Thorsten Quaeschning & Ulrich Schnauss On Keeping Tangerine Dream Alive

Synthesists Thorsten Quaeschning & Ulrich Schnauss of Tangerine Dream are featured in a new two-part interview with John Whitaker, embedded below:

In addition to their work with Tangerine Dream and their solo work, Quaeschning & Schnauss have a new album out, Synthwaves. You can preview a track from the new album, Rain On Dry Concrete, below:

16 thoughts on “Thorsten Quaeschning & Ulrich Schnauss On Keeping Tangerine Dream Alive

    1. The “TD died with Froese…” whining got old 2 years ago. Now it’s just sort of sad and pathetic.

      It’s time to move on, guy.

      1. No, it is not. TD without Froese is like Kraftwerk without Florian Schneider or DM without Alan Wilder – a bad joke.

        1. Triggered much?

          The sad truth is that TD lost its way in the 90’s and only got back on course in the Quantum era. Nobody wanted to listen to TD with sax solos and conga drums except the easy listening new age crowd.

          Thankfully, they’ve ditched that and gotten back to their roots. Give their latest live album a listen, and its as good as any live TD album since the 70s.

        2. What about DM without Vince Clarke? He basically was DM in the beginning. The band would not have reached the next level had it not been for the departure of its initial songwriter and sound designer. We can only hope that TD will have a similar fate and that their output in the future is not just a technically brilliant rehash of the sound from their glory days.

  1. Tangerine Dream lost their way with the departure of Chris Franke. They became a new age easy listening synth band. For a while I would buy their releases hoping they would improve buy they just got worse.

    The new incarnation with Thorsten and Ulrich is their best since the early 80s. Now if only Franke and Baumann would join, it would be awesome.

    1. This exactly.

      Froese was the visionary bandleader, but Franke, Baumann, Schmoelling and Haslinger – and now Q + S – made huge contributions that defined their sound.

      It’s hard to imagine the group being in better hands…

  2. To all you TD fans of some of their older productions…Long live ‘ Phaedra’….I still listen to that … it it still gives me butterfly’s in the stomach n goose bumps….

    Frose reincarnated into music…

    Those guys were pioneers of sound that will never die….

  3. Froese always discussed and viewed TD as a collective or movement, not as a band. In this sense, I feel that TD carries on as it should. Quaeschning & Schnauss carry the mantel well, I feel.

  4. It’s a weird thing when a band no long has any of its founding members, but I am willing to give the b/r/and a chance and listen.

  5. I’ll weigh-in with an opinion too. TD ‘lost it’s way’ in the mid-80s at the same time as JMJ and Vangelis. The technology overtook them. They couldn’t sound fresh and innovative any longer.

  6. I’m listening to the live Szczecin gig on YouTube as I type this and the ’70s/’80s TD sound is, quite frankly, SAFE IN THEIR HANDS (resurrected even, from the schlock tendencies of the ’90s, noughties and after).
    The legacy of any band is that of a handing-on and entrusting in any case, whether that’s from young Rolling Stones, to older ones, to ancient ones, and any band can mash up its own legacy and become self-parody (God knows, there’s enough of that out there!) but then you get situations where a whole way of thinking and working gets taken up and carried on and the results can often be easily as good as the original. Penguin Café Orchestra to all intents died with Simon Jeffes but then Arthur Jeffes took up the idiom and the ideas, creating Penguin Café, which absolutely ranks alongside the original.

Leave a Reply to Random Chance Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *