Force Majeure

The desk stopped doing what it was told. It was 1978, the final mix of an album recorded at Hansa in Berlin, and the last track started to distort on its own. Froese told the story in a couple of sentences in 1997. There was an accident in the mixing desk, and in the end they said, all right, leave it the way it is. The band had been here before. In 1973, in a cold English farmhouse, a Moog had drifted out of tune and they kept it. Five years later, in Berlin, they made the same call again.

Where it sits in music history

The band's road up to this point is in Tangerine Dream, where to start. The guide puts this record fifth and last: the final essential album before the classic period ends.

Getting here cost them people. Baumann left in the autumn of 1977 to make his own records. On Cyclone, released in March 1978, Steve Jolliffe sang, the first vocals ever on a Tangerine Dream album. Froese later called that record a failed experiment. Jolliffe did not stay long either. By the summer of 1978 it was Froese and Franke, and nobody else.

So they took the singing out and brought two people in. Klaus Krüger, an old friend of Froese's, played drums. Eduard Meyer engineered the sessions and played cello. They recorded at Hansa in August and September 1978. Froese told the German magazine Neumusik in January 1980 that they spent seven weeks in a good studio in the middle of summer. The atmosphere was good, he said, and there was nothing to fight about.

Franke called it a new phase. The music was more structured, he said, more heroic, a little like art rock again. The guitar came forward and the drums pushed the beat. The pieces were still long enough to fill a side.

Track list

One piece on side one, two on side two. The times are from the original UK LP as listed by both Discogs and Voices in the Net. The English Wikipedia gives 18:17, 7:27 and 14:30. Every edition is off by a few seconds.

Following "Force Majeure"

The guide says to put the title track on and leave it alone. It spends 8 minutes building. Three things are worth following.

The drums, first. When Krüger comes in, the piece starts to walk. On Phaedra the sequencer held the beat on its own; here the music has a second pair of feet, and your body notices before you do.

Then Froese's guitar, drawing long lines over the layers of synthesizer. This is where the band sounds most like a band.

And then the ending. The closing section quotes Arcangelo Corelli's "La Folia", the Violin Sonata Op. 5 No. 12. 18 minutes of electronic building work come down onto a Baroque tune published in 1700. Stop early and you miss it.

The rest of the record

"Cloudburst Flight" runs 7:21: Froese layers wild guitar over warm synthesizer pulses. In a 1986 interview Franke said it was a piece he still enjoyed playing and that it still meant a lot to him. He played it again at his solo concert in London in 1991.

"Thru Metamorphic Rocks" runs 14:15, and it is the one with the accident. Accounts of what went wrong differ. The official site says an outboard unit failed during the final mix; the band biography says the reverb unit modulated the signal in the desk by mistake. The one firm thing is what Froese said: something went wrong, and they kept it. Meyer's credit, next to the cello, reads steam train recording.

How to listen

• Side one straight through. Do not skip the last minute of the title track; that is where Corelli is.
• On headphones, a little louder than usual, so you can hear where the guitar and the synthesizers part company.
• In "Thru Metamorphic Rocks", listen for the place where the sound starts to break up. Something did break. They left it there on purpose.
• Play the title track of Phaedra first. Two accidents, five years apart, and they rhyme.

What happened next

The album entered the UK chart on 17 February 1979, climbed to 26 and stayed seven weeks. Krüger left after the sessions to work with Iggy Pop. The next member was Johannes Schmoelling, until then a sound engineer at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin. The three of them played the Palast der Republik in East Berlin on 31 January 1980, and Tangram followed that May, with the band back to three keyboard players.

Pieces of this record went into films. "Igneous", on the soundtrack to Michael Mann's Thief in 1981, is a remix of "Thru Metamorphic Rocks". On Risky Business in 1983, "Lana" is an edited remix of the title track and "Guido the Killer Pimp" does the same to "Cloudburst Flight", both with new material added. Some of Tangerine Dream's film music of the eighties was born on this record.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Thru Metamorphic Rocks". Warn them it is 14 minutes. Then tell them this: the place where the sound starts to break up is an accident in the mixing desk. The band left it in, and two years later the same piece, renamed "Igneous", was in a Michael Mann film.

Where to get it

The 1979 UK LP on Virgin, V 2111, is the record as it first appeared; a limited clear-vinyl pressing carried the same number. On CD, the 2019 edition was newly remastered from the original tapes and adds Franke's "Chimes And Chains" as a bonus. Turn the lights off and drop the needle on side one. 18 minutes later, from the top of all that electronics, a Baroque melody comes slowly down.

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