Article/Interview - Contemporary Keyboard, April 1981


TANGERINE DREAM By Dominic Milano

Tangerine Dream's music is music for your eyes as well as your ears. It
evokes images and takes you places you may never have been before. The
layers of synthesizer sound are an audio version of a surrealist
painting. And more than one reviewer has remarked in this German trio's
influence on other practitioners of live electronic music.

Tangerine Dream was formed in the late '60s by Edgar Froese, then a
guitar player. The music that the band created was traditional
psychedelic rock with traditional instrumentation and traditional
volume levels (it was *loud*). Working within this format, it was hard
for the band to establish any kind of original sound, and as Froese
puts it, "Playing that type of pop music became unsatisfying. We
weren't saying anything new to our audiences or to ourselves."

So by 1969, the band had begun exploring the synthesizer, much to the
dismay of it's growing European audience. As former member Peter
Baumann told Ernest Leogrande of the New York Daily News in 1977, "We
began to extend the electronic parts more and more. Eventually we just
dropped the guitar and drum playing. After we [had been] playing for
about 15 minutes the audiences got - what's the word? - unsatisfied.
This was quite the usual reaction. They got furious. *That's* the right
word."

Baumann joined T. Dream in 1972, replacing Klaus Schulze, who went on
to become famous in his own right as a synthesist. Baumann was first
featured on their third synthesizer album, Zeit, which was released
after two others, Electronic Meditation and Alpha Centauri. It was on
the latter album that current member Christoph Franke, formerly a
drummer, joined the ranks of T. Dream. Zeit was a double album which
featured four cellists in addition to the standard T. Dream trio of
synthesists. Interestingly, all of Tangerine Dream's albums up to this
point were improvised, as were their immediate successors, Atem,
Phaedra, Rubycon, Ricochet, and Stratosfear.

The more recent albums have also been improvisational in nature. One of
the most controversial was the album immediately following Stratosfear -
the soundtrack to William Friedkin's movie The Sorceror. The band was
also fairly displeased with this LP. In an unpublished interview for
Keyboard just before he left the band, Peter Baumann told writer Mike
Falcon, "The soundtrack itself, we like, but we didn't like the way it
was used. We think that if it had been used the way we thought it
should be used, the way it was composed and felt, then it could have
fit very well into the picture. But the way it was put in was very
different from the way we saw it before. The film was disappointing."
Edgar Froese added, "We really loved the script, which we were given
before the film was shot. We were asked to compose the music without
seeing the film. I think Friedkin is one of the greatest directors, but
the final cutting of the film and the way the last five minutes had our
music fade in and out seemed totally impractical to us."

Also released at about the same time as The Sorceror was the live album
titled Encore, the last album to feature Baumann. With the release of
their next album, Cyclone, Tangerine Dream became a quartet. Peter
Baumann left the band in pursuit of a solo career, and Froese and Chris
Franks added a drummer, Klaus Krieger, and a reed player, Steve
Jolliffe, who also played keyboards, flutes, and piccolo. Despite the
inclusion of these acoustic instruments, the band still maintained
their other-worldly machine-like drive, created by sequencer ostinato
patterns, which had long since been established as their audio
signature.

Force Majeure was released in 1979 and included Krieger on drums, but
Jolliffe's keyboards and winds had departed. Engineer Eduard Meyer also
put down some cello lines on this LP. Finally, we have 1980's offering
from Tangerine Dream, Tangram. This album features the Dream at what
may be the most interesting moment in the latest phase of their
development. Edgar Froese still plays synthesizers and a little guitar,
Chris Franke is still playing synthesizer and taking responsibility for
the sequencer rhythms within the trio, but they've been joined by
keyboardist Johannes Schmoelling. And one perceives some subtle
alterations in the classic Tangerine Dream sound. There are more
dynamics in the music, and coupled with their machine-like motor
rhythms is a hint of emotion and some feeling that goes beyond
mellowness.

Schmoelling joined the band after a chance meeting with Froese in a
Berlin studio, where Schmoelling was completing some work with another
band. His background, he explained to us, is in classical music and
more traditional jazz and rock keyboard playing. He worked as an
engineer in various recording studios and studied electronics as well.
He saw joining Tangerine Dream as a chance to make use of his skills in
both playing and electronics. Onstage, his instrumental duties involve
playing some of the more traditional keyboard parts on such instruments
as an Oberheim OB-X, a Phrophet-5, a Yamaha electric grand, and a
Minimoog.

T. Dream is infamous for the vast amounts of synthesizer gear they
cover a stage with. One glance at the photo above will prove that this
reputation is deserved. {photo of TD onstage with draped sheets,
similar to Logos photo} Visible are Froese's and Franke's huge
customized modular synthesizers and the many other keyboard instruments
used by the members of the band. Many of these instruments aren't as
stock as they appear from the outside, and the number of technological
advances that this band has made is enought to make any equipment
fanatic drool.

