Each of the main characters is on the run, having escaped either certain death or imprisonment in their respective home countries. Tangerine Dream’s earliest Hollywood scores-particularly their work on Sorcerer and Michael Mann’s debut film Thief (1981)-signaled a newfound acceptance of electronic music in dramatic film productions and demonstrated how synthesizers can supplement and magnify a film’s sound design.īased on the novel Wages of Fear by Georges Arnaud, Sorcerer tells the story of a group of desperate men toiling in an impoverished Latin American village. While Fricke used synthesizers to create haunting reimaginings of European folk traditions, Tangerine Dream took their sound in a more propulsive direction, utilizing sequencers to create hypnotic soundscapes that evoke astral travel and spiritual transcendence as much as the mechanical grind of the modern, industrialized world.īy the time the band started working on Hollywood productions, they had signed to Virgin Records and achieved a degree of commercial success unknown to most of their peers in West Germany’s experimental music scene. Fellow musician Florian Fricke lent his Moog synthesizer to the band for their 1972 studio album Zeit, rounding out Tangerine Dream’s pair of VCS3 analog synthesizers.įricke himself produced memorable scores for films including Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Among the most prominent of these artists was Tangerine Dream.įounded by Froese in 1967, Tangerine Dream went through several iterations before landing on their most critically acclaimed line-up featuring the trio of Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann. music industry shied away from synthesizers at first, experimental musicians in West Germany’s budding music scene in the late 1960s enthusiastically adopted them in their practice. Modular voltage-controlled synthesizers enabled musicians to sculpt musical timbres from scratch and generate otherworldly sounds through endless configurations of oscillators, filters, envelopes, and other electronic components. The introduction of the Moog synthesizer in 1964 ushered in a new era of music-making. Who using only basic oscillators and tape splicing in 1963. Delia Derbyshire created one of the most enduring and iconic pieces of electronic music in film and television history when she recorded the original theme for Dr. The composer Miklós Rózsa used the theremin to add a spectral dimension to his scores for Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, both released in 1945, and the instrument’s eerie glissando effect made it popular with sci-fi film producers in the 1950s. Despite a poor showing at the box office, Sorcerer launched Tangerine Dream’s influential Hollywood career, which played a central role in popularizing the use of synthesizers and electronic music in cinema.īefore the advent of commercial synthesizers, filmmakers integrated prototypical forms of electronic music into their work. Filled with slowly evolving drones and velvety, beat-driven synthesizer arpeggiations, the resulting score for Sorcerer (1977) broke new ground for electronic music in film. Impressed, Friedkin decided to hire Tangerine Dream for his next project. “They were really emotional and the sound was so loud that you could feel it throbbing within you.” It was really trance-like, everybody was really into it and so was I,” Friedkin told Vice in 2015 shortly after Tangerine Dream’s founder Edgar Froese passed away. He saw the synthesizer trio perform a midnight show at an abandoned church in the Black Forest. Visiting West Germany in 1974 to promote the European release of The Exorcist, William Friedkin encountered Tangerine Dream for the first time. The electronic group redefined the sound of ’80s cinema, pioneering an iconic electronic soundscape that reverberates into modern film scoring.

Tangerine dream