Encore

At the beginning of 1977, Peter Baumann was occupied with arranging his studio in Berlin and incorporating new equipment. It was left to Froese and Franke to plan the forthcoming tour in the United States. The tour started on 29th March in Milwaukee, and ended on 26th April but was later extended with four concerts in July and August. The tour turned out to be a very big success and many concerts were sold out in only a few days. Some concerts had to be cancelled since some of the promoters went bankrupt when Emerson, Lake and Palmer called off a big tour with a 120-piece orchestra. The promoters -- and Tangerine Dream -- lost a lot of money.

A new P.A. system -- specially designed for Tangerine Dream in England -- was brought into use on that tour. It was designed by Martin Audio and was able to handle both the very deep bass and the very clear sound that a synthesizer can produce. Especially the lowest spectrum of a synthesizer sound can be very violent to a speaker system, but this new equipment could handle it and play loud -- and it was played very LOUD!

For the concerts, Tangerine Dream had chosen to use the company "The Laserium Light Show" for the visual side of the tour. It was one of the first companies to incorporate lasers in their light show, which they have been doing since 1973. Sent through different kinds of prisms and modulated otherwise, a laser can create the most unbelievable and beautiful colours, figures and forms in three dimensions. For many years, The Laserium was located at the Planetarium in London, and every day there were several shows; to the music of Pink Floyd, Jean Michel Jarre and Alan Parsons you could experience a "laserist" improvise -- and it was different from show to show.

I myself have taken the journey below the star dome in the London Planetarium quite a few times, and it has been an extraordinary experience every time. If you remember the last part of Stanley Kubrick's famous movie 2001, you will have an idea of what it was like... Sadly, the Laserium in London does not exist anymore!

Miles from the New Musical Express wrote about his experience of the Laserium at the concert in Washington D.C: "A nebulous cloud appeared on the screen behind the group. It floated, ever-changing, in an illusion of three dimensions, like an universe in creation. The intensity of the red laser light gave the projected image a degree of substance that a conventional light-show lack. It was as if flames were burning inside the cloud!" (NME 16/7, 1977)

The tour was immortalised on the double album Encore which came out in October 1977. It made its way to a 55th placement on the English charts. The music is the well-known style from the past few years -- four long pieces that each take up one side of the album. The album sounds very live-like and the presence of the audience is quite obvious, but a lot of re-mixing and pasting of music from different concerts and recordings from the performance Oedipus Tyrannus was done at the studio afterwards. Bootlegs of the concerts show a different picture; the concerts were much more heavy and raw than Encore seems to reflect!

It was Peter Baumann who did the mixing on the album and that would become his last assignment as a musician in Tangerine Dream; he left the group in November to concentrate on a solo career. There had been a lot of controversy during the seven years the trio played and toured together, and the rumours had been whirling: Peter Baumann had left the band, he was being replaced by a computer, he had gone solo, he had re-entered the band, he had never left, and so on...

Shortly before the final break, and while the three musicians were still submitted to stay together in Tangerine Dream, both Baumann and Froese talked about the situation in the band in different interviews with Miles:

Baumann: "We want to be very cautious about what we are doing. We are not splitting up, we are not married! It's always the same with a group; you can have a common status when you start but I cannot imagine three people having over six years the same kind of development musically and personally -- both very important. So it's more than natural that we say we have to be aware of what we are doing, otherwise we will lose our identity. Edgar is 8 or 9 years older than me. He is married. He has a child. I think these things really do matter to the kind of things you are playing. We had no discussion in the beginning -- we had the same background -- we just did it and we found this is what we wanted to do. The world has changed in the last seven years. We just thought we couldn't go on with what we did in the beginning -- it would be dishonest. The end was Ricochet and the new beginning was Stratosfear. This is a time of changing!" (Miles, NME 16/7, 1977)

Froese: "What I've found is that all the success of the last one and a half years was psychologically a bit much, you know? I'm 33 now and I've been connected professionally with music for about 13 or 14 years so it doesn't get to me. I think I can handle money very carefully -- I've got quite a lot of knowledge about it. But these two boys are ten years younger and they've got a high income. And you have to be fair. You have to help them a little bit to get everything the right way; not buying big cars, liquor... success is something which could happen for one week or ten years, you know? It depends on an intelligent operation situation". (Miles, NME 16/7, 1977)

But their opinions on how the band should be run were too different and Peter Baumann finally left. They parted at a time when Tangerine Dream were at the peak of their creativity and also very popular. They were later to meet each other again on a more professional level many years later.

Baumann wanted to do something more popular and dance-like music -- or something on "the edge-points of pop music", as he called it himself -- and for a few years he was still very active as a musician. It led to records in his own name with melodic electro-pop and he had a cooperation with the singer Robert Palmer, among others.

Edgar Froese: "There's a piece on here, Monolight, which shows our classical leanings. We tend to listen to classical music, and feel very close to Bach because of the counterpoint, the use of sequences and the masterpieces he wrote in terms of basslines. Jack Bruce said Bach was the greatest bass-player ever, and I completely agree."

Chris Franke: "The comparison with classical music is difficult, but we do write long, instrumental pieces, very dynamic, partly aggressive, partly lyrical."

(Interview with Johnny Black, thisBEAT, issue 17, April 1986)