Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

links:
Disc 1
Disc 2
pw: sgtg


extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

link
pw: sgtg

Christopher Franke - Klemania (1993)

Picked this up in a charity shop the other week for 50p.  Saw the name, and quickly googled the album to check it was definitely the guy from Tangerine Dream; then realised I could've probably guessed anyway from the track titles.  Even if it's terrible, I couldn't turn it down at that price - it's bound to at least have mild amusement value, surely?

Oh yes, it does. In spades.  If you've always wondered - and I'm sure you have - what a former member of TD would sound like inadvertently playing the main riff from Therapy?'s Meat Abstract (safe to say just a coincidence, unless Franke was somehow aware of Northern Ireland's finest indie metallers) whilst hitting a couple of random sampler buttons marked 'crowd noise' and 'erotic panting', then you've come to the right place.  By the 90s, Franke had turned his attention almost exclusively to soundtrack work, and it certainly shows in the 22 minutes of Scattered Thoughts Of A Canyon Flight (thanks, Tangerine Dream song title generator app!).  There's a lot of fragments here that might've been more than adequate for some 90s thriller or action movie, but ran together they don't make for a coherent piece.

Inside The Morphing Space (thanks again, Tangerine Dream song title generator app!) is more successful in creating the kind of sustained moods that TD themselves might've churned out around the time.  There's at least some decent Berlin School sequencer work going on here, and a more ambient drift towards the end, but as you'd expect the whole thing is completely sunk by the dated, sterile synth gear.  Nonetheless, TD diehards and soundtrack-electronica nerds will find sufficient enjoyment here to give Klemania a whirl - everyone else, do give it a once-over even just for the chuckles.

link