Force Majeure

Chris Franke: "There's one piece, Cloudburst Flight, which I still enjoy playing. Sometimes doing something again and again, it loses its power, but this still means a lot to me. It's hard to say what you try to achieve when you make music. Different words come to mind like...room, landscape, painting, A combination of all the things that make up life."

(Interview with Johnny Black, thisBEAT, issue 17, April 1986)

Shortly after the Cyclone tour, Steve Jolliffe left the band again, but already in August, the trio Froese, Franke and Krieger was working on a new album, Force Majeure, this time in the Hansa studio in Berlin.

Force Majeure was a long time in the making and was not released until the end of 1979. This time, as opposed to Cyclone, the new album recieved high praise from the critics and quickly hit the charts in England. Here it achieved to become number 26 on the album chart.

The music was still rock-based with Froese's guitar and Krieger's drums in the foreground, but the music develops throughout the album and ends up with something that sounds like a subway ride in the London Underground breaking every speed limit! The album also contains one of the finest pieces of music Tangerine Dream have ever written -- Cloudburst Flight. This piece was by the way used as the signature of the weather forecast on the Italian TV station RAI!

A big tour throughout Germany was scheduled to take place -- after the success of the Cyclone tour -- but it had to be cancelled because Force Majeure did not sell very well in Tangerine Dream's native country.

After the recording of Force Majeure had taken place, Klaus Krieger left Tangerine Dream. Krieger had always had a very loose connection with the band -- more like a session musician -- and at the end of the day Froese and Franke did not really want to work with real drums. Instead, there was room for another keyboard player as a replacement for Peter Baumann, as it had been the intention all along ever since Baumann left the band. This replacement was found in Johannes Schmoelling -- aged 29. At the time, he was working as a sound engineer at the Hansa studio.

Froese: "Johannes was very professional in terms of music and studio work. He had a remarkable ability to concentrate and could work for long stretches of time. He had several years of experience as an audio technician at the famous Berlin Schaubüne Theatre of Peter Steins. I visited a performance there of Robert Wilson's Death, Destruction and Detroit. Johannes had created all the sound collages one could hear throughout the play. I was so enthused by the five-hour performance that I asked Johannes afterwards if he wanted to join Tangerine Dream". (Interview with Mark Pendergast, January 1994, Tangents)

Well, apparently Johannes Schmoelling liked the idea, and for the following six years he was a regular member of Tangerine Dream. Johannes Schmoelling was born in Lohne, Germany in 1950 and he began playing the piano at the age of eight. He later moved on to the pipe organ and played professionally in various churches before he graduated from college in 1978 with a degree in sound engineering. Maybe he already had his debut on Force Majeure, where he may have been involved in the production when the band -- towards the end of the track Thru Metamorphic Rocks -- made a very expressive sound collage with sounds of running trains and so on! Well, maybe not -- in an interview in 1997 Edgar Froese told a journalist that this particular track actually got its strange and futuristic sound by accident.

Froese: "The reason is simply that Thru Metamorphic Rocks had an accident in the mixing desk. So while we did the recording the tape ran, and all the instruments were locked in, and we played, and we improvised quite a lot all the time. Then all of a sudden something went wrong with the desk. So there were a lot of strange noises all of a sudden which appear within the track and are totally wrong, but which actually made sense in the music. We listened to it again and again and said 'should we? shouldn't we?' Finally we said 'okay, leave it the way it is". (Interview with Ashley Franklin and Nick Willder on 29 October 1997, Soundscapes, 16 November 1997)