We caught Tangerine Dream in Los Angeles just after they had finished
up their latest American tour. There, we spoke with Chris Franke. About
halfway through the interview we were joined by Edgar Froese. We didn't
have the chance to speak with Schmoelling until a month later, when the
band had a day off from their European tour. Then we spoke to Johannes
over the phone from Berlin. The entire band was eager to talk about
their unique collection of instruments, their perceptions of the music
industry, and future directions that they're going to explore.

* * * *

  How much modular equipment is the band making use of currently, and
  has it been modified to make live performance a little easier to cope
  with?

Franke: We have three modular systems, which have been modified rather
heavily through the years to make live performance easier. I think we
have 200 modules or so. Our service engineer in Berlin became more and
more involved with our problems and he started to design his own
modules, which are not for sale anywhere else. They are designed just
for us. His company is called Projeckt Electronic. This company is
very useful to us in the analog field. Digital, of course, is a
different story altogether. Our modular systems are about 50% Moog and
50% Projeckt Electronic.

  What kind of problems have you had to overcome on the modular systems
  in live performance that have caused you to need to modify them?

That's very easy to explain. The natural problem with modular systems
is that they don't have any programmable computer interface
facilities. You have no preset programs. You have so little time
between songs and within songs to change patches and to set up new
registers. That is why we have our systems modified. We have added a
lot of CV [control voltage] busses for the oscillators, a lot of signal
busses, a lot of busses for controls like keyboards and sequencers. All
of these things can now be routed very easily. We even have sequencers
set up to control these routings.

  How do you decide which sequencer is going to control which voltage?

The sequencer, which we use a lot, is an important controller for us.
There are a couple of different sequencers programmed onstage, but we
use another to control routing. This routing sequencer is in control of
routing the other sequencers to the oscillators and saying how often
sequence A is played and how often sequence B is played. This way you
get some kind of structure already programmed. Another modification
we've had to make is to have completely different power supplies. We
have had to stabilize all the oscillators, and all the mechanics we've
had to change drastically. Those were the main problems in preparing
our system for use onstage. We have just played 30 countries, and our
systems are still holding up. Five or eight years ago, there were
tremendous problems. Now we`re prepared for them.

  How did you deal with the problems back then?

We went to Australia and the modular gear was completely smashed. We
played the tour with a couple of Minimoogs. That was a particularly
hard time. I still wonder how we were able to use the standard Moog
sequencers, since the steps are not quantized and the temperature
changes affected them all the time. Now I have a very special
quantizing arrangement. I can define the intervals of the quantizing.
My oscillators also never run out of tune. I can't believe that I used
to go through all the trouble I used to go through. I guess the
motivation for going through that much was supplied by the interest in
doing something new. Every night we were afraid of having things not
work, so we spent most of our income on improving the live situation.
We always wanted instruments that were programmable and had polyphonic
facilities. We even built our own programmer before there was any other
programmer out. Then we started using the Sequential Circuts programmer
on our modular units when it came out, and we started using
synthesizers like the Phrophet-5 and the OB-X when they came out. We
also used the first Oberheim Four-Voice because this was the first
polyphonic synthesizer we knew of and Oberheim instruments have always
been avant-garde in technology.

  What other types of keyboards does the band make use of?

We use ordinary keyboards like a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand, a Hohner
Clavinet/ Pianet Duo, a Wurlitzer electric piano, and string machines
like the Solina, Elka, Crumar, and Korg units. Every instrument has a
special position in our music. You have to clarify where to use each
instrument through your own experience, because they all sound a little
different. Sometimes an instrument only sounds it's best in one octave,
so we make use of combinations of all of them. We are also getting into
purely digital machines.

  In what way?

I started out by using three Roland Microcomposers. That gave me quite
an experience. It also provided me with enough information to know
what I wanted to see in a music editing system. We've been building
this up, and it should be done by the summer of 1981. Then there is
also an instrument that will provide us with percussive sounds - a sort
of digital Mellotron, with digital storage onto floppy disk.

  You're having this built for you, or you're using something that's
  sold commercially?

We're having it built, because there is nothing quite like it on the
market. I want to go into musique concrete. This instrument samples
acoustic sounds and gives you the ability to alter their pitch and time
constants. I started out with short percussive sounds, which could last
up to two seconds. In this way, I could do a drum solo just by playing
a keyboard. Later we will have more memory to do things that are more
complex. Drum sounds are short enough to make the quantizing noise
silent. Flute sounds are more difficult. The designers of the Fairlight
are trying to do this same thing. but it's still very early in the
game.

  What other experiences have you had with digital instruments that are
  on the market now?

We own two instruments, the Crumar GDS and the PPG Waveform Computer,
which comes from Germany and isn't available in the States. We feel
that the Crumar GDS is by far the most advanced and developed digital
instrument in terms of software. It also has some of the best hardware
in it. Some people feel that it's not good to use such dedicated
hardware because you have no idea where digital sound synthesis will go
in the future. Will it be additive? Will it be FM? Will it be something
else entirely? Nobody knows for sure. And every system is still limited
in certain ways. The Fairlight people say that a system that is totally
software oriented is the way to go, because it's easier to develop and
change. Microcomputers and microprocessors are just far too limited in
sampling speed.

