force behind Tangerine Dream, a rock band about which it is difficult to write because every facet of their being is totally at variance with the modern world.

Froese was a big, burly, bearded German man who kept the money coming in; Tangerine Dream was essentially his family business, literally so in its later days. Some people choose to spend their lives making shoes, or selling cuts of meat; Edgar Froese chose to create vast oceans of sound, and latterly weak synthesiser pop, and then muzak, and then he died. As time goes on Tangerine Dream's career will be forgotten backwards, starting with their most recent work and ending with some of their earliest, which will linger in the collective memory for a while longer. There's a lot to be said for dying young.

Tangerine Dream's latter-day music was no good, but it acted as a gateway drug for their earlier stuff, and adventuresome listeners such as you and I progressed beyond Tangerine Dream to the music of Can and Amon Duul and thence into the realms of mystery and beyond, and for that I am thankful Tangerine Dream existed.

This is an awesome photograph. Monika Froese was an avid photographer and seems to have had a camera in her hand all the time.

Edgar Froese was born in 1944 in a part of Germany that now belongs to Russia, on account of the late unpleasantness between those two countries. German kids of the 1960s were not on the whole nostalgic for the 1940s, and Froese's generation wanted to build a new world in the wreckage of the old. From my point of view the problem with Froese's generation is that they built a new world that immediately collapsed and was replaced by a newer world built by the punks a few years later, who were in turn absorbed by the postmodernists; and so the hippie communes and space-rockers and roots rockers and blues rockers and proto-new age cultists of the 1970s were like a dose of drain unblocker, they broke through the blockage but were washed away when the pipe became unblocked. That's an evocative metaphor. As a consequence Tangerine Dream's generation puts me in mind of Cassius, who killed Caligula and was sentenced to death for it, even though everybody wanted Caligula dead; he was useful in war but could not survive in peace. Thus the bearded hippies were shockingly new in their day, and shockingly out-of-date just a few years later.

In the 1970s modernism ceased to be the dominant art movement. It increasingly came to be seen as a sad sick joke, because the future it anticipated did not materialise. Progressive rock and Krautrock were fundamentally modernist art movements, and perhaps because of this they fell out of fashion within a few years and became ridiculous in the wake of punk; the sheer sonic majesty of Krautrock eventually fell back into fashion, although progressive rock has not yet followed it, and probably never will. Tangerine Dream straddled the two worlds uneasily. Although the likes of Can and Faust are nowadays mentionable in polite company, Tangerine Dream has not yet been rehabilitated. The band suffers from being too successful and well-known to champion as a forgotten underdog (Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler mostly ignores them), yet too obscure to have aroused the attention of the general public. The band charted and most music fans know the name, indeed I suspect that a lot of the mainstream only knows the name but none of the music. It's a good name, instantly recognisable, presumably borrowed from the 1967 psychedelic album by Kaleidoscope. Why Tangerine Dream? My hunch is that people in the 1960s were dazzled by tangerines, because rationing was still around and they had never seen tangerines before, and of course they didn't have colours back then, but you can't call a band just "Tangerine", and "Tangerine Cream" sounds silly and besides which there was already a band called Cream next paragraph NEXT PARAGRAPH

In the 1970s there existed musicians whose unique selling point was that they used synthesisers, and there was an audience sufficiently intrigued with this new electronic sound to put synthesiser music in the charts. The likes of Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk bridged the gap, sales-wise, between a cult and a fully-fledged religion, but of course synthesisers eventually became so common that synthesiser music as a distinct genre died off. I remember being shocked, as a kid, to learn that the newest Bryan Adams album had been mostly created with drum machines and samplers. Bryan Adams of "Everything I Do" fame. Bryan Adams' music was conventional guitar pop, but the guitars and drums and the rest of the arrangements were actually sequenced and performed with samplers. A band was hired only when he played live, and the same was true of Meatloaf, Cher, and nowadays of course all pop music is created with VST plugins. Lots of orchestral film scores are created in the same way. I knew then - this would have been the 1990s - that synthesiser music was dead. If even Bryan Adams relied on synthesisers, they were no longer special.

I want to draw a distinction between synthesiser music - the synthesiser music of the 1970s - and later musical movements that relied on electronic instruments and indeed used them exclusively. Ambient music of the 1990s was entirely synthesiser and sample-based, but it wasn't synthesiser music; it was "ambient music", nobody really cared how it had been made. The UK garage and grime and electroclash of my youth were all fundamentally electronic music styles, but the medium was transparent. The musicians might have been proud of their dual G4 Power Macintoshes and Nord Leads and multi-monitor Ableton setups and their stash of antique MC-202s and Juno 106s, but nobody listened to the music simply because it had been created with electronic instruments. People listened to the music because it had a good beat and it sounded good in the car and you could code to it etc.

