EAST - LIVE IN BERLIN 1990

"East" is a live recording of Tangerine Dream from 1990. The concert was recorded at the Werner Seelenbinder Halle in what was then East Berlin (hence the title), within months of the Berlin Wall coming down. The line up consists of the trio of father and son Edgar and Jerome Froese with Paul Hasinger, who are joined occasionally by two saxophonists.

The 15 tracks are mainly taken from the albums recorded during the Melrose years, such as "Lily on the beach" and "Optical race", with a couple coming from "Destination Berlin" released during that period. As such, this is mainly the rather unexciting one dimensional quasi new age music Froese was churning out in the later 80's and early 90's, at a rate matched only by Rick Wakeman. The music is pleasant enough, but the proliferation of synthesisers sound synthetic, cold and one dimensional. The compositions lack real depth, often sounding like little more than extended improvisations on simple themes. This places a greater emphasis on the actual sounds, which need to be more interesting if they are going to compensate for the prosaic nature of the compositions. Unfortunately, they largely fail to do so.

We do get the occasional welcome diversion such as the aforementioned saxes (on the rather enjoyable and certainly spunkier "Wall Street") and some fine lead guitar played by Jerome (on "Nomad's scale"), but such interruptions are not as frequent as they should be.

"East" has more in common with the theatrical light show music of Jean Michel Jarre than it does with the pioneering experimentation of the Tangs during their Virgin years. The music here is safe and unchallenging. It makes for great background music when pursuing other activities, but it offers little stimulus to the attentive listener. That is not to say the music is bad, it most certainly is not. I am sure the event itself would have been exciting and visually impressive, especially for the 8,000 or so East Germans who attended and who had been starved of music of this type.

It is perhaps too easy to look with the benefit of hindsight and to judge on that basis. Heard today though, this is not an album which defines the relevance of Tangerine Dream in popular music, it is just another of the one hundred plus albums which bears their name.