Tyranny Of Beauty In Bella Italia

(Dream Collector #11, July 1995)

A Video, CD And CD-I Presentation With A Littie Mishap

"Tyranny Of Beauty" -- this was, indeed, the name of a fancy cake served to journalists at the end of the press meeting in Milano's top-disco "Tutti Frutti". Everything had been well prepared until then: Invited by Italy's New Age Music and New Sounds magazine and by their label "Les Folies Art", Tangerine Dream presented the first CD-I version of their music and answered questions of reporters. But when the organizers later showed a video film produced especially for this evening, the pleasure was diminished by some little technical mishaps.

The band's Italian record company is really engaged in promoting TD: After the presentation of Turn Of The Tides in Desenzano sul Garde (Garda lake) last year, they invited the band to Milano for the 14th and 15th of June. So just a few days after returning from a promotion tour to radio stations and music newspapers in Great Britain, Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese and Linda Spa spent two days with a great number of radio and TV interviewe in north Italy.

For the evening of the second day, New Age Music, "Les Folies Art" and the Philips CD-I company invited some 80 journalists to the huge open air disco located in the south of Milano. "We are really surprised about such an interest", Julia Synder of Tadream Productions said after the presentation of the Tyranny Of Beauty CD-I. For this evening, Tangerine Dream was an item of interest not only for specialized music journalists but also for a lot of daily newspaper reporters.

After the press meeting and a meal, the evening was planned to end with a public performance of a video film promoting the Tyranny Of Beauty CD. This event was open not only for the journalists but also for the guests of the huge "Tutti Frutti" disco. A screen was set up open air next to a swimming pool, and people crowded for the performance of the video.

The video featured a lot of computer created clips with pictures of the solar system, outer space and a space ship. The camera flies over "cyber" surfaces of planets, over landscapes and through tunnels in space; the film shows underwater life, landmarks especially in the USA like the Grand Canyon and also contains clips from a band's stay in Venice (Venezia) where also the photos for Turn Of The Tides had been taken, and clips from the Melrose set with the band on bicycles in the desert and Linda with a make-up artist. These pictures were mixed with the musicians in studio and on stage; some film sequences were alienated with the help of colour effects and fire faded into parts of the background. The music included some previously unreleased modern material and some well-known tracks, most of them from Tyranny Of Beauty. However, soon after the film started around midnight, the show was from time to time disturbed by heavy rhythmic music from other open air dancing areas around, stage lights went on and off, and the equipment used for playirig the music did not feature perfect sound quality. After 30 minutes, the performers faded out the video film and the music on the spot right in the middle of the Stratosfear 1995 part just a few minutes before it would have ended anyway.

Many fans -- some of them had travelled hundreds of kilometers for this event and, of course, also Edgar and Jerome seemed to be a little bit disappointed with the technical inadequacy of the performance, even it there was a lot of applause for the film. The band left the place right after this show long after midnight; they had to leave Milano early in the next morning.

However, even if some fans hoped in vain to get the chance to ask some questions to the band members after the show or to get autographs on the records they had brought, they had an extraordinary evening anyway: Probably there will be no other chance to see this video film again...