And some of it sounded new and different and unlike all that had preceded it, but the future dreams of my generation were far more pragmatic and perhaps more narrow than those of the primitive people of the 1970s, who really did believe that humanity was about to break through into a new age. Instead, my generation believed that aliens were going to breed us like cattle, except that we didn't really believe it, it was just a joke; and post-9/11 it was hard to entertain dreams about the future any more. It was best not to think about the future. My generation lived for today, bought more shoes, got what we deserved.

You know, there was a time when googling for "you are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve" might have thrown up something good about that song. An article or blog post about it. Instead there are thousands of robo-generated shopping links and uploads of the song to file sharing sites like Soundcloud. Back when I worked as a writer it struck me that the internet would be the death of writing; but on further reflection it came to me that writing had always been engaged in a process of death and rebirth, and that the thing I thought of as writing was merely the tail end of the previous dominant form, and that even novels and poetry - ancient forms - had been new once. But it will be a bleak future when the internet is dominated by the likes of Imgur, which isn't even a primary aggregator. It's an aggregator of an aggregator, with a comments section deliberately designed to stifle expression by limiting commentary to a few characters. Writing has always had to struggle, writers have always had to struggle, everybody has to struggle, all of life is a struggle against a hostile environment, and the struggle makes us strong, but what became of the Spartans? They spent their days struggling and had no time to leave behind much of a legacy, and now all that remains is a cartoon.

A lot of synth music was rubbish; people listened to it because it was new. I imagine that some people listened to Tangerine Dream's music without really liking it. They listened to it because the music had whizzy space noises and you couldn't get 2001 on VHS because VHS didn't exist yet, and if you wanted to journey into space in the privacy of your own bedroom you didn't have many options in the 1970s beyond smoking a joint and listening to Rubycon. The first generation of synthesiser musicians generally solved the problem of technological irrelevance by tightening up their compositions and incorporating conventional melodies - notably Kraftwerk, who were a rotten Krautrock band but hit their stride when they discovered beats and tunes - or by transitioning to film soundtracks, which was Tangerine Dream's solution. As a soundtrack band they benefited from great timing, which is a polite way of saying that they had a very limited range. Within that range their music was effective but it has to be said that both Vangelis and Jan Hammer trounced them; outside their narrow range they had neither musical training nor much of a desire to stretch their sound. And yet their adaptation of Thomas Tallis' "Puer Narus Est Norbis" for the soundtrack of The Keep is astonishing and unlike the rest of their work, so they could push themselves when they wanted.

Tangerine Dream's Hollywood high water mark was Ridley Scott's 1985 fantasy epic Legend, which starred Tom Cruise as a weedy shepherd or something and there was a unicorn and the devil was played by Tim Curry in a giant plastic suit and the set burned down and it cost a fortune and was a flop and Mia Sara looked nice in black lipstick, yes children they did have goths in 1985, and no it wasn't the one with David Bowie, that was Labyrinth. But therein lies a tale. Scott originally commissioned Jerry Goldsmith to write music for the film. The pair had worked before, on Alien. They didn't get on, but money.

At the time Goldsmith was one of Hollywood's most respected film score composers. He had been around since the 1960s, initially working in television, before graduating to movie scores; he could write orchestral music as well as anyone, but he was willing to push himself, notably with the percussion-heavy, jarring Planet of the Apes, but also the more conventional Patton, which deftly managed to express a mixture of militarism and spirituality with such aplomb that the Academy decided to give the Oscar to Love Story instead. Orchestral soundtracks fell out of fashion in the 1970s but returned with Star Wars, and whenever John Williams was too busy the studios called on Jerry Goldsmith instead, and then James Horner and John Barry respectively. Goldsmith wrote the score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was wonderful - the score was wonderful - and it had a really cool bwaaang noise, remember? He also wrote the music for Alien, which coincidentally sounded like early Tangerine Dream, sick angel strings and devil woodwind, although as far as I can tell Goldsmith and Froese never met or interacted in any way.

Alas Jerry Goldsmith wasn't good enough for the producers of Legend. The original European release of the film had Goldsmith's score, but for the American release the producers - sensing commercial disaster - had the film trimmed down, and commissioned a new score from enter stage left Tangerine Dream. The band apparently had three weeks to record it. The edited, Tangerine Dream version of the film was most prevalent on television when I was young; it's the one I grew up with.