  Tell us something about the PPG system.

Edgar is using this system. There are small versions of the system
available that cost about $5000. These have 100 presets, 40 of which
you can define yourself. Then there is the big machine, which lets you
define all your own waveforms. There are eight voices which can be used
as notes, sequences, or independent tone colors. In each voice set
there are 64 waveforms, each of which can be defined by splitting it up
at 256 break points. You define waveforms by defining the break points,
and then you use the envelopes in the machine to sweep through all
these different waveforms. That is what makes it sound natural. That is
the key to making a synthesizer sound good. The manufacturer has to
decide what circutry to use to make sound change. Using a filter is
nice, but it cuts off frequencies. That is why I like to use digital
machines. They make the sound appear so clean and crystalline.
Electronic music has always sounded too soft and mot as brilliant as it
should be. You must imagine what this Waveform Computer sounds like
with these rich harmonics sweeping about. It gives you the effect of
having a filter, but without all the dullness that a filter imposes on
a sound. then you can arrange the harmonics to get a previously unheard
effect.

 Are you using digital systems in live performance yet?

We will be using the GDS on out next tour. I did some software changes
on it, and we are just waiting to get it back to use it on tour. We
might also purchase a Synclavier in the future. This instrument is
perfect for live performance. My sound editing system is strictly a
studio instrument. This is the most wonderful time in electronic music
for getting more control over parameters. One section of the machine
I'm designing is strictly for composing. It doesn't matter if the
machine is playing itself or if you are printing out something that
will control another instrument. When I finish it, it will be able to
interpret certain symbols which will give it the ability to play solos
as if it were some given instrumentalist, like a violin player. You
will be able to draw in pitch-bends and define accents and
accelerandos, ritardandos, and dynamics. It is a simple system to
use. On the Roland Microcomposer, you sometimes need as many as 12 key
depressions for just one note. On this system, only three will ever be
needed. This system is also very useful for composition. There are many
facilities in it for copying and editing a piece. You can print out
numbers in order to have information on a piece of paper, or you can
print out in standard notation, which makes it easier for people who
aren't familiar with your system to read.

  Have you made any provision to have the computer generate the
  structures of a piece?

This is a far-out possibility, and many universities are doing just
that. It will come in time. There are a lot of different possibilities
in doing something like that. Let's say you have five tones and you
don't know what order to put them in. Well, you have the computer throw
out some random possibilities. I have a library of harmonies which I
can use to harmonize a bass line automatically. You can pre-define the
rules for doing this. Sometimes an ordinary rule can be applied to a
new music too. What you don't want to have happen is to have the
computer actually doing part of the composition. As long as you have
control over the entire piece, assuming you have enough taste and power
to select the right things, then you're all right. To me, the computer
is there to help with routine things, to make it easier for the
composer to compose.

  Getting back to other types of equipment that the band uses, what
  about effects devices and signal processors?

We use Moog parametric equalizers, and we use delay lines, of course. I
have a very nice delay line made by Klark Technik called the DN-36 that
I use for chorus and flanging effects in stereo. Then we have the 360
Systems programmable parametric, and some graphic equalizers too.
Almost everything has at least three effects on it. We use flanging and
chorusing effects quite a lot, because they make your brain think that
the sounds are moving around more. In the future, it would be nice to
see someone come out with flanging, chorusing, and echoes which are
programmable and can be tied in with synthesizer voices directly. On
side two of Tangram I put my OB-1 synthesizer through a very old
fuzzbox. That made it sound like a saxophone in the lower registers and
a guitar in the upper registers. Many people mistake that sound for
Edgar's guitar.

  What type of fuzzbox did you use?

It is only the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz which is usable for this
effect. I even play my Prophet through five Big Muffs.

  Five!

Five of them, one for each voice. This is because if you play a chord
on the Prophet and run it through a fuzzbox, you get white noise. So I
run each voice out to it's own fuzzbox. This gives me an almost digital
sound quality. Sometimes we use MTI's Hot Tubes which gives you a
little more sharpness and a little dirt. Electronic instruments sound
better sometimes if they're run through an old Marshall amp or through
a Leslie. I like to try unconventional setups to see how the
instruments will be affected.

  What about the vocoder effects on the Tangram album?

