ALPHA CENTAURI

The second official Tangerine Dream album moves towards more ambient realms, combining with impulsive ideas and predefined melodic progressions. The length of the songs start to escalate from four to twenty-two minutes, like reaching for ever further distances of space in every step (currently Alpha Centauri is over four light years from Earth, so there is no quick trip there if Einstein's theories aren't wrong).

First the "Sunrise in The Third System" is visualized by careful picks of guitar, welcoming the shimmering synthesizers painting up the first rays of the heavenly sunrise. Then, "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola" starts with abstract swirling sounds, later being accompanied by calm electronic layers, reaching a grandiose melodic theme enriched with flutes, and later landing to the plane of drummings, before the collision breaks the Comas Sola's flight abruptly. Finally the main target "Alpha Centauri" emerges interestingly as distant echoes of drum plates and unclear voices. Lush elements enter and disappear like events of a dream. Later some atonal swirls bring more frightful feelings to the music for a moment, after the appearance of beautifully shimmering glimpses of stars, seen through the aural textures. Flute reappears to guide the listener trough changing landscapes of galaxies and nebulas, and the tension starts to build up slowly. As the Alpha Centauri is reached, we hear some German spoken words telling us... something very important I believe (I'm really not very educated in the language of Göethe). The end sequence builds up from multi-track collage of voices with organs creating a solemn wall of sounds.

What little takes off my enthusiasm from this album is the recycling of some elements already used on their first album, especially on the first two tracks of this album. Especially the synthesizer melody and drums rhythms similar from Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets". These are really fancy sounding things, but they get little boring as they are overused so much, and this group could innovate also themselves more personal musical solutions than mimicking others. Well, this possibly being part of their own artistic development. I think still that the usage of these themes reveal their importance for the group, and as the expression is very free, they have studied them and matured them. The title song ending the album is a great result of this process.