Tangerine Dream's score is mostly atmosphere, with a couple of pop songs and one really strong romantic theme that is repeated several times. The producers wanted a "songtrack", and so they brought in Bryan Ferry and Jon Anderson to sing a couple of numbers. The music has lots of electronic pan pipe noodling, plus the very same Emulator shakuhachi sample that went on to be a cliché later in the decade, but would have been forgiveable in 1985, and to be fair Tangerine Dream don't overuse it.

Goldsmith's score, on the other hand, is conventionally orchestral, although because he kept up to date with the latest trends it has quite a lot of synthesiser as well; unfortunately he picked an irritating electronic noise as a leitmotif for the film's villains, which was supposed to be irritating but it's still irritating. In the same year he wrote the synth-heavy, contemporary music for Rambo: First Blood Part II, and he went on to score Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Air Force One, Mulan, LA Confidential, The Mummy, the list is quite literally finite, because he died in 2004. There was a ritual whereby each year the Academy would nominate him for an Oscar, and he would turn up and watch while someone else won it, and a single calcified tear flowed from his eye. Many years from now, when Leonardo DiCapro dies and goes to heaven, Jerry Goldsmith will welcome him, and they will sit and share a drink, and cry. To be fair, those films were popular and/or good, but I can't actually remember how the music went. Perhaps in his later years Jerry Goldsmith needed some money to renovate his house, or perhaps he had lots of daughters, I don't know. Daughters are expensive.

In my opinion both scores work, and if anything Tangerine Dream's music fits the material better. It's unsubtle and bold, just like the film. I pooh-pooh the band throughout this post, but their music for Legend works in the context of the film. Scott's movie was a fairy story closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than Tolkien; it was shot in a studio and has an unreal, deliberately fake look, and in that respect Tangerine Dream's music complements Scott's aesthetic. I don't apologise for using semi-colons so often. My heart is fine, I'm just like this. Besides, it's a very efficient way of juxtaposing two ideas quickly. "Complements Scott's aesthetic" is really clipped and aggressive, isn't it? The kind of thing a Klingon might say. (pause). Goldsmith's score, on the other hand, is surprisingly bland and anonymous.

My theory is that Goldsmith wasn't inspired by the material, and so despite having more time and an orchestra he produced something unmemorable, whereas Tangerine Dream was having a good day. I mean, we're supposed to rate Goldsmith's score, because he was a proper composer and the studio spat on his work, but I simply can't warm to it. Tangerine Dream's "unicorn theme", for example, is syrupy, sentimental, crude, simplistic, emotionally manipulative... and it's fantastic, because all of those qualities work in the context of the film (Goldsmith's score for the same sequence is just dull). I have no doubt that Jerry Goldsmith could have destroyed Tangerine Dream on any other day, in any other arena. Post-Legend the band declined into television work, I suspect because Legend was a fiasco. Ridley Scott's career basically tanked until Thelma and Louise, six years later; Mia Sara's career was obliterated just as it began. Tom Cruise immediately went on to enormous stardom, perhaps because people completely forgot that he was in Legend. I have seen the film several times and I can't remember his performance; I remember Tim Curry, I remember the sets and the music, I can't remember a single thing about Tom Cruise in Legend. Not a single line of dialogue or... I mean, wasn't Mia Sara essentially the driving force of the plot? I'm digressing here. It would be so easy for this tiny throwaway paragraph about Legend to grow so big that it eventually takes up one-quarter of the entire post, I must trim it down.

I think the fundamental problem with Tangerine Dream's soundtrack career is that Froese had no formal musical training, and like most autodidacts he was never forced to jump the groove or write an essay explaining why his last album sucked. He trained as a sculptor, and Tangerine Dream's music has an engineered quality to it, as if a sensible craftsman had set himself the task of constructing sonic collages from technology and a pool of musical ideas.

The synthesiser and progressive rock boom of the 1970s coincided with a period in which it was fashionable for musicians to adopt elements of European romantic classical music, and the likes of Yngwie Malmsteen continued this in heavy metal during the 1980s. I have no idea why rock musicians decided to mimic romantic classical music and not, for example, the interesting modern classical music of the twentieth century. Tangerine Dream was almost unique in that their music actually did resemble the stark, alienating sound of modern classical, but because they didn't have any conceptual depth they couldn't progress, and so their career boils down to three or four solid but disconnected ideas run into the ground. On a tangent, I've always found it strange that The Beatles - a trivial silly yeah-yeah pop band - experimented with musique concrète ("Revolution #9" and parts of the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack) and sampling ("Tomorrow Never Knows", "Walrus", "All You Need is Love" etc), whereas supposedly more hardcore rock bands of the prog era wanted to channel Beethoven, and that was supposed to be progress. What was up with that?