For those, I'm using a Moog vocoder in conjunction with a Gentle
Electric pitch-to-voltage unit. I haven't used it onstage yet. I
haven't found the right singer for it yet. Also on Tangram we used the
vocoder with a rhythm machine. We have had our own Studio for a year
and a half now, and we have all the usual stuff in it, which was used
for Tangram. We have tape recorders which are used for delays and an
EMT plate reverb. It is a breakthrough for us to have our own studio,
because we can go ahead and breathe now. We can get used to having
things in the same place and having the room always sound the same. You
need to feel comfortable in an environment when you're doing improvised
music, and you need to feel no pressures from time, which we always had
when we were renting studios. It's also very important to us to have
rehearsal space where you can record as well, and the studio could
easily fit 250 people in it. Unfortunately, electronic music is
expensive to make. It's something like making an animated film. You
work with a whole lot of tracks in electronic music, and in that
respect it resembles animated film. Maybe we're doing animation music.

  How much of a part do visual images play in your music?

There have always been visuals in our music. In the beginning, things
were pretty surreal. They were landscape kinds of things. A lot of our
music removed you from time and gave you the feeling of flying in a
dream. We always tried to express our visuals through our music. We
experimented with using slides and video projections in our live shows,
and we did a tour with Laserium. We will definitely do a video disk
sometime in the future, but for now, people need to learn to accept
lots of new information. Some people close their eyes when presented
with too much visual experience accompanied by music which they don't
know too well yet. I wonder if there will ever be a film that we write
music to that no one would ever see. They would just hear the music
that we've composed for it. The film would structure the music, but no
one would ever see what we used to create the structure. Since we don't
use vocals to determine timings, we've had to find other things that
will define those parameters for us. We still feel that we don't want
to do vocal music, and we want to find new sound colors that will
create a new fantasy for the audience.

  How do you actually go about organizing a piece? Does it generate
  itself in the studio?

There are a lot of different ways. Sometimes we're just fooling around
improvising and we come up with a theme. Sometimes you're setting up a
special color which is so extraordinary that you can only play certain
tunes on it. Sometimes sound colors dictate the tune you play, and
sometimes it's a certain structure in your mind. At the moment, our
recorded and live approaches are mixtures of all those things. We
always work around the structured parts and the improvised parts. The
structured parts last from five to ten minutes and then you have the
improvised parts, which are centered around certain rhythms or keys and
that's about all. There are always places left for solos, and there are
places where we do abstract kinds of sounds and abstract transitions
from totally composed pieces to freeform ones. One nice feature about
my editing system is that it can read out what has been played during
an improvisation. It's very difficult to try to remember what you
played, and it's nearly impossible to transcribe what three guys
improvised when you're dealing with echoes and three different
synthesizer players. This editing system gives you the opportunity to
go back and look at what was played and to edit it together.

  You could also go back and alter tone colors.

Of course, this can always be done. So we are not afraid of doing
spontaneous music even in a live performance context, even if there is
the danger of having something not work and not sound quite right. Our
following knows that we are improvising, and that makes it more
exciting for them because they know that they will always hear
something different.

  How well do you understand your audiences?

You never know how the audiences and the kids are. We've been playing
for twelve and a half years now and 50% of the audience is completely
new. Maybe our concert is the tenth they've ever been to in their
life. So it's a completely different experience for them. When we
first started doing electronic music 25-year-old students were our
audiences. That's all changed now. They've grown older and we've
become more popular. The audiences aren't just a following anymore, I
think they've grown into a movement. So I wonder how well our American
audiences will accept us. Our big problem here is the system of
airplay. It's terrible. You have to have short pieces that fit into
some kind of format to get any airplay at all. I think jazz musicians
have the same problem. You have to cut down your pieces and you have to
make them commercially acceptable and even middle-of-the-road. You have
to do that in order to get airplay where it counts in the States.

  You do get a lot of airplay on the college stations in the States.

Oh yeah, we get some airplay that way, but I still wonder how we can
sell out the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium without any major market
airplay. Still, we've just completed the film score to a movie by
United Artists called The Thief. It has some shorter pieces in it, and
the record company likes that very much. There's over an hour of our
music in the film and we did it all in two weeks time. It all happened
very quickly.

  One of the most characteristic sounds of Tangerine Dream is the
  everpresent use of sequencers...

It's one rhythmic structure which, when we use it, you can always hear
it. The sequencer is a great instrument. The type of repetition it
creates is used a lot in African music and minimal music. Bach also has
some great sequences. The sequencer makes it great to go into modal
music. It makes it much easier to get away from certain types of
harmonies, and that's important to us in making music work for the
mind. I was a drummer and always was wondering how I could make these
bloody drums be in tune. It was just impossible. I wanted percussive
sounds that were in tune and that bore some tonal relationship to what
the rest of the band was playing. I used to use tape loops, and for
years people thought that's how we did it. They didn't know that we had
switched over to sequencers.

  What about digital sequencers?

I don't like that type of sequencer. I like sequencers that you can use
like an instrument, where you access to certain parameters and you can
cause it to change over time, so you have an ongoing structure
happening. If you are good and you have the right instrument, you can
have astonishing patterns happening. We have a new sequencer which
looks analog from the outside, but is really digital, but not the kind
of digital that people sell on the market. You don't control pitch with
them, you use them as a clock, because we had trouble creating
polyrhythymical things. We had to find a way to sync two different
sequencers running two different rhythms. Our engineer came up with a
wonderful phase-lock-loop system that synchronizes them. We can sync
up to five or six sequencers at once.

