Mann brought Tangerine Dream back for his folkloric WWII thriller from 1983, "The Keep" (available on Itunes and Amazon), in which a Nazi occupation in Romania awakens a vengeful golemlike figure named Molasar that only a Jewish scientist can communicate with, and its music glues the confusing film together with a transfixing coherence. "Force Majeure," which I'm sure Mann chose for its sometimes translation into "unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract," thus hangs over the proceedings in the same way Frank's post-prison PTSD does, creating a bubbling tension whose momentarily release (on the cathartic 'Beach Theme') is betrayed by the preceding, almost pre-determined road towards self-destruction. For Michael Mann's 1981 film "Thief" (streaming on Netflix), about a safe-cracking ex-con named Frank (James Caan) who thinks he'll be able to retire after one last job for a mob boss, it reworked significant parts of its album "Force Majeure" into a propulsive score. That same year, John Williams bombarded audiences in "Star Wars," but here Froese's band used Moogs, mellotrons, and sequencers to create small-scale apprehension that exhibits both primal urgency and contemplative remove, adding another element to Friedkin's spare, minor-detail-oriented storytelling. Tangerine Dream's first soundtrack was for William Friedkin's 1977 film "Sorcerer" (available on iTunes, Amazon), in which Roy Scheider leads an explosive trek through the jungle on behalf of a multinational oil company's dictatorial grip on a small Latin American country. Oddly enough, it was Tangerine Dream's work scoring commercial films which gave these aural investigations their most expressive dimensions. Froese and his Berlin School peers seemed to be staging an aural investigation into Germany, and the world's, uncertain futures with efforts. Its base of operations was West Berlin, where you had the Red Army Faction setting off bombs to protest authoritarian measures emboldened by failed de-Nazification, while famed Nazi rocket scientist Werner Von Braun spent his final years in America, helping us win the space race and making educational videos for Disney. Burroughs-like cut-up collages of sound into an increasingly synthesized world of creeping electronics. Tangerine Dream lent its quietly disruptive sounds primarily to genre flicks, elevating stories of thieves, spies, aliens, and psychics from B-movie tropes to philosophical art and amplifying each story's question of power structures.įroese founded Tangerine Dream in 1967, but as the consciousness-expanding psychedelia of the '60s gave way to the acid-damaged, technologically averse paranoia of the '70s, so did its music shift from the William S. Tangerine Dream picked up where Pink Floyd left off in Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" ( streaming on YouTube), balancing proggier freak-outs with ambiguous dread, creating an atmosphere of ambient dislocation that made reading a scene more cerebral by default. Along with John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, Vangelis, and Claudio Simonetti, his work with Tangerine Dream presented an alternative to the top-down, full-orchestra bombast of old cinema. Edgar Froese, founder of Tangerine Dream, died last week, and part of his legacy was an impact on film scoring that has yet to be fully unpacked.
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