~

There's a pervasive whiteness to mid-1970s synthesiser music that is very much of its time. Tangerine Dream's music is almost stereotypically white person's music, stiff and cold and grandiose, so that even though the band avoided classical stylings the very form of their sound has a classical air. The mid-70s line-up of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann could be used as a teaching aid for non-white people in order to point out the characteristics of the white race; Froese was burly verging on overweight, Franke had stringy hair and looked as if he spent his days asleep and his nights playing Dungeons and Dragons, Peter Baumann was a stealth geek who was handsome in an effeminate way, which is creepy because you have to wonder why such a pretty man was hanging around with geeks. Was he mentally ill? Tangerine Dream's music was technically interesting and emotionless, and was aimed squarely at young white men, although the band's enveloping, formless soundscapes had a feminine quality; Phaedra and Zeit and so forth are amorphous swamps of sound, aural expressions of the classical stereotype of women as chaotic, clinging harpies whose bottomless vaginas consume the innocent flesh of young virgins. I'm not sure if a feminist reading of Tangerine Dream's music is the right way of approaching the problem of writing about the band, although I suspect it would be an entertaining journey. Phaedra was of course an adulteress who, in order to conceal her adultery, was prepared to condemn an innocent man to death. It might be that the band simply picked the name at random because it sounded mysterious, but come on (rolls eyes).

Notice how the photographs - taken by a woman - are divided into masculine squares. HAVE BEEN divided, deliberately.

Yes, but what of Tangerine Dream? Their popular legacy rests on a string of albums they released in the 1970s, running roughly from 1974's Phaedra to 1977's live double album Encore, although the cut-off is gradual. Debut album Electronic Meditation is a mess; their next three albums were recorded for German experimental label Ohr, and have an ambient sound that predates Brian Eno's ambient albums by several years. 1971's Zeit, in particular, is a double album of menacing drones, the kind of thing that might play on the tannoy of Hell's airport. It's difficult to write about Tangerine Dream's early music. It's formless and there are no lyrics and because no-one else has written about it I'm not sure what opinion I am supposed to have of it, and I'm not willing to be the first. I'm worried that I might say something embarrassing that will cause me to be disbarred from all the literary luncheons that I go to.

I want to stress that I'm not a fan of Tangerine Dream, oh God no. I ponder the band as an entomologist might ponder an extinct species of proto-cockroach. I grew up listening to the most fashionable music imaginable, and Tangerine Dream's music sounds... it sounds like something that was daring and new once, but it didn't lead to anything, and so now it's just a kind of dead end. Imagine if Thomas Koner had gone on to become a dance music DJ and you have a mental portrait of Tangerine Dream's unusually binary history.

Think of all the people who won the Turner Prize before 1993, before Brit Art got into gear. You've heard of Gilbert and George, but what about Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon? What of their work? It just doesn't mean anything today because there isn't a framework to give it meaning. We all know Damien Hirst, even if we know none of his art, but who was Tony Cragg? The same is true of Tangerine Dream's music. The music of The Beatles has meaning, because there is a framework; there are books about The Beatles, we are all familiar with their story, there are films about them, their albums are still rated, they are still written about. Tangerine Dream, on the other hand, were never written about extensively. They didn't sell enough records to dominate the media, but even huge record sales are not enough to guarantee the existence of a meaningful framework. The Electric Light Orchestra sold a huge amount of records during Tangerine Dream's heyday, but they are just as meaningless today; beyond "Wild West Hero" and the notion that they were loud and pompous, nothing remains. In contrast people still write about Richard Hell and the regulars of New York's CBGB club, because those things have a framework of meaning. And perhaps it's simply because they were good-looking and looked good in timeless leather jackets, whereas Jeff Lynne and Edgar Froese were bearded middle-aged men who did not look good whatever clothes they wore. Human beings are shallow, visual creatures, fascinated by looks and surface, and there is something universally appealing about the young punks of the late 1970s that will live on after the supposedly more substantial work of progressive rock has gone.

Zeit is one of my favourite albums. It's bleak and alien, even compared to the ambient music of the 1990s. It's uncompromisingly dedicated to its concept, and it was essentially the pinnacle of early Tangerine Dream. The point at which they got krautrock out of their system. The synthesiser musicians of the 1970s used some of the same technology, worked in the same field, and were occasionally indistinguishable from the high art of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, but there was a solid metal barrier separating them. Jean-Michel Jarre studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and was briefly a member of the GRM; he had an electronic opera performed at the Paris Opera, and until 1973 or so was in theory on their side of the barrier, but he rejected theory in favour of practice, and by the time of his international breakthrough with Oxygene the barrier had closed behind him.