  How do you control the pitches?

I have switches for quantizing the pitches to whatever I would like. I
only have two stepless pots, to control the outpots to the VCAs and the
filters. I use these for accents. But I can adjust any semitone that
the switchs on my sequencers put out, so I'm not locked into playing
within a tempered scale. On my new Prophet I can also play in these
tunings and I can do the same on a Korg polyphonic synthesizer, which
lets you tune each oscillator individually.

  What do you do when you change key? On those two instruments, you can
  set up a new scale, but it's limited to one key, unless on the
  Prophet you use a different program position with the same sound but
  a different scale tuned to the new key.

I use a bass pedal to tell the computer when to change keys. I press a
note and the computer knows what to detune and what to readjust to make
the scale work in the new key.

  You've built an interface to your Prophet and the Korg to do that?

I've done that on the Korg and the sequencers, but not on the Prophet
yet. I have another instrument which I should tell you about, which I
haven't used live or on record yet, but I plan to by the next album.
It's a Pianocoder. I bought the standard Pianocoder and we put our own
interface in it, so now I can play sequences on almost any keyboard
instrument. I plan to have sequences on pianos, harpsichords, pipe
organs, Rhodes pianos, Clavinets, and anything else that can't be
directly interfaced with an electronic sequencer.

  Is the Pianocoder a mechanical system that rolls up to the front of
  an instrument's keyboard?

Yes. Exactly. Technical people who look at the Pianocoder go nuts,
because the technology is back to the stone age, but it works. It's a
great interface that's perfect for computer music. It will interface
with any instrument that has a keyboard on it.

  You're not worried about being accused of using robots to play your
  music?

No. There is a person in Berlin who has built a robot which plays the
flute. There is a little motor that blows wind into the flute and
relays that play the keys, so it is a perfect flute sound, but every
time a flute player listens to it he will get a little sick, because he
doesn't hear the sound of the flutist breathing in [laughs]. I don't
mind having robots around the studio which can play, but actually more
important to me are devices like Master's Touch, the EVI, Lyricons,
Humanizers, and so on, because they start making electronic music sound
more alive. It's so dead when you hear a static tone from a
synthesizer. You need something to make the sounds move more.
Pitch-to-voltage converters are going to be better and better for
guitars, vocals, and wind instruments. This is always very important.
You can't be an artist by just playing notes. You have to be versed in
all the different left-hand controllers. Jan Hammer was just the start
of pitch-bending on synthesizers. Now with the touch-sensitive
keyboards that companies like Yamaha are designing people will have
even more to think about. The keyboard alone is really boring.

  What types of controllers do you prefer now?

My favorite controller isn't available right now. It is the
Trautonium. There is a guy who lives a few minutes from my house that
I go to hear, and he plays the Trautonium. Every time I hear it, I say
that this is the greatest controller in the world. He can control three
parameters with it, and he plays it like a keyboard. He presses down on
a string and the sound gets louder. You have XY pedals for making tone
color changes, and or course you have control over pitch. It's the
ultimate control. Naturally the drawback is that it is monophonic.
There is no way of getting that much control in a polyphonic
instrument, because a trumpet is a trumpet and a brass orchestra is a
brass orchestra. The keyboard is a progression to polyphony with a loss
of control over the subtlety and articulation. If you want to have a
nice solo voice, you have to go monophonic, so I don't mind. I've tried
all kinds of ribbon controllers, but they are not playable. They're all
effects machines. Brain wave control is also very interesting. There
is a guy in Santa Cruz, California, who has special pitch-to-voltage
converter by Gentle Electric that allows you to use alpha waves from
your brain to control a synthesizer. This controller allows you to play
melodies with your brain waves. It seems interesting, but you really
have to get involved in a large university in order to get hold of the
equipment necessary to make music in this way.

  What about university music in this country? Are you interested in
  what is being done?

Yes. It's unbelievable how much hardware students in the United States
have access to, but there is a barrier. They are made to learn so many
different computer programming languages just to take a music class.
This doesn't help at all. I'm hungry to hear more from universities,
but they don't seem to have the right philosophy behind their music.

Froese: There shouldn't be the necessity of having to be very popular
in order to get away with doing something different. It's amazing to me
to come over to the United States and hear what is being played on your
radio stations. It's all rock music, ads, rock music, ads, soft music,
ads, pop music, ads. After a short while, I just feel like turning it
off. It's so funny, because all the hardware one could ever want is
available in the States and yet no one seems to making use of it to do
anything different.

  Why do you think that's the case?

