EXIT

For someone that had been following the Tangs previous offerings for a long time, this showed a major change of direction. I suspect most people listening to the music were unaware of the dramatic changes in technology, equipment and music technology, but up until this point, most synthesisers were analogue, and prone to those odd, illogical qualities that made them what they were. Tangerine Dream, being at the forefront of synthesis, were one of the first to encounter digital synthesisers, even then in their infancy.

Exit is crammed with digital synthesisers, when everyone else was using analogue gear. This proved to be a double edged sword, that they had leading edge keyboards creating sound that nobody else could attempt to achieve, but equally, some of the sounds were pretty God awful!

The main workhorse of 'Exit' was the PPG Wave synthesiser, a device still in prototype stage, which Edgar and the others exploited to the best of their abilities. That said, they occasionally fell short of technology they were usually very complacent with.

One has to see this album as incredibly leading-edge for it's time, and I think, even without the technological limitations, the atmosphere of the whole collection is little short of astounding, and I have to say, is one of my favourite TD albums, based on melody, feel and sheer atmosphere; I have over 120 of their albums, and frankly, this is pretty well top of the tree for me. I would mark this as THE definitive Tangs album.

Incidentally, this is one album I would love to hear remixed in 5.1, or better 7.1, to really transmit the depth and feel of the piece by what are, undisputed masters of the electronic music genre.