There is an irony here. The music theorists of the mid-century produced a lot of ideas that died with them, whereas popular music of the 1960s and 1970s had a measurable and direct influence on music that followed it - not just popular music, but modern classical music, because the barrier between high and low art evaporated with postmodernism. Put another way, the idea of Stockhausen being influenced by or even working with James Brown is unthinkable, because with the exception of jazz, black music was despised as trivial folk art during the modernist period. Nowadays however modern classical musicians metaphorically crave black cock; they are gagging for it, desperate to be associated with hip-hop, and the very concept of modern classical music increasingly seems out of step with prevailing fashion. Again, this is another instance where the subject has a framework of meaning. John Cage was a terrific writer who worked hard to explain his ideas, and I don't want to suggest that I believe the likes of Klaus Schulze or Ash Ra Temple were cruelly deprived of the academic respect they had earned; and why is academic respect so important, anyway? There was nothing stopping Jean-Michel Jarre from writing at length about music. I just worry that the conventional historical narrative has blind spots, that's all.

The band remains influential to this day

On a superficial level Zeit resembles modernist classical music. It comes across as an experiment to be admired and pondered rather than a voluptuous pleasure to be enjoyed. A collection of static blocks of sound to be gazed upon as if they were exhibits in a gallery. On the other hand it has no theoretical substance, and it has a number of compromises that disqualify it from consideration as a work of serious art. The band wanted to fill a double album with drones, and they did so; then they moved on. Nonetheless I love it, and there's nothing quite like it. Brian Eno's ambient music was supposed to be soothing, and the ambient musicians of the 1990s were compromised by their desire to sell a lot of records, and "illbiet" music is too affected. Zeit is like a cancerous atom drifting through space, unimpressed with its surroundings.

Post-Zeit the Ohr label was destroyed by a mixture of drugs and lawsuits, and so Tangerine Dream signed to Britain's new Virgin label. Virgin was at least initially a progressive label for heads, but unlike Ohr it was eager to sell a lot of records. It was professionally run by Richard Branson, a normal man. Phaedra was one of the label's first dozen or so records, and reached number 15 in the UK album charts, impressive for a collection of stark electronic textures. Their next album, Rubycon, reached number twelve, and the band continued to chart until the mid-1980s.

Phaedra introduced Tangerine Dream's new sound. You know it already. A sequencer playing a simple dum-dum-dum pattern put through a delay line synced so that the sequence goes dum-dum-a-dum-a-dum-a-dum, with swooshy noises on top. Interspersed with formless jams so that the band could set up their instruments. Judging by bootlegs Tangerine Dream bought a sequencer some time in 1974 and quickly incorporated it into their live show. In those days sequencers could generally play a single, 16-step pattern; it wasn't until the 1980s that microprocessor-controlled, pattern-based sequencers became available, and as a consequence sequencing was awkward in the 1970s and of limited utility. Tangerine Dream quickly hit upon a neat way of using the sequencer to create an evolving rhythm track, and this new sound became known as the "Berlin School".

The sound became a cliché because it was so limited - it's hard to build an entire genre on a single technical trick - and in fact the band essentially took it as far as it could go on Phaedra. Rubycon is a smoother, more polished repeat of Phaedra, and from that point onwards the sequencer sound started to become repetitive. Nonetheless the band was firing on all cylinders at this point, and the run of Phaedra-Rubycon-Ricochet-Encore and the soundtrack for Sorcerer forms the bulk of their legacy. Although Phaedra was the big hit my experience of ordinary people is that they tend to have the slightly post-peak Stratosfear or Force Majeure in their record collections; two albums that had a mixture of majestic spacey ambient music and relatively conventional tunes. By Tangram (1980) the band was starting to churn out muzak, although again the cut-off is difficult to place. The likes of White Eagle and Logos (both 1982) suffer from terrible early-80s drum machines and a very dated sound. Chris Franke's drumming on the Ohr-era Atem (1973) is one of that album's high points, but the band's mid-70s albums didn't have drums, and 1980s Tangerine Dream was utterly uninterested in percussion, because the albums have perfunctory four-four drum machine patterns that sound like temporary tracks. Tangerine Dream did not dance.

