Tangerine Dream Avery Fisher Hall April 51977 Review

I decided it would be a real fun thought to get fucked up on drugs and go run across Tangerine Dream with Laserium. And then I drank two bottles of cough syrup and subwayed upward to Avery Fisher Hall for a night I'll never forget. For one thing, emerging from the subways into this slick aesthete's Elysium is like crawling out of a ditch into Jackie Onassis'due south iris — a listen-expanding experience in itself. A woman there told me that the management had quite soured on rock clientele, and it was easy to see why: here'due south this cornersteel of cultural corporations, and what staggers into it merely the lumpy, zit-pocked lumpen of Madison Square Garden. And when worlds collide, someone has to have the slide.

What kind of person goes to a Tangerine Dream concert? Here's a group with three or maybe even four synthesizers, no vocals, no rhythm department; they sound like silt seeping on the ocean flooring — and this place is sold out. Freebies are rife, yet I don't call up that kid in front of me wiped out in his seat for naught. And so I enquire some of the Tangs' fans what they find in their music, and get a lot of catholic, Todd-Rundgren mulch-mouth. I tell one guy I think they're just a bunch of shit, a poor human's Fripp and Eno, and he looks me over and says: "Well, yous gotta have imagination …"

Everyone is stoned. Some antipodal re the comparative merits of various items in the Tangs' oeuvre — i guy declares the double album Zeit a masterpiece, some other is an Alpha Centauri man. 3 times equally many males as females at least. A thirtyish guy sitting side by side to me in ratty beard and ratty sweater reminisces about 1968 precursor Tonto's Expanding Head Ring, and tells me virtually the time the Tangs played the Reims cathedral in French republic. ("6000 people cram the ancient edifice with a 2000 capacity," boast the program notes.) "They didn't take any bathrooms in the cathedral," he laughs, "so the kids pissed all over information technology. After information technology was over the high fathers, monsignors or whatever, said it was the devil and asked for an exorcism of the church."

Alison Steele comes out, a mode-modelish silhouette in the dimmed light-green calorie-free, and says that the management does non allow smoking in the theatre. As presently every bit she says her name, people effectually me scream out, "Swallow shit!" and, curiously, "You're a prune!" The microphone she spoke through will stand there unused for the rest of the evening, a sparse, black line cut into the psychemodal otherness of Laserium from where I sit.

The music begins. Three technological monoliths emitting urps and hissings and pings and swooshing in the dark, petty rows of lights flickering futuristically equally the three men at the keyboards, who never say a word, ship out sonar blips through the congealing air. Aye, permit's swim all the style out, through the jello into the limestone. I close my optics and settle back into the ooze of my seat, feeling the ability of the cough syrup edifice within me as the marijuana fumes sift through the cracks in the air, trying to conjure upwards some inner-eyelid secret picture show. Oh lawd, I got the dejection so bad I experience just like a cask of Amontillado. Yep, there it is, the swirls under the surface of my life are reconfiguring into: Daniel Patrick Moyn­ihan, caricatured by Ronald Searle. He dissolves similar a spectre on a window shade, and is replaced by neon tubing writhing slowly into lines and forms until I think information technology is going to spell out a give-and-take, but no, information technology doesn't quite brand it. Goddamn it, I judge I'll have to endeavor harder. On the other paw, perchance no news is good news.

I open up my eyes again. At present the Laserium, which I had forgotten all near in my druggy meanderings, has begun to arise from the deep and practise its shtick on the screen above the synthesizers. Starting time, a bunch of varicolored clots slowly sludging around each other; they could be annihilation from badly seeded clouds to cotton-candy cobwebs to de­composing bodies. Then two pristine laser circles appear afront the muck, one red and one blue, expanding and contracting and puckering at each other. They get larger and larger until they are gyrating and rubberbanding all over the identify with a curiously restful freneticism. The synthesizers whisper to them every bit they bounciness. The music goes on for a long time, varying in tempo and volume­ — Tangerine Dream is Salmane, not even Valium, on record but when they've got yous enclosed in their cool room they tin can be almost bombastic at times. The music seems to ebb off rather than terminate.

Break. Many audition members seem uncertain whether it really is suspension or if they should just pick up their stethoscopes and walk.

Back for more of the same, but more aggressive this time, if that's a way to describe quicksand. The Laserium begins to wink more than violently, exploding in dots and points and lines that needle your retinae as the synthesizers suck you lot off and down and the towering mirrors at the sides of the stage turn slowly, reflecting beams of white light that are palpably irritating merely past and gone and by again in a flash. I close my eyes to check into abode control, to see if any fiddling twisted-wax visions might be coagulating. Noth­ing. Blank grey. I open up them and offer myself up totally to the Laserium. Wink, flash, flash — the intensity grows until I am totally flattened; I experience like an viii-runway cartridge that has merely been jammed dwelling. Later that, I become slightly bored and restless, although the other bodies around me are rapt. I accept seen God, and the advantage of having seen God is that you tin can always wait abroad. God don't care.

And so, finally, picking up my coat and lugging my clanking cough-syrup bottles, I push my way through the slack and sprawling bodies — out, out, out into the aisle. As I am walking up information technology, I am struck by an odd figure doddering alee of me, doubled over nether raggedy cloth and drained pilus. I don't trust my Dextromethorphaned optics, and so I move closer until I can come across her, unmistakably, well-nigh crawling out the door … a shopping bog lady!

What's she doing at a Tangerine Dream concert? Did someone at CBS give her a ticket, or did she find one castoff past a jaded rock critic in some 14th Street garbage can? Never heed — at that place volition be a place for her in the wiring of this brave, new world. I myself had earlier considered giving one of my extra tickets to a wino so he could get a little sleep in a comfortable chair. Look. at that place's got to be some place to send these whipped dogs so we don't have to look at them, and where improve than Avery Fisher Hall? Allow them paw through the reject of a ameliorate world, listening to the bleeps and blips and hisses and amusing their faded aye with the test patterns and static that our great communications combines have no better employ for anyway. Just before I left, I turned around for one last gustatory modality of the Tangs and Laserium, and by gum, I had my first real hallucination since drinking the Romilar that afternoon: I saw a whole audience of shopping-bag la­dies. ■

This article from the Village Voice Annal was posted on January iv, 2021

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Source: https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/01/04/i-saw-god-and-or-tangerine-dream/

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