Electrobit: Edgar Froese

Edgar Froese, founder of Tangerine Dream, had died.

The band announced his death via Facebook:

Dear Friends,

This is a message to you we are very sorry for…

On January 20th, Tuesday afternoon, Edgar Froese suddenly and unexpectedly passed away from the effects of a pulmonary embolism in Vienna.

The sadness in our hearts is immensely.

Edgar once said: “There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address."

Edgar, this is a little comfort to us.

Yours,
TANGERINE DREAM TEAM

Born in East Prussia, and exiled as a child to West Berlin when the address was still a political statement as much as a geographic fact, Froese was one of the pioneers of the electronic-driven Berlin School. With Moog, Synth and the support of the-then-interesting Virgin Records, Froese and the Dream effectively created an ambient music blueprint that - through years of watering down, mistranslation, and 'improvement' - would eventually lead to the churning out of countless CDs with the word 'chill' somewhere in the title.

But you can't blame the man for what followed in his wake. And you've got to be impressed with the way Tangerine Dream quickly established themselves as the go-to team for film soundtracks where the budget didn't run to a full orchestra. Froese's work underscored Tom Cruise's "what the fuck"ery in Risky Business, and, erm, Tom Cruise's "don't touch the fucking unicorns" in Legend. They also did some films which Tom Cruise wasn't in. A lot of films which Tom Cruise wasn't in.

It's not surprising that the band made the leap to scoring computer games, although they waited for the artform to catch up with them; Grand Theft Auto V was that point.

Froese also produced a body of solo work, although confusingly some of this was released under the name of his collective.

Still working in 2014, Froese was 70. He died Janaury 20th.

Experimentalobit: Conrad Schnitzler

Conrad Schnitzler, a leading light of krautrock and electronic music has died.

Schnitzler, who was an early member of Tangerine Dream, passing on to Kluster and Eruption before moving on to a long and varied catalogue of solo work also worked under the name Conard Von Berlin.

His work spans the best part of 45 years and nearly 100 albums; he was working up until the last week of his life.

Recently, he'd been working on the Global Living project, which saw him send packets of his hair to nine locations around the planet, in order to have his DNA stake out a place in sites that he loved.

Conrad Schnitzler died from stomach cancer on Thursday. He was 74.

Bookmarks: Some other things to read on the internet

Arcade Fire invite Paste to tea:

Where there are sidewalks they meet at ugly angles, and factories squat on almost every corner. Its biggest institutions are a peat bog, a large creamery and a beet-sugar refinery. “The studio is amazing for recording in,” Win tells me, “but when you actually want to do anything, being stuck in Farnham can drive a man crazy.”

As he prepares to fight for Marlyebone Hight Street, Dave Rowntree talks to Guardian:

The drummer doesn't want to talk about whether he agrees with Albarn on Iraq because he's standing in a local election. He sounds, for the first time, a bit like a politician. Then he changes his mind. "I want to give you an answer. I'm not a pacifist. I do think some things are worth fighting for."

Rowntree's position on Iraq is equally personal. His girlfriend, Michelle de Vries, is the daughter of Daphne Parish, the nurse who was arrested by Saddam Hussein with the Observer journalist, Farzad Bazoft, on the cusp of the first Gulf war. Bazoft was executed; Parish was freed. "My girlfriend flew round the Middle East and got her mother released. She'd met all the people involved - Saddam and the psychopaths Uday and Qusay [Saddam's sons]. In the war, I was getting a very different view of what was going on in Iraq from a lot of people."

Jack Wilson tells The Stranger about the man who filled his iPod:

And that one lyric, the one about having once roared, keeps coming back to me. It seems to describe him. He was charismatic, entertaining, and charming. He could have been an awesome salesman—the product wouldn't have mattered—and he was great with computers. Did he torture himself with thoughts about what he could have been? Did he long for the years before he had fucked up his life, when he was free and the world was open to him?

Then I realized I was thinking more about Rowan than I was about Rebecca, the woman he'd slain. Listening to his music put me inside Rowan's head; it made me consider things through his eyes. I wanted to throw up.

The New York Post discovers Jarvis Cocker's life in France involves gestures, shouting:

He's lived in the City of Light for four years, but he's not fluent in French, although he says he can make himself understood. His job, songwriting, doesn't really call for being fluent. That's one excuse. His other is that his brain's hard drive is full.

"You can't chose what you want to delete from your brain," he says. "I'm supposed to be a writer. I don't want to lose my English."

Simon Reynolds sets off in the Observer Music Monthly to reclaim Tangerine Dream's place in electropop history:

At its most abstract - solo albums by Klaus Schulze and by Tangerine Dream's leader Edgar Froese - these were clouds of sounds to lose yourself in, a Rorschach mindscreen for projecting fantasies onto. Yet unlike the hipster-credible Krautrock of Can, Faust and Neu!, or more esoteric (ie unsuccessful) Sixties electronic outfits like Silver Apples, the cosmic synth voyagers have never been named by contemporary bands as a cool reference point.

Orange glow

Tangerine Dream are about to release a new album, Madcap's Flaming Duty, in memory of Syd Barrett; as part of the launch (and to mark their 40th anniversary) they've just announced a London gig to play the whole thing, from cue-up to run-out, at the Astoria Friday 20th April.