Froese: Musicians can't afford all of the things you find in a studio,
and the record companies are looking for things that will have a sort
of Star Wars success. So everything that they look for is
overproduced. People switch on the radio and all they hear is
overproduced music. They hear super-high-pitched vocals. They hear
Fender guitars. And the record company executives - not all of them,
but most of them - are sitting around at their bloody big desks trying
to figure out how to make money out of vocalists or out of a beat
band. That's all fine, but music should be a progression. So many
people are asking themselves what the next step is. The record
companies are asking themselves how they can turn this recession
around. What they don't realize is that only about 5% of possible music
has been covered. Even with electronics, things have only just begun!
It's the child of a new age. And people don't realize that.

Franke: That's one big reason. Another is that you need to have
experience and you need to be able to pay for having it. But of course,
none of us was born rich.

Froese: That's true, but I know a lot of musicians who have reached a
certain level of income who have lost interest in developing new
things. The first thing they want is a car, and the next thing they
want is a house in the country. And that's fine, but they need to keep
other things in mind as well.

  They tend to lose track of what it is that got them into that
  position of wealth.

Froese: Yes. They lose energy. Those people aren't getting any
younger. They're usually in their mid-30's. And they have families and
kids, and they develop interests in other things besides creating
interesting music. And that's the pity, because they can afford good
equipment and the young and struggling musicians who are full of new
ideas can't afford the gear. We believe in the teenagers of today,
because they are our audience. Our audience is not the 25-to-30 crowd
of college students that it used to be. They're all too old to change
now. But the younger people between 13 and 16 are really open-minded.
They seem to know what's needed.

  Who plays what role in the band? Is there some way that you define
  each other's parts or who's going to play what when?

Franks: It all depends on the piece, because we all play similar
instruments and we switch roles all the time. In general, Edgar is
playing the lead stuff and the guitar-like parts. Johannes is playing
chords. He's very much into chords because he used to be an organist. I
am doing much of the rhythmical stuff because I used to be a drummer.
The rules are very elementary, but they get changed around all the
time. We all compose and we play off what we composed for the other
members. And then there are times when we're all doing the same things,
playing unison lines or the same polyrhythms. It's difficult, because
the audience likes to know who is playing what, but that's something we
cannot deliver very easily. Once we had a video projection system
onstage where the audience got to look at a large screen overhead and
see closeups of us as we were playing. For a very young audience it's
hard for them to tell visually what actions result in what sounds. In
one or two years we hope to have projections like that on the stage all
the time.

  Do you forsee the video disk playing any part in changing people's
  approach to listening to your music?

Froese: It depends on which way the quality is standardized. I hope
they don't go the route of filming silly acts to show what the video
disk can do right off the bat, because that will turn a lot of people
off to it. There are so many things to visualize.

Franke: One of the drawbacks of the video disk is that you can listen
to music for hours. It can exist in the background of whatever you are
doing. But watching the screen of a TV sometimes makes my body and my
mind shut off. It is just too passive. With music you can have your own
fantasies, so watching TV along with music can be a very concentrated
experience that not too many people will put up with for that long.

  How much rerecording of parts do you do in the studio?

Franke: We have to go back and do things many times over before we get
a take that we like.

  Does the whole band go back and do a section over again, or do you
  punch in and just redo a single part?

Franke: We try to play together as much as possible. So a good part of
the music is recorded live in the studio. Then we start adding things
to improve it. One can say that about 50% of what you hear on a record
is real play. We don't start with one track and end up with 50. That's
very difficult.

Froese: That makes it very hard for us to use session musicians,
because we try to play everything. We've thought about using session
players often, because there are better guitarists around and better
keyboardists around, but in an improvised situation, we know each other
better than if any session player were to just walk in cold, so for our
own music, we stand up to session players very well.

Franke: It's also much more fun to play our own music ourselves. We are
in this for the fun as well as the ideals. Of course, everybody works
as home figuring out new repertoire, but when it comes to recording,
there must be a live group there from the start. Otherwise, there's no
real reason to have a group.

  What's your recording studio like, other than the fact that it is
  big?

Franke: Our studio is a step up to making electronic music easier to
perform in the studio. The biggest thing to worry about in an
electronic music studio is the control room. Most typical studios don't
have a big enough control room for putting all of our synthesizers
around the mixing console. So our studio does that. That makes mixing
communication much easier. We also have duplicates of all the standard
keyboards at our homes as well as in the studio. The three modular
systems stay in the studio most of the time. For the nice small
programmable synthesizers we don't have any transport problems. We also
have a couple of 8-track recorders which we use to put down rough ideas
and to make demos at home. These are then transferred onto the bigger
machines in the studio. So the nice thing is that we can all work up
ideas at home and then get together and expand on them as a group.

Froese: We feel that it is very important that each of us has something
to tell. If we stayed together every day and saw each other all the
time, we would get very bored. No one would have any new stories to
tell that way.

Franke: Sometimes we work in parallel.

