Tangerine Dream - White Eagle (Definitive Edition) -Remastered- (c) 1995 Virgin
Artist....: Tangerine Dream
Album.....: White Eagle-Definitive Edition
Type......: Album
Source....: CDDA
Tracks....: 04
Genre.....: Electronic
Label.....: Virgin
Catalogue#: TAND 2 / 7243 8 39444 2 2
Encoder...: LAME 3.97
Quality...: VBR kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint-Stereo
URL.......: http://www.discogs.com/release/552934
Tracklist:
----------
01 Mojave Plan 20:10
02 Midnight In Tula 04:00
03 Convention Of The 24 09:37
04 White Eagle 04:35
Total:50,3 MB / 38:22 min
Release Notes:
--------------
High definition digital remastering by Simon Heyworth at Chop 'Em Out,
London. Recorded and mixed January 1982 in Berlin.
The Definitive Edition Series is considered to be the very best sound
quality of any of the Tangerine Dream releases because of Super Bit
Mapping technology.
Tangerine Dream experiments with an ever-widening lexicon of sound on
White Eagle, though the arrangements tend to suffer for it. The album's
principle work is "Mojave Plan," a four-movement, 20-minute song that
represents some of the darkest music they've recorded in a while.
Perhaps it was Edgar Froese's fear of nuclear annihilation that fueled
this bleak view of the future, but the piece's effectiveness is
undermined by the decision to continually dabble with different sounds.
Where earlier extended pieces tended to move the listener from point A
to point B, "Mojave Plan" doesn't flow so much as fuse disjointed
sections together. The remaining songs are more cohesive, though
Christopher Franke's sequencer patterns, while initially intoxicating,
remain static here. That's not a problem on the brief "Midnight in
Tula"; four minutes of contagious dance music that turns corners as
tight as a Polyrock tune is a welcome respite at this point in the
album. "Convention of the 24" clocks in at under ten minutes, and is
arguably the closest in effect to Tangram et al. The album closes on a
pleasant note with "White Eagle," a mesmerizing song that spins on a
slightly off-kilter axis while delivering a lovely little melody in the
bargain, in some ways suggesting a meeting of Tangerine Dream's
sequencer-led journeys and Cluster's playful side. While it's
ultimately an uneven work, White Eagle is clearly the sum of its parts,
and readily identifiable as the work of Tangerine Dream. Perhaps Froese
had relinquished too much of the music to Johannes Schmoelling, whose
curiosity for new sounds often comes across as restlessness. Most
likely, though, TD wanted to move its music into the modern age. People
weren't as likely to sit in a lotus position for 40 minutes as they
were in the '70s -- a point that Exit acknowledged. Conceptually, the
band members fall back on familiar ways with White Eagle, but musically
their minds are operating on a more contemporary level. It's not an
ideal amalgam, suggesting the band was at a stylistic crossroads.