Edgar Froese

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Edgar Froese 2007 in Eberswalde

Edgar Willmar Froese (born June 6, 1944 in Tilsit , East Prussia , † January 20, 2015 in Vienna ) was a German composer, musician and artist. He is considered a pioneer of electronic music and was the founder of the group Tangerine Dream .

Childhood and studies

Froese was born in Tilsit, East Prussia , in the last year of World War II . His father and some relatives were murdered by the National Socialists. His mother had to flee to Berlin before the end of the war, where the rest of his family followed after the war. Froese came from a merchant family, and the only one who could be said to have artistic talents was his father, who liked to sing arias from famous operas. Since his family had lost all property during the war, Froese had to start working for a living at the age of 15. At the age of 18 he received a scholarship for gifted students and studied painting, sculpture and graphics at the Berlin Academy of the Arts for four years . To finance his education, he took on a variety of casual jobs in a theater such as slogan writer, draftsman, radio announcer, type designer and speechwriter. He thus worked early on in commercials for IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford and many other companies. One of his most lucrative jobs was to design advertising posters for the Berlin buses. He began evening studies in psychology and philosophy and received his doctorate on Kant's categorical imperative . Since his interpretation did not conform to the academic way of thinking, he left the college with the remark: "The dust of the universities lies like a shroud over the truth."

Musical development

Froese originally wanted to be a classical pianist. He finally turned to the guitar and learned to play self-taught. Between the ages of 20 and 23, Froese founded several pop jazz and free jazz groups as well as rock bands, which he left again. Music without adventure was "just too boring" for him. In addition to his art studies and his musical ambitions, he played leading roles in several German underground movies .

In September 1967 Froese founded the first incarnation of Tangerine Dream with fellow students from various faculties . With guitar, violin, bass and drums, they mainly played at student parties, vernissages and similar special events. The early Tangerine Dream were known for their uncompromising and almost anarchist appearances. At that time the underground movement knew almost no borders - the more extreme the appearance, the larger the cult following. A highlight of the group was the performance for the action artist Joseph Beuys and a series of concerts in Salvador Dalí's villa in Portlligat near Cadaqués, Spain . Dali himself danced in the midst of those present and was interested enough in Froese's "rotten, religious" music to have him repeat the performance three times. When Bing Crosby's White Christmas rang out with deafening guitar feedback, or when a concert began with a single 20-minute bass note and dissipated into the noise of traffic from Trafalgar Square , the audience mostly understood that the group was about adding structures to traditional pop music and the clichés it contained dismantle. After a sound recording from an obscure attic apartment in Berlin found its way onto the desk of a newly founded record label, one of the most adventurous biographies he could have imagined began for Froese.

His first LP Electronic Meditation was not meditative at all in the traditional, esoteric sense. Musically, worlds of velvet and sandpaper collided. This album was - in Froese's words: "almost natural" - not successful. The two project employees, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler , left the group shortly afterwards to embark on a solo career. Froese continued the group and recorded three more albums with different line-ups on Ohr Records . He then got a promising offer from the then new British label Virgin Records . With its founder Richard Branson, Froese negotiated the terms of the first major contract for Tangerine Dream on the steps of a record shop in the London borough of Notting Hill . After two days and a few games of chess on Richard's houseboat on the Thames, a ten-year collaboration began that launched Tangerine Dreams worldwide career.

biography

Froese learned to play the piano as a child. Froese founded his first group in 1962, where he played guitar. However, Froese had no plans to become a musician at the time. Later, his artistic training helped him design the record sleeves, with his wife Monika at his side. She designed many covers for Tangerine Dream and can also be called the first official band photographer. Edgar and Monika Froese married in 1970, and son Jerome was born in the same year .

Froese met Salvador Dalí and in 1967 accepted an invitation to give several private concerts in Dali's villa in Spain. This is where artists met for happening afternoons . The performances were a mixture of music, literature and painting and can be described as an early form of a multimedia presentation. They coordinated the music for the inauguration of Dali's Christ statue in July 1967.

