Interview with Chris Franke from 2001

[Desert_Voyager]

There have been lots of very special albums since 1987: Optical Race, Lily on the Beach, Melrose, Seven Letters from Tibet, Jeanne D'Arc, and Madcap's Flaming Duty, Summer In Nagasaki....

[cantosis]

There have been lots of very special albums since 1987: Optical Race, Lily on the Beach, Melrose, Seven Letters from Tibet, Jeanne D'Arc, and Madcap's Flaming Duty, Summer In Nagasaki....

yeh I hink the newer stuff especially is some of TDs best ever. With Edgar getting near to retirement age its great he is active and making superb music....no doubt he will continue doing music and art untill his dying day....and thank god for that!.

[Desert_Voyager]

There have been lots of very special albums since 1987: Optical Race, Lily on the Beach, Melrose, Seven Letters from Tibet, Jeanne D'Arc, and Madcap's Flaming Duty, Summer In Nagasaki....

yeh I hink the newer stuff especially is some of TDs best ever. With Edgar getting near to retirement age its great he is active and making superb music....no doubt he will continue doing music and art untill his dying day....and thank god for that!.

Yes, I also really do feel that the newer TD is some of TD's most wonderful music. Thank goodness for TD.

[timer]

There have been lots of very special albums since 1987: Optical Race, Lily on the Beach, Melrose, Seven Letters from Tibet, Jeanne D'Arc, and Madcap's Flaming Duty, Summer In Nagasaki....

yeh I hink the newer stuff especially is some of TDs best ever. With Edgar getting near to retirement age its great he is active and making superb music....no doubt he will continue doing music and art untill his dying day....and thank god for that!.

Edgar certainly has no plans to retire !

[hansx]

There have been lots of very special albums since 1987: Optical Race, Lily on the Beach, Melrose, Seven Letters from Tibet, Jeanne D'Arc, and Madcap's Flaming Duty, Summer In Nagasaki....

yeh I hink the newer stuff especially is some of TDs best ever. With Edgar getting near to retirement age its great he is active and making superb music....no doubt he will continue doing music and art untill his dying day....and thank god for that!.

Edgar certainly has no plans to retire !

It doesn't look like that. They never had a production like this year as far as I remember.

[Scorpion]

Thanks for the welcome Cantosis. I'll try to do my bit to keep the party swinging.

I'm also glad the newer TD stuff works for you. I'm afraid most of it doesn't for me. When I first started listening to TD in the mid seventies I loved the way the combination of sounds wrapped themselves around me. The sounds just grew - weaving, growing, dividing and multiplying like a living thing. I never knew what was coming next, I was in unchartered surroundings. It was like nothing else.

I listen to the band now and I'm afraid I just hear 'tunes' are not particularly remarkable. Very sad for me but obviously its making a good connection with you. Thats life. Musicians change and so do listeners.

I do accept the band is travelling through different musical territories but IMHO is no longer 'discovering' them and haven't done so for many years. It all feels too comfortable and too easily churned out. I don't want Phaedra back, or banks of analogue synths listed on album covers or anything like that - I've moved on as well - I just want them to take me to new places. I want them to be explorers again. Froese is still my hero and I look to him to hopefully sweep me away like he and the band used to.

I'm not against melody you understand, its just that I feel the ingredient of the unknown is no longer in-and-amongst.

You sure you want me to stay?

[cantosis]

Thanks for the welcome Cantosis. I'll try to do my bit to keep the party swinging.

I'm also glad the newer TD stuff works for you. I'm afraid most of it doesn't for me. When I first started listening to TD in the mid seventies I loved the way the combination of sounds wrapped themselves around me. The sounds just grew - weaving, growing, dividing and multiplying like a living thing. I never knew what was coming next, I was in unchartered surroundings. It was like nothing else.

I listen to the band now and I'm afraid I just hear 'tunes' are not particularly remarkable. Very sad for me but obviously its making a good connection with you. Thats life. Musicians change and so do listeners.

I do accept the band is travelling through different musical territories but IMHO is no longer 'discovering' them and haven't done so for many years. It all feels too comfortable and too easily churned out. I don't want Phaedra back, or banks of analogue synths listed on album covers or anything like that - I've moved on as well - I just want them to take me to new places. I want them to be explorers again. Froese is still my hero and I look to him to hopefully sweep me away like he and the band used to.

I'm not against melody you understand, its just that I feel the ingredient of the unknown is no longer in-and-amongst.

You sure you want me to stay?

Of course your a TD fan even if it is more the older stuff... there was a point around 2001 where I went of TD myself, I have said a few times I even sold my collection that I had been building up ever about 6 years.

But at the start of the year I came back to TD and I think it will stick this time, I really am enjoying the music again and after going through some tough times the music is really giving me a new lease of life.


were you a fan of the 80s period?

[Michael66]

But isn't listening to music a bit like a collaboration between the musician and the listener? The musician puts his soul into the music, but the listener needs to be on the same wavelength for "decoding" the sounds. He needs to invest his own soul energy into listening for giving colour to the music and make it a worthwhile experience.

Maybe most of us here tend to glorify Rubycon, Ricochet, Force Majeure because we have spent so much time listening to those records. We have invested so much of ourselves into the listening experience. It's us who have "switched the light on" behind the soundwaves. And maybe it is us and our unwillingness to invest in a different experience that some of TD's newer output remains just soundwaves.
Which I guess is ok to. I don't feel an obligation to make myself like all of TD's output. I can't stand the Dante Trilogy with a passion lol! It's a miracle to me how Edgar could conceive Jeanne D'Arc (which I really really like) and Purgatorio/Paradiso at the same time.

But Ed The Man will move mountains again when he feels like it. At the moment, each new release is something different. I don't know how he does it, but he does it.

