Tangerine Dream
Nov. 5th, 2003 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationExit was one of my favorite electronic albums when I was younger. It still has bits that make me shiver. It's so delicious and clear, with little sharp-edged sawtoothy bits poking out all over the place. It's like listening to music designed around a diamond-edged sawblade.
Some of the very distinctive sound of the album is due to be being written around a synthesizer designed, effectively, for Tangerine Dream, and to their specifications. The PPG Wave was the first wavetable synthesizer, and could fling waves and wavetables around like no other synth would until, really, the Wavestation (made by Korg, and mostly only a spiritual descendant of the PPG Wave). The Wave was such a flexible synth, in fact, that you could add the WaveTerm sampling and waveform-editing unit and create your own waves, a feature still unmatched in wavetable synthesis to this day. (It's not complicated to build machines to do this-- people are just lazier these days, and will go for a full-scale sampler than the complexity of making little tiny waves with clean loops).
Either way, Exit remains a distinctive album, even in today's world of analog modelling and similar digital sound manipulation. It's also still one of my favorite albums. And it's back in print, after being hard to find for quite a while. Recommended.
Some of the very distinctive sound of the album is due to be being written around a synthesizer designed, effectively, for Tangerine Dream, and to their specifications. The PPG Wave was the first wavetable synthesizer, and could fling waves and wavetables around like no other synth would until, really, the Wavestation (made by Korg, and mostly only a spiritual descendant of the PPG Wave). The Wave was such a flexible synth, in fact, that you could add the WaveTerm sampling and waveform-editing unit and create your own waves, a feature still unmatched in wavetable synthesis to this day. (It's not complicated to build machines to do this-- people are just lazier these days, and will go for a full-scale sampler than the complexity of making little tiny waves with clean loops).
Either way, Exit remains a distinctive album, even in today's world of analog modelling and similar digital sound manipulation. It's also still one of my favorite albums. And it's back in print, after being hard to find for quite a while. Recommended.