Tangerine Dream

Mars Polaris - Deep Space Highway To Red Rocks Pavilion

- Studio, released June 1999 -

Covers

CD release Germany 1999
Design: Edgar Froese

CD release Germany 2009

Tracks


		[a]
1.	Comet's Figure Head	10:02
2.	Rim Of Schiaparelli	6:15
3.	Pilots Of The Ether Belt	10:15
4.	Deep Space Cruiser	4:42
5.	Outland (The Colony)	9:15
6.	Spiral Star Date (Level P)	6:13
7.	Mars Mission Counter	5:45
8.	Astrophobia	9:57
9.	Tharsis Maneuver	4:31
10.	Dies Martis (TransMercury)	4:00
Total running time		70:55

Details


Recording date	January 1999
Recording site(s)	Eastgate Studios (Vienna), Mariner Studios (California)
Composer(s)	Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese
Musician(s)	Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese
Producer(s)	Edgar Froese

Notes

NASA's Mars Polar Lander mission provided the idea for TD's 1999 studio album Mars Polaris. The music material was first performed during TD's only 1999 concert in Osnabrück, Germany, on June 12th, at the KlangArt festival. The album had been announced as an "original motion picture space reality soundtrack" before, and it turned out to be a score for pictures in the listeners' minds: Mars Polaris contains ten tracks inspired by the flight of the 'Mars Polar Lander' capsule to Earth's neighbour planet. The capsule had been launched on January 3rd, 1999 and it was intended to reach Mars on December 3rd, 1999, but it got lost accidently. TD composed the music that could have accompanied the capsule's mission, even if they avoided the word "soundtrack" on the final release -- a film does not exist. However, some visual impressions could be seen during the live presentation of Mars Polaris at the 1999 KlangArt festival. The CD contains the major part of the music of this event, including a short piece similar to an excerpt of the Sony Center Topping Out Ceremony Score CD.

With Mars Polaris, the band has followed their late nineties musical style, which has started with albums like Transsiberia and What A Blast, but now completed by some new sounds and layers, used very carefully. With this album, TD have returned to play some longer compositions again: Four of the ten tracks are about ten minutes long each. Different from earlier announcements, Mars Polaris is not a double CD with more than 100 minutes music but a single CD of about 70 minutes. The whole artwork concept fits into the typical TDI style of the previous releases. The booklet text contains facts about the planet Mars as well as technical data of the NASA capsule.

There was an alternate version, titled Mars Polaris - Original Motion Picture Space Reality circulating the shops, which features a different track listing that consists of songs from this release and from the album Great Wall Of China. See The Mars Polaris Mystery for differences of these two releases.

In March 2009 the album was re-released with different cover design as part of an extensive digipack series (consisting of a total of more than 60 CD and DVD releases) by the Germany based Membran record label.

Releases


Germany	1999: TDI/EFA CD: 63016-2 2009: Membran CD: 232648; digipack