After rumours of a new collaboration between Edgar Froese and former member Johannes Schmoelling in May 2005 the album Kyoto finally was released. It turned out that it contains not really newly composed music but leftovers back from 1983.
In an interview with Conrad Gibbons in September 2005 Johannes Schmoelling tells about Kyoto: "It was quite fun to work with Edgar. Kyoto is more a combination of 'OK, what is in your archive? What is in mine? Let's put it together.' So I haven't met Edgar since March or April. [...] I think it's quite a good record but I think, I'm not so friendly with the idea of always looking back, look on the past, what we did twenty, twenty five years ago. But I can imagine maybe Edgar and I will come together and say 'Well let's look at what we can do together in bringing in new material', maybe this is quite possible."
So it's no wonder that some of the material sounds quite similar to recent music Edgar Froese released on his album Dalinetopia while other tracks bear a strong influence of Johannes Schmoelling. One composition even is a reworked version of a track that was released as part of the soundtrack album The Park Is Mine (by the way, a release that was not approved by Tangerine Dream), another could be some unreleased leftover much in the vein of Logos Live. Anyway, most of the material has been strongly "tangentized", that is, overlayed with modern sounds, so a fan who expects "untouched" music from 1983 (like Hyperborea or Poland) might be dissapointed. On the other hand this output shows another aspect of TD's work, quite different from other recent releases and might be interesting for any Tangerine Dream fan.
While both CD and backside insert of the initial release show the TDI logo, this album has not been released by TDI but by Edgar Froese's own label Eastgate which had only been used for release of his solo records before. All material has been published by a company called "JOSEF Publishing", obviously a name created from the initials of both artists.
Almost exactly one year later another similar album has been released: Blue Dawn, being a collaboration of Edgar Froese and former member Ralf Wadephul and containing unreleased material dating from 1988.
In June 2007 this release became available as MP3 download at the Tangerine Dream Download Shop.
In March 2009 the album was re-released with different cover design as part of an extensive digipack series (consisting of a total of more than 60 CD and DVD releases) by the Germany based Membran record label, and in June 2009 it was re-released in Japan as part of a series of HiQualityCDs with mini LP paper sleeves.
Releases
Germany
2005: TDI/Eastgate
CD: TDI CD042; multicoloured disc; matrix code: 49008; no order number on disc or inserts
2007: Eastgate
Download: complete release or individual tracks as MP3