[Scorpion]

were you a fan of the 80s period?

Yes to a point. I really disliked Le Parc - it was the first release where I disliked more than 50% of a TD album. From the point Optical Race was released I never liked more than about 20% a TD album. I still listen to the newer releases but I find them too pretty and shiny - and I rarely buy a TD album now that isn't second-hand. God knows what I would do if I listened to MFD - it might just finish my relationship with TD totally. I've not heard the Nagasaki stuff though.

However, despite all that, there's a lot of positive energy in this forum and its you chaps, and the odd spark from the TD musicians, that still keeps my toes in the TD waters, at least for the time being.

[Desert_Voyager]

were you a fan of the 80s period?

Yes to a point. I really disliked Le Parc - it was the first release where I disliked more than 50% of a TD album. From the point Optical Race was released I never liked more than about 20% a TD album. I still listen to the newer releases but I find them too pretty and shiny - and I rarely buy a TD album now that isn't second-hand. God knows what I would do if I listened to MFD - it might just finish my relationship with TD totally. I've not heard the Nagasaki stuff though.

However, despite all that, there's a lot of positive energy in this forum and its you chaps, and the odd spark from the TD musicians, that still keeps my toes in the TD waters, at least for the time being.

If you're interested, you can hear the full tracks, In the Cherry Blossom Hills, from Summer In Nagasaki, and also A Dream of Death, from Madcap's Flaming Duty, on the jukebox player here..... http://www.tangerinedream-music.com/index.php

[timer]

were you a fan of the 80s period?

Yes to a point. I really disliked Le Parc - it was the first release where I disliked more than 50% of a TD album. From the point Optical Race was released I never liked more than about 20% a TD album. I still listen to the newer releases but I find them too pretty and shiny - and I rarely buy a TD album now that isn't second-hand. God knows what I would do if I listened to MFD - it might just finish my relationship with TD totally. I've not heard the Nagasaki stuff though.

However, despite all that, there's a lot of positive energy in this forum and its you chaps, and the odd spark from the TD musicians, that still keeps my toes in the TD waters, at least for the time being.

Welcome to the Forum Scorpion.

[Mac cuber transfer]

Thanks for the welcome Cantosis. I'll try to do my bit to keep the party swinging.

I'm also glad the newer TD stuff works for you. I'm afraid most of it doesn't for me. When I first started listening to TD in the mid seventies I loved the way the combination of sounds wrapped themselves around me. The sounds just grew - weaving, growing, dividing and multiplying like a living thing. I never knew what was coming next, I was in unchartered surroundings. It was like nothing else.

I listen to the band now and I'm afraid I just hear 'tunes' are not particularly remarkable. Very sad for me but obviously its making a good connection with you. Thats life. Musicians change and so do listeners.

I do accept the band is travelling through different musical territories but IMHO is no longer 'discovering' them and haven't done so for many years. It all feels too comfortable and too easily churned out. I don't want Phaedra back, or banks of analogue synths listed on album covers or anything like that - I've moved on as well - I just want them to take me to new places. I want them to be explorers again. Froese is still my hero and I look to him to hopefully sweep me away like he and the band used to.

I'm not against melody you understand, its just that I feel the ingredient of the unknown is no longer in-and-amongst.

You sure you want me to stay?

Hi Scorpion

I've been trying to work out why the music of TD no longer excites me as it once did and I feel you've articulated precisely how I feel too.

There was a time when I considered the impending release of a new TD album an important event and I would go to the ends of the earth to get a copy on it's release date and it would challenge me, grip me, and take me to new horizons with the majesty of it's composition and sound invention.

Today I feel like someone outside looking in (I've been looking at this forum for two years before posting), I don't want to be negative because many people love the music TD are now producing, and fair play to them, they are still producing, but for me there is no hunger or danger in the music anymore and maybe that is because it is definitely Edgar's band now -whereas maybe before the tensions of personalities added to the music - I don't know.

One thing I do know though is that for 20 years this music was for me the greatest of our time, maybe such music needs to be formed by those with hunger and a point to prove, or was it too far ahead of it's time for others to catch up. Did we witness a true golden age, one that the history of music will set in true perspective one day.

So here I am standing outside looking in (not a place of my choosing or is it my inability to keep pace) and waiting for the mantle to be taken up again - either by TD themselves or others inspired by their legacy.

I'll get my coat

[Nero]

I definitely think that it has to do with your inability to keep pace. If you could be more objective rather than subjective and more open-minded you would discover that TD still is and always has been a "locomotive" - running and running - sometimes slowly but especially in the last years quite rapidly. You definitely missed the opportunity to jump onto that train and therefore unfortunately missed great music & compositions. Maybe your life could have been richer with their music...

[Mac cuber transfer]

Hi Nero

Maybe so, I'm not discounting that. I try to keep an open mind (in all things) and it's not that I haven't tried to keep up - it's really only since inferno that I've stopped following them, even so I still bought Jean d'arc and Madcap. But the point is having gone through my collection the other week I feel the great stuff ended after underwater sunlight.

It's not that I havn't listened to them since – I've been listening to them for the best part of my life! and I have enjoyed some of their later music notably Mars polaris, parts of Goblin's club 220volt etc but I don't find it essential or great when compared to ricochet, rubycon, white Eagle, Tangram etc.

[Nero]

You know what the problem is?? The music from the PAST is always connected with FEELINGS and MEMORIES from the past....That's why you feel so comfortable with it. At least ONE - but very important - explanation. You were young, you were maybe a revolutionary ... Now, those times are gone.
We all need a fresh new spirit - like we were young - to get into the music of TODAY....You see what I mean?
By the way - the music we hear isn't the same music coming from the disc,
all music begins in our individual mind.