Back in Berlin, Froese tried to find like-minded people who were also interested in not just playing the top 40 of the American charts. Most musicians, however, found his idea of ​​balancing music and visual arts uninteresting. With a constantly changing line-up, Froese often played in the Cafe Zodiac at so-called "night concerts".

Because of its Nordic appearance, Froese was nicknamed "Viking". With the band The Ones , which he had founded in 1965, he released a single in 1967 with the beat pieces Lady Greengrass / Love of Mine . The band played rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll .

In September 1967 Edgar Froese founded Tangerine Dream , whose style he significantly influenced. With constantly changing formations, he brought out more than eighty albums and soundtracks. His most important musical companions were Klaus Schulze , Christopher Franke , Peter Baumann , Johannes Schmoelling , Paul Haslinger , Linda Spa and his son Jerome Froese .

In addition to his work with Tangerine Dream, Froese still found time to implement and publish solo projects.

In the middle of 1974 Edgar Froese's first solo LP Aqua was released on the German rock label Brain . The recordings were made with the artificial head developed by Günther Brunschen (TU Berlin) .

Froese's second solo work Epsilon In Malaysian Pale was created in 1975 under the influence of a trip to Asia. "It's like stepping out of the eternal darkness of the jungle into the blazing sunlight of a beach - from the dreams of the night into the reality of the day," the record is described by the Melody Maker .

In 1976 Edgar Froese released his third solo LP under the title Macula Transfer . The titles of the individual pieces seem very idiosyncratic, as they are named after flight numbers such as Qantas 611 or OS 452.

In 1976 David Bowie and Iggy Pop lived with Froese and his family for a short time before they both moved to Hauptstrasse 155 in Schöneberg . Bowie described Froese's album Epsilon in Malaysian Pale as "an incredibly beautiful, enchanting, apt work ... That was the soundtrack to my life when I lived in Berlin."

In 1978 Froese's fourth solo album Ages was released . He gave the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí as inspiration , as well as the American writer Henry Miller and Fritz Langs Metropolis .

Froese first used digital sounds on the 1979 album Stuntman . He was supported by the Hamburg engineer Wolfgang Palm . Froese's only single Stuntman / Scarlet Score for Mescalero comes from this album .

Edgar Froese wrote the soundtrack for the Wolf Gremm film Kamikaze in 1989 and published it under his name on Virgin . The German film, in which the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder can be seen in a leading role for the first time , was made after the novel Mord on the 31st floor by the Swedish writer Per Wahlöö . Fassbinder died suddenly in June 1982, so that this film is also his last cinematic work.

Another solo work by Froese was published in 1983. The record Pinnacles was described by the music scene as a production “which is not characterized by volume, but by the intensity of the moods and atmospheres”. The title refers to rock formations that are thousands of years old in the Australian Nambung National Park .

It was not until 1995 that Edgar Froese brought out another, sometimes controversial, solo project with the double CD Beyond The Storm . There are thirteen remastered older tracks and fifteen new tracks on it. Especially the revised pieces met with rejection from some fans. Froese had already revised and reissued large parts of the repertoire for Tangerine Dream, which did not always meet with approval.

Edgar Froese's wife Monika died in 2000 after a long illness.

Froese shared a love of art with his second wife, Bianca Acquaye , and she paints acrylic pictures herself . In 2004 they had a joint exhibition in Berlin. Bianca also created the images that can be seen on the Tangerine Dream albums Inferno and Purgatorio as cover art.

A five-part CD collection was released in 2004 under the title The Ambient Highway , in which Froese remastered older material and continued it musically. Here, too, there are works by his wife on the cover.

In 2005 Edgar Froese's last solo album, Dalinetopia, was released . In the same year he also released his first six solo albums on his own label Eastgate Music . For legal reasons, the re-releases were remixed and in some cases also re-recorded, which can be seen from the changed cover design and the name of the artist "Edgar W. Froese" (instead of "by Edgar Froese").