At its best, Tangerine Dream's music was a mixture of brittle beauty and brute force, but the new digital synthesisers of the 1980s tended to undermine both of those qualities, and although the band had solid practical reasons for abandoning their unreliable Mellotrons and Moog Modulars it's as if they were enamoured of the theory of digital sound without pausing to listen to it critically. Their early-1980s albums have a clean, thin sound that hasn't dated very well. As a live band digital pattern sequencers essentially turned them into travelling light show with musical accompaniment. To be fair, a lot of the improvised 70s-heyday live stuff on their bootleg box sets is dross that sounds as if they were simply trying to cover up for broken equipment, and on the whole Tangerine Dream are a frustrating band. They were one of several experimental bands of the late 1960s, early 1970s that successfully managed to update and mutate their sound while remaining distinctive - Pink Floyd were probably the most successful - and they had a longer run than most, but by the 1980s they had lost their way. At their most extreme they were more extreme than Pink Floyd, but conversely when the two bands were down, Pink Floyd had more taste. Roger Waters had more taste. I suppose the modern equivalent would be someone like the Aphex Twin, or... is there a modern equivalent? Richard James just slowed down, he didn't start copying Sash. Remember Sash? "Ecuador"? Ask your parents. Modern bands have one advantage that Tangerine Dream didn't have, which is that they got to see Tangerine Dream grow old, whereas Tangerine Dream had no role models to copy. In the worlds of jazz and classical music composers typically get better with age, not worse, perhaps Froese and his chums assumed that the same would happen to them.

What will history make of Tangerine Dream? Their early music resembles the cosmic soundscapes of 2001, and the band has always been ghettoised as a nerdy act for sci-fi nerds. Lester Bangs wrote a piece about them, but he was more interested in their light show rather than the music. And what is there to say about Alpha Centauri, or their landmark gigs at the Royal Albert Hall in 1975 or their concert at Reims cathedral in 1974, which ended with hundreds of stoned hippies emptying their bladders against the stonework? Beyond the drama of peeing in a cathedral, what is there to say about music that was mostly a formless wash, without even any musical theory behind it? Eno understood that people crave meaning, and so he accompanied his tape loops and drones with exposition, and rock music writers lapped it up. Tangerine Dream have the same problem as Autechre, Squarepusher and huge chunks of the rave and electronic music I grew up with; on the whole the band let their music speak for itself, and like a firework display or a football match the music excited the spectators and then it was over. Their album art was abstract and their song titles were essentially Engrish, or Englisch given that they were German. "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola", "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares" - did they mean "assembly"? - "Rising Runner Missed by Endless Sender" all have the form of English sentences but the style is wrong.

"Runner" was one of the band's few vocal songs, from the 1978 album Cyclone, which was a conventional hard rock album with drums and singing. I don't know why they did that. The lyrics... I mean, 1978 was late for a German prog rock album with a long instrumental track on the second side. Yes, 1980s heavy metal had room for long instrumental songs, but Froese never had the chops for 1980s metal. If we're being honest, dear reader, he wasn't a very good guitar player. Live bootlegs of the 1970s are full of his guitar solos, but he was rubbish; the solos sound like StSander's "Shreds" videos.

History, Tangerine Dream. Jean-Michel Jarre sold many more records than Tangerine Dream, and was generally pegged as a lightweight in comparison. He suffered from the same mixture of meaninglessness and critical indifference, which is faintly tragic given that he had a genuine academic background and might have been able to supply meaning if he had been so inclined, and he is now in the same position as... but the same is true of Elton John and Paul McCartney, isn't it? Remove their private lives and they would be forgotten men. Nobody listens to their new music. Perhaps it's not so much that Froese and his ilk failed to give the historians something to write about, it's simply that writers and the media in general aren't interested in music, tunes, sound. Writers are interested in the music industry, or the private lives of musicians, but not music. For writers, music is just a noise that happens in the background while they are typing away on their keyboards, just as I am currently listening to Tetsu Inoue's Yolo, or if not listening to it then at least playing it in the background.

Yolo probably means something else in Japanese, you can't blame him for that. Inoue's last album was released in 2007, and he seems to have vanished since then, or perhaps he assumed his final form. I mean, literally, nobody has heard of him since then. The sun rises, the sun sets.

Mirrormoon EP: Worlds in Collision

Let's have a look at Mirrormoon EP, an intriguing new game of exploration and puzzle-solving. It was released via the Steam platform on 04 September for the reasonable price of £6.92, and it's great fun. Mirrormoon is an independent game, but unlike smash indie hits such as Kirby Space Programme and Minecraft it doesn't seem to have generated much of a buzz yet; I first heard of it whilst browsing through Steam's New Release schedule. It was a finalist for some award or other last year or this year.

