In spring 1977 Tangerine Dream performed two sell-out tours in the USA. They were supported by the visual effects of a Krypton gas laser by Laserium. Tickets in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Washington and New York were all sold-out within days. In October 1977 Virgin released the double-album Encore that featured four long tracks recorded during the tour. Some of the music based on themes from Ricochet, Stratosfear and Sorcerer. The titles Coldwater Canyon (including Edgar Froese's longest guitar solo on record) and Cherokee Lane originate from the roads in Coldwater Canyon near Los Angeles, where TD lived for a while during the tour.
Encore is supposed to be the definitive live TD album among fans, and it was the last record featuring Peter Baumann, for after a concert in Denver, Colorado, during the second half of their tour, he informed Edgar Froese and Chris Franke that his private obligations no longer allowed him a full-time collaboration with TD. In November 1977 Peter Baumann left TD for good and started working as a solo artist and producer. He built his own studio in Berlin, before finally leaving that city and moving to New York.
Being asked in 1985, if TD often used old pieces of music for films, TV or the theatre and gave them further exposure on an album, Edgar Froese answered: "No, although we counted around ten whole albums' worth of unused material from our last years with Virgin. When we were doing Encore in 1977 we used a piece of music that we'd made for the play Oedipus Tyrannus at the Chichester Festival under Keith Mitchell a couple of years before. Generally we wouldn't do that, but one of the reasons was the departure of Peter Baumann. The whole record was done when Peter decided to stay in the States so we looked back to what we had and used a couple of pieces from rehearsals we did, and the Oedipus pieces which came from CBS studios in London in '74 - '75."
Edgar Froese about the question, whether Coldwater Canyon was a genuine live piece: "Why do you think it wasn't? In fact we played that piece on a lot fewer dates than the others because it came from the second half of the tour. The first part went very well but the second half was knocked down after three concerts. We always said I broke my arm falling off a horse, which was b*******. I can hardly ride a horse." Chris Franke: "That's probably why you fell off it." Edgar Froese: "The real reason was that all the concert promoters went bankrupt because Emerson, Lake and Palmer had just cancelled their massive tour with a 120 piece orchestra. We were part of the disaster and we lost a lot of money on the tour. We had to grab together some bits and pieces -- on Cherokee Lane there were pieces from three of four concerts, so we got a lot of letters saying 'I've got the tape from the concert you played here and I can't find that part anywhere!'"
In 1995 Virgin re-released the album on CD in the so-called "Definitive Edition" series, featuring the original front cover artwork. The sound quality of this release, using the Super Bit Mapping technology, is probably the best up to now.