Froese: There is a lot of room to do that. One person works on the
promotional side running around and seeing all the radio stations;
another is looking at new equipment; and the third is writing new
material. That is the way it has to be. It you start fighting - why do
that? I don't want to do that. As long as you stay as a unit, you have
to go for what's necessary, even though you don't necessarily like it.
That's part of the pity, though. We can't delegate our teamwork. You
have to do everything by your own effort. No one else can do it for
us.

Franke: One of the reasons that we can't delegate our jobs outside of
playing is that we aren't like other groups who use standard equipment
a lot. We are always looking for something above average. We are always
looking for better promotion, better pressings, and better equipment.
People that you hire don't have the motivation. They don't have the
fantasy to try to fulfill. We say it can be done and they say it's
impossible.

Froese: The thing is, you know exactly how things should be and how
things should look. If you just sit around and wait for the high
income, the car, the big house, the family, and the chicks waiting
around in your dressing room, then it will never come. And wanting
those things is okay as long as that's all you want. You can have those
things for as long as you are popular. People will like to work for
you, but as soon as you aren't in fashion anymore, forget it.

  Why did you get into using electronics?

Franke: I've already mentioned that I was looking for a way to get
tuned drums, but we were looking for a way to make a new impression. We
wanted to stretch the imagination. We wanted to create sounds that your
mind didn't help to fill in. We wanted to make the brain work by giving
it some new input. There are a lot of groups that use electronics that
got into it because of the fascination with technical equipment. We got
into it the other way around. We were looking for specific experiences
and electronic instruments were the only things around that could do
the things that we wanted to do. It took a lot of sweat, because to
start very early with this stuff wasn't easy. We started when the first
synthesizers from England and the States came into Germany. There was
no one who could show us how they worked and no one who could repair
them for us if they broke down. We didn't even have schematics for
them. Also, the audiences weren't ready to take hearing this kind of
music. It was too strange for them. It took us three years to really
get through to them. We started when there was a big change happening
in the music of the late '60s. People were starting to get away from
standard forms and they were starting to improvise more and more within
the rock format.

Froese: It was quite a struggle, but it was fun as well. You see, in
England and America, music is a part of everybody's lifestyle. In
Germany it is not. In Germany, you might get one rock show on a given
radio station during a week. It's changed a bit since then, but not
that much. The media help to spread information, but the media in
Germany were not doing very much when it cane to rock music.

Franke: We got into using electronics because we wanted to explore
spontaneous music. We started with tapes because we really wanted to
use an orchestra, but that is just too big a thing to manage in a
spontaneous situation.

Froese: I remember when Hendrix first played in Germany after putting
out "Hey Joe." We were the supporting act, and it's funny but we had
been searching for something and suddenly there it was. There it was
and it was better than anything we had ever imagined it could be. After
we heard that, we knew that we could never produce it, because we
didn't have the feeling it takes to get it.

  Has Hendrix had an influence on the band, then?

Franke: As a feeling, yes. But there have many influences on us that
one could never hear in our music. We listened to a lot of music, but
we've never stuck with reproducing any certain type. What we like to
pick up on is the emotion within a given form of expression.

Froese: One form of music that has been a great influence on me is the
blues, but I've never tried to copy it, because it's not in me.
Whatever I did in that vein would be a bad copy.

Franke: There are certain types of music which we feel make the
performer into more of a circus act than a musician. These forms of
music involve extremes, which can be a thrill to watch, but we were
never into that. We were more into the emotional expression.

Froese: There are some classical pieces that are written just to show
off how fast a performer is. That's *ridiculous*. Musicians are used
like race horses in that type of music. They have to perform. They
think, "Okay, I'm very famous because I can do that, that, and that."
It's silly.

Franke: I think a lot of people won't accept music for it's emotional
content alone. They have to be shown that it's somehow difficult to
do. They want to see the thrill, and not the real expression.

  Johannes, who have you been influenced by as a keyboard player?

Schmoelling: All the people you might expect - Emerson, Wakeman, George
Duke, Corea, Jarret. But I've never tried to copy any of them. I've
always gone for sounding like an individual. I've always hunted for
some means of sounding like myself.

  In much of the band's newer material, you can hear more dynamics than
  used to be the case. Is that a conscious thing?

Schmoelling: Yes, it is a goal that we all have as a band. It is
something which we are all striving for.

Franke: The only guy who has done it well in electronic music so far is
Tomita. Sometimes he is so very strange, though. His tone colors are
so very Japanese. Still, one has to give him credit for his dynamics.
It is one parameter that gets overlooked too often. Dynamics are very
hard to control. One can always use a computer mixing console to adjust
them, but you have to keep in mind that they are a big thing. The
electronic keyboard instruments haven't had that much control over
dynamics, at least not when compared to the piano, but they're coming
along now. It's the new age of electronics. You have more control, so
the expression will be much greater in the future.

  You had a live drummer in the band as well as a flute player once.

