California Dreamin'

He's a musician who never plans for anything, but Tangerine Dream fans can rejoice in not just the 50th-anniversary reissue of Phaedra, but also a new album from one of its creators. Synth maestro Peter Baumann makes a welcome return with Nightfall, which continues his ongoing exploration of the human condition. He tells Prog why he prefers to do things in a haphazard way and why he wishes he'd had the chance to work with Edgar Froese again.

- Rob Hughes

“I've never considered myself to be a good musician,” says Peter Baumann. “I’m not a good keyboard player, but the upside is that you reach for more ways to express yourself. It’s all intuitive, it’s all creative. My whole life I’ve never felt like doing what you're supposed to do. I've always kind of moved in haphazard ways.”

Haphazardly or not, Baumann’s journey through music is a pretty distinguished one. As a member of Tangerine Dream during their imperial 70s phase, he helped advance the Berlin School of electronica, creating avant-garde music forged from the twin poles of technology and free improvisation. When he quit in 1977 – leaving behind a run of hugely influential albums – he applied a similar working approach, albeit on a less grand scale, to his solo career.

“I would say that the feeling, where it comes from, has stayed the same,” Baumann offers. “In Tangerine Dream, it was about making the expression as direct as possible. In the studio we'd record things like a mattress falling onto a cymbal, then turn it over backwards and put it through a phaser. So there were no limits. We'd record whale sounds on a Mellotron tape and then treat them. Whenever we played any kind of melody that already sounded conventional, we'd change it. It was always about expansion, about transcendence.”

Baumann’s engagement with music has wavered at times. By the new millennium, having sold his new age label Private Music (sometime home to Tangerine Dream, among others), he’d forsaken it altogether. He moved to San Francisco where, in 2009, he set up the Baumann Foundation, a think-tank exploring “the experience of being human in the context of cognitive science, evolutionary theory and philosophy”. This interest dovetailed with Baumann’s other activities as part of the California Institute of Integral Studies and the not-for-profit Mind & Life Institute.