Customer Reviews

Tangerine Dream: The Video Dream Mixes

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From a group that is recognised for their early innovative concert visuals I cannot believe the tawdry product they have served here. The visuals look like the were produced in the early 80's on a commodore-64 computer. Why the repeated images of the female musician on sax and other reed instruments when none are featured on the soundtrack? (granted she is easy on the eye compared to the other two heaps).

Avoid.

I suppose there has to be some point to this release, but I'm blowed if I can find it! What we have here is 60 minutes or so of jumbled video imagery, set to some of the tracks (straight PCM-encoded) from Tangerine Dream's "The Dream Mixes" CD. Beyond the presence in most of the images of the three main band members (Edgar and Jerome Froese, with Linda Spa) - occasionally even on stage, good heavens! - there seems to be little cohesion (or, indeed, relevance) to much of what is shown. Most of the time, indeed, we seem to be looking at little more than tourist holiday footage - presumably shot by Edgar or Monika Froese whilst on tour with the band. This is generally of the world passing by at speed, albeit prettily processed and made to look meaningful by virtue of its complete unintelligibility. The only exceptions to this uniformly treated stock are the chapters `Change of the Gods' (which utilises complex computer-generated abstract and surreal imagery, some of it very beautiful indeed) and `Rough Embrace' (which features false-coloured and slow-frame historical film). Sadly, even these don't really rescue the disc or produce anything anyone is likely to want to watch twice.

I suppose the main problem is that for most of the time, the images simply don't fit the music. They just detract from it. Or vice versa. Bits are fun, but most are simply tedious. Nor does the disc make use of any of the capabilities that the DVD medium has to offer: all we get is a straight transcript from tape, poor resolution and all. And absolutely nothing else! Just a few words from the main perpetrators would have been fun and added no end to the value of this release. Ah well, at least it isn't region encoded...

Edgar Froese once described "The Dream Mixes" CD as a just-for-fun project. Maybe this was one too? If so, let's hope he did indeed have fun making it. I doubt whether anyone will have any watching it. Save your money!

(By the way: if you choose to watch this title on a widescreen TV, you'd be best to lock it to the Regular aspect mode, unless you can stand to have it switch mode every few seconds through some of the chapters! Blah!)

I found this DVD quite OK. Music was good but not the best that Tangerine Dream has made. The video tricks were a little bit poor in quality and technicality. It looks like the video was home-made by a teenager who has gotten an old video camera.

This is basically a lot of Tangerine Dream's travel video which was taken at a time when there were only three people in the band.While a lot of people thought this is just like watching someone's home movies, they take us places we might never go ourselves. The footage is processed(pschedilesized) to give it an otherworldly quality.Linda Spa provides the eye candy here. Froese and son were never glam rockers, prefering to let a laser light show handle the visual stimulus during live performances. Ms. Spa has been in this band since 1992 (17 years). This means she outlasted even Chris Franke as a T. Dream mainstay. The video has been syncronized to the music, which means it works within the context of a movement of music. While one might get bored watching Jerome drive fast cars, human beauty has been relegated to Linda Spa who probably could have been a model had she not learned to play wind instruments and keyboards. I did not pay as much for this as an audio CD, so with that said, you know you can get a quality music soundtrack with visuals as well. You could always close your eyes and just listen to the sounds which alone are worth the price of admission.