SORCERER (OST)

Though it was recorded in between Stratosfear and Encore and released in 1977, many compilations of Tangerine Dream's Virgin years don't include Sorcerer - probably due to rights issues since it wasn't actually released on Virgin, coming out instead on MCA. The anomaly may be explained by Sorcerer's game-changing nature - though the big departure isn't so much the music (which is in the classic spacey Tangerine Dream style) but in its purpose, since this is the first movie soundtrack that Tangerine Dream would compose.

As such, it represents the first chapter in a whole other strand of the Tangerine Dream story - one which arguably would become more important than their non-movie work by the mid-1980s. At the same time, good chunks of this - including the Main Title - are much more in the style of early works from Zeit to Rubycon than the slick digital approach of much of their later soundtrack efforts - note how there was a years-long gap in between them putting the finishing touches on this and tackling Thief, their next soundtrack album, and the one which really kicked off their soundtrack career.

The difference is less due to the quality of the music - this is perfectly solid Tangerine Dream in nice bite-size portions, at least on a par with Thief - and more due to the relative successes of the film they were attached to. Sorcerer was a cinematic oddity which was something of a commercial failure, whilst Thief was a smash hit whose aesthetic presentation made a huge splash - and, of course, the music was very much part of that presentation. Set aside from the movie, however, the music of Sorcerer is a decent but oft-overlooked bit of mid-1970s Tangerine Dream; the main thing holding it back is the sense that we are just getting extracts from longer pieces here.