Tangerine Dream

CD version. Zeit is the third album by Tangerine Dream, first issued as a double LP on Ohr in August 1972 with the subtitle Largo In Four Movements. Each of its four long pieces filled one side of the original vinyl. There are no drums, almost no melody and no pulse, only slow fields of drone, organ and synthesizer that shift over twenty minutes at a time. It is regularly named as one of the first fully realised ambient records, and this edition pairs it with a full live concert from the same year.

The album was recorded in 1972 at Dierks Studio in Stommeln, near Cologne, with Dieter Dierks engineering and the band producing. It was the first record by the trio of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. Franke and Baumann played EMS VCS3 synthesizers, Franke added keyboards and cymbals, Baumann organ, and Froese worked a tone generator and glissando guitar. Steve Schroyder played organ, and four cellists joined the sessions. Froese later recalled that the cellists were students, asked only to hold an A and bend it by quarter tones.

Birth Of Liquid Plejades opens with those cellos in a dense, dissonant cluster before the synthesizers and organ take over and the piece thins into a long organ coda. Nebulous Dawn and Origin Of Supernatural Probabilities are built from sustained electronic tones and metallic washes that barely move. The title piece closes the album with choral-like layers of sound. The second disc, The Klangwald Performance, runs almost eighty minutes in two parts and is entirely electronic, a looser and more abrasive counterpart to the studio record.

The label credits the concert to the large broadcasting hall of the Cologne radio house on 25 November 1972. It had previously circulated in a fan release, Tangerine Tree Volume 52, and some collectors have questioned its date and location. Froese himself, in a 1986 interview, called Zeit "probably our most avant garde album, but it was a direction we chose not to follow." Reviewing this reissue for DPRP in 2011, John O'Boyle wrote that "nearly forty years down the road it still sounds fresh and relevant."

This edition comes as two CDs on Esoteric Reactive (EREACD 21017, 2011), with the original album in a 24-bit remaster and the Klangwald concert as a bonus disc. It is packaged in a slim double jewel case with a 16-page booklet including an essay by Andy King.