When artists lose direction they lack coherence. To fix that, they streamline their work and try to imitate the popular stuff that people were fleeing when they listened to these artists in the first place.

In the metal and krautrock genres, which have similar musical roots, this means you turn something similar to classical music into rhythmic rock ballads. This is how most metal sounds today, because it’s the easiest format to embrace: let the song become a variation on a known them and a superficial backdrop for a generic beat, include some death metal fillers to make it interesting, and then add random themes from horror movies. For the krautrock scene, artistic decline is very much the same.

Whatever happened with Tangerine Dream after Peter Baumann left the stage, no one knows, but it’s safe to say that the band started to decline shortly after releasing “Stratosfear” in 1976. Following that period, TD released three albums that barely qualify as very good, “Tangram” probably being the champion. With Johannes Schmoelling on the keyboards, this is an unexpected gem–more polished and simple, to be sure, but strangely dense and information-intensive. It sounds like a new age quartet, mixing layers of synth collages, rhythmic pulses and dreamy melodies, all into an epic format. If the early albums celebrated the spirit of ancient civilizations, “Tangram” is about joyfully discovering your inner child, and contrasting it against your present existence.

Take this classic album and let Tangerine Dream 2008 modernize it for its new audience. Aside from a small layer of sound effects, they’ve added a generic beat as rhythmic foundation for the actual musical content. Did I say rhythmic foundation? What made early TD so great was that they sounded like a modern classical orchestra. The music wasn’t restrained by neither rhythm nor predictable harmony, as in rock music and most metal. Thanks to the open format, these geniuses could improvise on the spot, and still compose music that is structured and layered according to emotional logic.

Like listening to classical music, a classic Tangerine Dream listen “makes sense” in a emotional way, because it’s a growth, or an adventure, and not a static backdrop. Tangerine Dream 2008 has instead destroyed its classic compositions by forcing them into the tedious rock song format model — one that later also came to make most of Klaus Schulze’s stuff boring to listen to.