Tuesday 17 December 2013

Zeit (Tangerine Dream, 1972)

This long track - some 18 minutes - is one of the most arcane and fascinating ones in Tangerine Dream's discography. It's the last of the four movements forming the double album "Zeit", maybe the most intriguing one. Its spacey atmosphere, based on innovative keyboards, electronics and a slow, rarefied avant la lettre ambient music is both dreaming and scary, cold and moving. We're dragged in a dark, interstellar place, hold up by a cosmic wind and lured by a mysterious, alien energy, just to find that the outer space looks like our inner ego.
 
The alarming black sun of "Zeit".
 
Sure, "Zeit" belongs more likely to electronic experimental music or to the so called "kosmische musik",  than to progressive rock as we usually imagine it, but the high rate of creativity and the surprising landscapes in this track exceed all boudaries and perfectly incarnate the spirit of an era. Who could deny that the sense of wonder and the desire for unexplored soundscapes this song inspires is the same we find in all the biggest achievements of prog rock? That's why I add this track here, that's why I still listen to it today.

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