Froese was friends with David Bowie , Brian Eno , Iggy Pop , George Moorse , Friedrich Gulda , Salvador Dalí and many other world stars.

At the beginning of 2013 he had a serious accident when he slipped on black ice and suffered a head injury that resulted in him being in a coma for six months . Due to the broken jaw he was initially unable to eat or speak. Months later, he still had considerable problems articulating himself.

Edgar Froese died on January 20, 2015 at the age of 70 in Vienna of a pulmonary embolism .

His autobiography, published after long delays in autumn 2017, focuses on the band's 70s and 80s despite the additional title.

Discography

  • Aqua (1974)
  • Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975)
  • Macular Transfer (1976)
  • Ages (1978)
  • Stuntman (1979)
  • Electronic Dreams (Compilation 1979)
  • Kamikaze 1989 score for the film of the same name (1982)
  • Pinnacles (1983)
  • Beyond the Storm (1995)
  • Introduction to the Ambient Highway (2003)
  • Ambient Highway Vol. 1 (2003)
  • Ambient Highway Vol. 2 (2003)
  • Ambient Highway Vol. 3 (2003)
  • Ambient Highway Vol. 4 (2003)
  • Dalinetopia (2005)
  • Orange Light Years (2005)
  • Armageddon in the Rose Garden Part 1 . Split CD with Ron Boots (2008)

Filmography (selection)

  • Why the UFOs steal our lettuce . (Alternative title: Hello, Checkpoint Charlie , also: Checkpoint-Charly .) SciFi comedy, BR Germany, 1980, 91 min., With Edgar Froese as an extraterrestrial.
  • Tangerine Dream. Sound of another world. Documentary, Germany, 2016, 58:32 min., Script and director: Margarete Kreuzer, production: Tag / Traum, Eastgate, WDR , rbb , arte , first broadcast: 25 November 2016 on arte, summary by arte, ( memento from 26 November 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  • Revolution of Sound. Tangerine Dream. Documentary film, Germany, 2017, 86 min., Script and director: Margarete Kreuzer, production: Tag / Traum, Eastgate, WDR , rbb , arte , cinema release in Germany: September 1, 2017.

literature

Web links

Commons : Edgar Froese  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Edgar Froese: Biography. In: edgarfroese.com. Retrieved January 24, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Contemporary stories: Tangerine Dream . In: Groove . January 26, 2015 ( groove.de [accessed September 21, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Pascale Hugues: When David Bowie lived with Edgar Froese in the Bavarian Quarter . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . January 8, 2017 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed September 21, 2018]).
  4. ↑ Photo series: Exhibition 2004, vernissage. ( Memento of October 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: acquaye.de .
  5. ^ Pascale Hugues : Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream, Berlin. With David Bowie in the Bavarian Quarter . In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 26, 2015.
  6. ^ Margarete Kreuzer: Tangerine Dream on a farewell tour. ( Memento from January 24, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ). In: "Stilbruch", the culture magazine of the RBB , May 22, 2014.
  7. ↑ Good to hear in an interview compilation by Olaf Zimmermann in the Elektro Beats series on June 4, 2014 on Radio Eins : On the 70th birthday of Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream. ) ( Memento from January 24, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ) (from 24:51 min). See also the live world premiere of the Tangerine Dream soundtrack “Sorcerer” in Copenhagen. ( Memento from January 24, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ). In: Radio Eins , April 16, 2014.
  8. ↑ Shane Mack: RIP: Edgar Froese, founder of Tangerine Dream. In: Tiny Mix Tapes. January 23, 2015, accessed January 23, 2015 .
  9. ↑ This is a message to you we are very sorry for… In: Tangerine Dream on Facebook . January 23, 2015, accessed January 24, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Froese, Edgar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Froese, Edgar Willmar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, musician and artist, pioneer of electronic music
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Tilsit , East Prussia, German Empire
DATE OF DEATH 20th January 2015
Place of death Vienna , Austria