ZEIT

Unbelievable stuff. This is truly an album that divides the listeners big time. Some call it genius, others call it a big piece of crap. Giving the ratings I gave it, I'm obviously with the former. This was the album that premiered Peter Baumann to the fold, who would stick with the band until 1977. There is nothing rock about this album. What you get is lots of spacy electronic effects that spans over two discs, each piece lasting 17-22 minutes.

"Birth of Liquid Plejades" starts off with a cello quartet (I believe one of the cellists was a member of HOELDERLIN), which is extremely sinister sounding, helped further with strange electronic manipulation of the cellos. Eventually the cellos disappears, and a Moog kicks in (from Florian Fricke, of POPOL VUH, who was a guest here). This seems to be one of Fricke's last recording with the Moog, before he turned to religion and to the piano and away from the Moog. There is some organ in the background. Here previous member Steve Schroyder makes a guest (he would later join ASH RA TEMPEL for "Seven Up"). Then at the end is this very trippy, PINK FLOYD like organ. The next piece, "Nebulous Dawn" is strictly electronic effects. "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" is mainly one long sinister- sounding drone with more electronic effects, while the title track basically sounds like the middle part of PINK FLOYD's "Echoes", but it's actually nothing but wind sounds.

There is no doubt that this album is one long LSD trip. It's strange how a record label like Ohr had the balls to put out such a record realizing it wouldn't sell. But I'm glad they did. Such a far cry from the stuff they did in the mid 1980s, it's not even funny. Yes, there's no such thing as a real tune here on "Zeit". Jerome Froese (Edgar Froese's son, the baby seen on several TD albums, including "Atem" and the gatefold of "Zeit", and a member of TANGERINE DREAM since the early '90s) hates this album, but that's not my problem. That's probably more the reason for me to like this album. A strange album indeed!