On a conceptual level Mirrormoon is easy to describe. You play an intangible presence, and you fly a spaceship through a galaxy of planets. Each planet has a spinny circular thing that you can only pick up once you have solved a series of puzzles, which involve touching things with your magic zapper gun. Once you pick up the spinny circular thing you get to name the planet - but only if someone else hasn't named it already, because there are other people playing the game. You never see them, but they're there. And that's Mirrormoon, but this description doesn't do the game justice because it's more than just a lot of pointing at things and moving around. It's visually striking and a sonic feast. After playing it for a while I am struck with a wave of melancholic nostalgia. There is something about its minimalist modernism that sends me back to the past.

Mirrormoon: Largo in Four Movements

See, one of my earliest memories is Battlezone, the classic arcade game. The local arcade had a machine, and I remember being mesmerised by the fluid 3D polygons and the sense of being free to roam around on the surface of a gigantic alien world. Of course, the playfield was actually tiny - it wrapped around, so you could travel forever in one direction without getting anywhere - and there was no way to reach the jagged mountains that ringed the horizon or the erupting volcano. In that respect it was a metaphor for life. You travel without ever getting anywhere, because you're trapped by your own limitations, and there's a hostile world out there trying to trip you up. The wonders you ogle are just square blocks, and ultimately there's no magic, everything is just a few lines of code bashed out by an overworked staffer who had to meet a deadline. Ball lightning? Spontaneous combustion? The Voynich Manuscript? They were just bugs caused by shoddy programming; a pointer that overflowed.

Battlezone. Apart from blowing up tanks and being killed by those damn missiles there wasn't much to do, but the game is still a fun blast nowadays. The visuals have style and the action is surprisingly fluid.

THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME

Over subsequent years I was drawn to games that allowed the player to explore a 3D world. They were rare in the 1980s. Home computer technology was barely capable of rendering Battlezone itself, let alone extending the concept into simulating a coherent world. But there were a few notable pioneers of what would nowadays be called sandbox games. Keeping within the realm of proper 3D, and ignoring space combat simulators - which rules out Lotus Turbo Esprit and Elite, both of which were sandbox pioneers - there was Firebird's cult classic Cholo (1987), which combined the robot-collecting gameplay of Hewson's Paradroid with a jerky but expansive 3D environment that encompassed a city centre, a military base, an airfield and an offshore island. The visuals were jerky and occasionally indecipherable, but it had ambition. Its major flaw was that it was a few years ahead of its time; it really needed a 16-bit microcomputer to do the concept justice, but as far as I can tell it was never ported for the Atari ST or Amiga. There was a modern remake a couple of years ago that finally managed to get it right, and revealed a game that might have been hailed as a stone-cold classic if only it had been faster.

Cholo, Firebird (1987). Clockwise from top-left, an office with a table - an impressive feat of realism at the time - plus some buildings, a control tower, and an aeroplane sitting on a runway.

Another game that springs to mind is Mercenary (1987), in which the player has to escape from an alien city:

Mirrormoon EP is a lot more reminiscent of Mercenary's sequel, Damocles, which gave the player freedom to explore a star system containing several planets and moons. Mirrormoon itself takes place in a galaxy of several thousand procedurally-generated worlds, which put me in mind of the surrealistic Captain Blood (1988):

Unlike Captain Blood, travel in Mindymork takes time. You can tell your spaceship to hurry up, but high-speed travel takes more fuel, and if you don't have enough fuel you're forced to coast, like the Wizards of the Coast, Wizards is the name of a film by Ralph Bakshi, Ralph 124C 41 is an early work of science fiction by Hugo Gernsback, The Grapes of Wrath, of Khan... Hugo Gernsback's original name was Hugo Gernsbacher; Miss Teschmacher was played by Valerie Perrine, which was a type of mineral water popular in the 1980s. Here's what the control panel of your spaceship looks like as you turn it on for the first time, and when I say turn it on I mean that you press buttons, I'm not suggesting that you feed it chocolates:

The game takes a back-seat approach to telling you how to play it. The control panel likewise. In the top-left there's a speed control and a fuel meter. You can see that I've selected the slowest speed, which will use up a quarter of what little fuel I have left. It's going to take me 1:03 of real time to reach my destination, 1:18 of presumably on-board relativistic time. The little polygon in the very top-left shows my heading and velocity; I'm going thataway (points towards the blog's sidebar and thence to the window and beyond). The screen in the middle is a star map - I am heading from a star to the left of the screen that I have already named to a star in the middle of the screen. In a way Moogaloo is a wolf-marking-its-territory simulator, you go around marking your territory.

The other controls? To the right of the screen is a triangle that lets me spin the display around, and above it a thing that lets me scroll around. The mouse pointer is hovering over some buttons that light up the displays - this seems to be cosmetic. To its left, a floppy disc, which has to be inserted into the drive in order to (I assume) download myself on the planet. On the planet itself you navigate with standard WASD controls and the mouse, albeit that the mouse only controls your gripper / zapper stick, e.g. you can't look up and down. It remains to be seen whether you move around the planet, or you're just standing still and it rotates beneath your feet.

