Mota Atma
The career of pioneering electronic soundscape architects Tangerine Dream has stretched so long that the child of founder/mainstay Edgar Froese, who occasionally graced the band's covers as an adolescent, is now Froese's full-fledged band mate. And if their commercial success and string of Hollywood films they scored in the '70s and '80s seem to have ironically cost them some critical perspective, this soundtrack (recorded in the fall of ‘02) to the obscure Spark-Guchy production is a compelling summation of the band's various phases and enduring appeal. The brooding, sensuous textures of their expansive mid-'70s prime are often efficiently set here to the pulsing sequencer rhythms that propelled much of their film work fromSorcereronwards, but deftly seasoned with samples and sparing uses of natural instruments that give it a deceptively transparent sense of the organic. Young Jerome Froese seems locked into his father's electro muse at the genetic level, producing one of T-Dream's most sonically elegant and rewarding modern albums.--Jerry McCulley