Franke: Yes, we did an experiment about three years ago that didn't
work out. These guys were too specialized on their instruments. There
were inhibitions that kept them from going for new sounds. We had some
personal problems with them and we had some tour problems with them. In
their souls they wanted to be doing something else. So we went back to
our original format of three keyboardists. Having a drummer in the band
is sometimes nice if he can do other things too. It's nice to have
multi-instrumentalists in the band. With drums we only want to do
certain things. We never want to use conventional rhythms and have
conventional solos. We found out that it was much simpler to create the
nice sort of driving rhythms that we would use a drummer for
electronically, because you don't need very complicated stuff happening
with the drums. For that, you have the other instruments.

Froese: It's so hard to understand people sometimes. We've lost the
possibility of communicating with someone who had totally different
ways of thinking about sounds. All these conventional musicians are
still thinking about how to perform or how to show off. They won't put
a sound in the dark and leave it like it sounds. It's so hard for them
to understand that one could sit there in the twilight or in the dark
and just hear what has been created. You don't have to be entertaining
all the time.

Franke: We just didn't meet the right people. That was the case, and
the idea still exists. There is still a dimension of electronic music
which needs to be explored more, and that is the joining of electronic
and acoustic instruments. If it is done right, one couldn't tell if
things were done electronically or acoustically. And it wouldn't matter
that you couldn't tell. You have just created a new sound character.

  You've abandoned the use of Mellotrons.

Froese: I was one of the biggest Mellotron fans around ten years ago.
Unfortunately, after you listen to polyphonic synthesizers, you quickly
give up on the Mellotron. I still have two Mark V's laying around. And
I have one of the little ones too. I've also got about 50 or 60 sets of
tapes. It's a pity, because I think that the instrument wasn't
developed to it's full potential. It was only about 50% of where it
should have been. It could have been done much better. It could have
had better electronics in it to stabilize it, and it could have had
better tapes and electronic envelopes. And then there's that thing
that Wakeman came up with, the Birotron. It used 8-track tapes. I
bought one of the first of these and brought it over to Paris to tour
with it. I thought it would be fabulous. The first thing was that the
8-track cassettes didn't make it.

Franke: It used the same kind of concept as the Orchestron in that it
had tape loops. If you don't have the attack characteristics of a
sound, then you've lost the most interesting part of the sound. Things
start to all sound alike. It just starts sounding like an organ again.
That's why we started working on our electronic Mellotron, just to
capture the attacks. We wanted to store these in digital memory, which
lets you play with them a bit. You can then start imposing these
attacks on other types of sounds, and you can also alter the attacks
however you like. Many people are convinced that you can build up any
sound with additive synthesis, which is so wrong. They forget the most
important thing about acoustic sounds, which is the envelope. Now to
have the envelope from acoustic instruments coupled with the control of
a synthesizer would be very powerful.

Froese: The idea is not to use this machine to duplicate a flute or a
violin - you could go out and buy the real thing for much less. What
you do is use those characteristics and play in other registers which
will give you a violin or a flute that hasn't been heard before.

Franke: The perfect trombone and the perfect trumpet blended together
to create something new. The outcome would be very strange, like
tasting an apple that has been combined with an orange.

  But you have to be careful not to start doing things like that just
  for the sake of the effect.

Franke: Yes, you have to have a reason for using something like that.
An Indian musician plays a fast solo not for the sake of playing a fast
solo, but because it has a function.

Froese: The effect of using an effect like that just for the heck of it
would be just like Ravi Shankar using a mouth organ [harmonica] player
just for the heck of it. It wouldn't make sense.

  Do you make any compromises in your music?

Froese: We do things from purely a textural standpoint, and if we were
to just deal in sound colors, people would nave a hard time
understanding what it is we are doing, so our way of compromising in
our music is to use melodies and harmonies with a few conventional
structures. And underneath or on top of it we're still dealing mainly
with colors. People may only get that with their subconscious. People
won't notice a particular color and say that was a good sound. People
are always reluctant to notice things that they aren't used to hearing,
so we try to transport or carry them in with something that is
conventional, which people can relate to immediately.

  Does your music serve any purpose for you other than exploring tone
  colors?

Froese: Many different hardwares can be addressed by software, and both
together can be used to change consciousness, and that's what we want
to go for. By using new sounds and new technology, we are changing a
program that exists outside of our human process. Hopefully, that will
lead to a change, in a positive sense, of our internal programming, the
subconscious matrix. That's a very high aim, and I don't know how far
we can progress in trying to reach it, but this is what we would like
our music to do. We don't want to occupy everyone's life or try to tell
them what to do. We just want to help people start thinking for
themselves again. We want to make them more independent in deciding
what they're going to do next. It should make people ready for some new
way of thinking.

Franke: A lot of music is used as therapy for people when they are
frustrated and troubled. They go home and switch it on and then they
feel good. It is therapy. It's something that helps them to forget. But
we still think that ideally, music should awaken people. It should make
them think, not make them passive.

Froese: Activating people is what is important. We don't want to put
them to sleep.

- end -