Rev­o­lu­tion of Sound: Tan­ger­ine Dream – first look review

A packed house and a slight­ly mut­ed recep­tion greet­ed the Berlin Film Fes­ti­val pre­mière of this doc­u­men­tary about Ger­man prog-rock­/­movie sound­track giants Tan­ger­ine Dream. Inti­mate with­out being espe­cial­ly reveal­ing, Rev­o­lu­tion in Sound cleaves a lit­tle too close­ly to its sub­ject at the expense of pro­vid­ing any real con­text that might put the band’s mighty achieve­ments into prop­er focus.

The result veers a lit­tle too close to a hagio­graph­i­cal clutch of home movies and inter­views in which uncom­fort­able ques­tions are either not asked or edit­ed out. It just about works on a tech­ni­cal and nar­ra­tive lev­el, but the killer doc­u­men­tary about this bril­liant, weird, frus­trat­ing band remains out there. Somewhere.

Formed in Berlin in 1967 by Edgar Froese, Tan­ger­ine Dream were in many ways a Deutsche Pink Floyd – prog­ging-out for (pos­si­bly-tor­tu­ous) hours beneath acid night­mare light­shows as flower eat­ing hip­pies tripped through rain­bows on their way to sci-fi tomor­rows. A lit­tle out-there for Ger­man audi­ences, they were final­ly accept­ed in France, and lat­er giv­en an all-impor­tant boost by the patron­age of Richard Branson’s nascent Vir­gin Records label.

Suc­cess fol­lowed, as did an invi­ta­tion to Hol­ly­wood, where they scored sound­tracks for William Friedkin’s Sor­cer­er, Paul Brickman’s Risky Busi­ness and Sir Rid­ley Scott’s Leg­end. Lat­er they would pro­vide 37 (!) hours of music for sem­i­nal video game Grand Theft Auto V – for which they were con­tract­ed to ​‘upload’ five min­utes of music per day.

The trou­ble is that all of this rise-and-plateau is almost entire­ly inci­dent free. Tales of excess are at a pre­mi­um, and there is none of the keen­ing per­son­al or roman­tic strife that enlivens sim­i­lar docs on early-’70s greats like The Eagles or Fleet­wood Mac. Or even Gen­e­sis. Var­i­ous mem­bers of the band leave with lit­tle expla­na­tion and are replaced by face­less musi­cians who deserve bet­ter introductions.

The fact that their would-be break­through sound­track for Sor­cer­er was hitched to a film that – due main­ly to the fact that it opened the same week­end as Star Wars – was heard by vir­tu­al­ly nobody is glossed over. A chang­ing line-up and big-time Hol­ly­wood fail­ure should be grist to this story’s mill, but they are edged-out in favour of com­fort­able footage of the band’s dotage.

Rev­o­lu­tion of Sound is warm but not won­drous. And it nev­er achieves the escape veloc­i­ty that sling­shot Tan­ger­ine Dream and their music way beyond the infinite.