Zeit

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-11-12 rating:
A Masterpiece
I'd passed up the opportunity to buy a mint original vinyl copy of this some years ago since it was silly money but I regret it now. After all the reviews saying that Zeit was "difficult" at the very least I was therefore surprised to find an eminently listenable 75 minute trip which was so intoxicating I played it all over again immediately. You're either wired up to go with this or you're not, my only advice would be if you buy it and it leaves you nonplussed then you need to get out more. Out there that is!

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review by: date: 2008-06-30 rating:
Challenging early album
"Zeit", which means `time', was a vast, sprawling double album of four side-long pieces, and so is pretty good value on CD. This was their third album, and the first to feature the `classic' line-up of Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann, Baumann having just joined. All three play synthesisers and other keyboards, with Froese adding some guitar. They're joined on this album by Florian Fricke, of Popul Vuh, who also plays synthesiser, and Steve Schroyder, of Ash Ra Tempel, on organ. Shroyder had only just been fired from Tangerine Dream by Froese, for alleged unspecified `freaking-out', but here he rejoined his old band as a guest. The other additions were not synthesiser players at all, but cellists, the Cologne Cello Quartet, no less.

It's the cellists who open the album, on `Birth of Liquid Plejades'. (No, I don't know what a plejade is either.) Their cellos drone mournfully, bringing to mind Tony Conrad's violin work with Faust on `Outside the Dream Syndicate'. But where Conrad's violin is scratchy and unobtrusive, the cellos here soar, sweep and dive like ever stretching elastic, twisting and turning in a most unnerving fashion, a soundscape of a cold wintry afternoon. It's like having a UFO circle your living room. This is tense, nervy music, not at all the bland new age fare you might expect. When the organ and synthesisers are added the music softens and drifts, and the cellos fade away. Nothing much happens in the way of development; the music simply sits there, like something from a gothic Vincent Price movie. The organ drones, the synths burble and bubble, and while the sound later builds into a louder throbbing, there's no real climax. Still, it's strange stuff.

"Nebulous Dawn", the second piece, is a more familiar Tangerine Dream soundscape; softer, more ethereal altogether; the drones are shorter, and interspersed with more synth burblings, hums and rumbles, like some distant electronic earthquake. It's as though that UFO has landed and is glowing and throbbing there on the carpet. Strange electronics wash from speaker to speaker, like aliens mumbling to one another, a little like the Ligeti piece near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A two note alarm sounds over and over, drifting in and out of the mix, as the music becomes more urgent and unsettling, like a bubbling swamp on an alien planet. It's probably the most satisfying piece on the CD.

"Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" is next, and has a slight surprise, for here the soft, slow throb is provided by Edgar Froese's gentle electric guitar. It's not long before the synths return, wobbling and burbling like a cosmic Rolf Harris. This is far more ambient than the first two pieces, the sort of timeless sounds that relate only to themselves, and which were probably an influence on the likes of Brian Eno some years later. All throbs and drones. The track becomes more spacy towards the end, as though that UFO has taken off again and is heading out to the far reaches of the galaxy. This is music that's hard to listen to in the normal sense: it's just there, and tends to permeate the atmosphere like a bizarre incense stick.

Finally there's the title track, "Zeit", which is essentially more of the same. The music moves very slowly, and though there are some strange synthesised bird tweetings the basic backdrop of sound changes very little. There's a long drawn out flourish at the end, but basically this is Space music with a vengeance. 80 minutes of sprawling emptiness. It's not without appeal, though. Tangerine Dream have still created something, a milestone, in some ways, of electronic music, the first truly ambient album. It's a bit like listening to a carrot grow: it takes a long long time and you can't hear much, but at the end you have a carrot. "Zeit" is that carrot.

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review by: date: 2008-01-19 rating:
If you really MUST...
To set things in perspective, I'm a Tangerine Dream fan. My favourites. Ever.

However...well, where to start? This was recorded near the beginning of their career, not long after their phase of using "instruments" like "prepared piano" (yes). As other reviewers have said (rather too kindly, I thought), it's boring and monotonous. The band obviously thought "Hey [man], if we're going to call it "Time", we ought to string it out to a double album." "Jah...At least".

Quite possibly their career would have taken off even earlier than the John Peel / Richard Branson era if they'd been told by the record company "This could be condensed to a single or e.p. Go away and think it over". As it is, I think I'm right in saying that sales of "Zeit" only really got going after "Phaedra", when the fans started to buy up the band's back catalogue.

If you really MUST listen to it, lock all sharp instruments away beforehand.

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review by: date: 2007-12-10 rating:
Time to Waste?
As a Tangerine fan I couldn't wait to get this double album home when I first bought it, but what a disappointment it turned out to be! This has to be one of the dullest music compositions ever committed to vinyl. It's long and dreary, it's tuneless and rythmless, and could surely only be appreciated by someone who's stoned out of their head.


review by: date: 2007-05-27 rating:
Please give this work TIME to work on you...

This lengthy collection of dreamy, slow, trippy, spacey drones is, to me, a landmark in this kind of music; the style copied endlessly by people over the years, but never really bettered. Don't expect Rubycon style sequencers here, or the often bland "identikit" compositions of the nineties. This album was truly groundbreaking at the time - nothing quite like it had ever been done before, at least with electronic and acoustic instruments.

Sorry for the pun in this review's title, but I remember being given a copy of the original "OHR" LP issue thirty years ago and I sat bored out of my brain on my first listening - Phaedra, Rubycon and Ricochet were far more my "thing" back then...

Now, so many years and life experiences later, I can REALLY APPRECIATE what this album's all about. This "Largo In Four Movements" MUST be savoured in a quiet, peaceful environment with absolutely NO distractions to disturb the vibe...

Like a previous reviewer, I returned to this body of work on headphones in a very darkened room one evening and allowed the subtle spacey soundscapes to wash into me and gently carry me away. Listened to this way the music is very calming and you come out the other end feeling refreshed and rather spaced out (even with no other "additives," if you see what I mean).

So many people in the EM scene have tried to do this (some quite successfully), but this "original" does it so much better, as it has a good mix of acoustic and elecronic instruments - a technique that TD used for many years afterwards.

In some ways I wish the band had done more works like this, or perhaps a cross between this and "Atem," but when recording Phaedra, they discovered the joys of sequencing -(apparently by accident as a "burble" was slowed down to a sequence of notes to tune each note better to the Mellotron - something that can be clearly heard in the title track's first few minutes) - and the truly freeform way of doing things as here was all but abandoned as time went on (although tiny shades of this came through from time to time...).

It's been said by some in TD fandom that you MUST at least hear their first recording - Electronic Meditation - and that you must also OWN a copy of Zeit. I'm inclined to agree.......

For Tangerine Dream fans of all ages, I sincerely recommend you buy a copy of this and treasure it. Hopefully you'll grow to love it as much as I do now - even if my favourites are the sequencer led albums of a very few years later.........

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