Why is it called Mirrormoon? And not for example Mr Fidget's Bidet Quest? When you arrive on the planet there's a moon in the sky (called the moon). But it's no ordinary moon, it's actually a mirror-image of the planet, a kind of map hanging in the sky that you can use to navigate with. I keep saying the planet, but really it's tiny. You can traverse it in no time.

The gameplay for the most part consists of walking around the planet, touching things. Beacons fire out pulses of light that you have to follow, there are strange objects that make a noise when you walk through them - the buildings are insubstantial - and ghostly shapes that are only instantiated when night falls. The emphasis on light and shadow reminds me a bit of Tau Ceti (1985), which had possibly the first model of day/night transition in a computer game:

At night you could fire off flares, or use jerky infra-red, or just hide in a building until sunrise.

Mirrormind is complicated by the fact that you can actually grab the moon and move it around - in fact you can use it to eclipse the sun, in which case night-time falls on the planet and some of the structures change. Before you can swing the moon around you have to assemble your grippy shooty gun thing, and to make things interesting the moon occasionally drifts through the sky uncontrollably. The puzzles are generally simplistic, but the game's emphasis is on exploring lots of worlds rather than getting stuck on a few.

The edge of the galaxy is to the right - you can visit each of these stars.

Audio-wise the game has an ambient soundtrack that reminds me of Alpha Centauri-era Tangerine Dream crossed with Music for Airports-era Brian Eno, except that it's a lot more cheerful. I assume the music is procedurally-generated, just like the planets, although the sonic environment sometimes provides clues that help solve the puzzles. Even if the game was a pile of rubbish, the music would make the price worthwhile.

Mirrormoon is developed by the two-man team of Santa Ragione, who are from Italy which is a place I have visited in fact I have been to Milan which is the home of one-half of the team but then again lots of people have been to Milan, I have no special connection with the place or with them. Santa Ragione is apparently Italian for Holy Reason, but I'm sure there are subtleties that I don't understand on account of not being Italian, e.g. perhaps it's a football team, or an Italian expletive.

The game was designed by Italian people, you can tell

 
Is Mirrormoon any good? On an objective level neither Captain Blood nor Tau Ceti were particularly effective as entertainment, in fact they weren't really games at all, they were clever graphical demos with a slip of gameplay draped around them in order to justify their existence.* On the other hand they were experiences and of course I still remember them fondly.

* Literally so - Tau Ceti began as a 3D shape drawing demo and Captain Blood was built around a fast fractal landscape routine. You know, I never realised that Valerie Perrine was the policewoman in The Cannonball Run who pulled over Adrienne Barbeau and was immune to her mesmerising bosom - which is one of the few implausible things about that film, given that Adrienne Barbeau's bosom is universally appealing to all mammals, male or female, human or otherwise.

Mirrormoon is an experience too, but it's far more successful as a game, albeit in short bursts. The procedurally-generated puzzles feel arbitrary and occasionally the planet doesn't have a puzzle at all, but the combination of heavenly music and fantastic, distinctive visuals are enough to keep me playing. The sense of being an explorer in a mysterious galaxy is enticing, and the game is of course under active development, so it remains to be seen how it will pan out. There is a very tenuous storyline (which I admit to having completely ignored) but the game is ripe for expansion - it would be interesting to see fractal planets with subaquatic spaces and gigantic glaciers and cities in the sky. But these are whims. Mirrormoon is well worth the money even as an ambient sculpture, and it has very modest system requirements - any Core II Duo PC with a decent graphics card is enough. So far it hasn't been ported for mobile platforms but I would be surprised if any of the current generation of tablets had trouble running it.

Why EP? It stands for Extended Play. There was a demo, see, which was much smaller. Back then long time ago when the grass was green and music came on vinyl discs, a record that had more music than a two-song single but less than a forty-minute album was called an EP. Typically there were two songs per side, two sides, occasionally two discs. In the 1960s they were a popular vehicle for bands that didn't have very many good songs, or as a live showcase, in the 1980s they were the ideal indie label sampler format, more value for money than a two-track split 7". Nowadays EPs are an anachronism (and they generally aren't released on vinyl), but they're very trendy, e.g. look at the pretty girl and her beestung lips. She's from Southampton, not usually famous for having attractive people. Don't write in to complain, people of Southampton, your strengths lie in other areas.

"I've started out for God knows where /
I guess I'll know when I get there"