Tangerine Dream

Tyranny Of Beauty

- Studio, released February 1995 -

Covers

CD release Europe 1995 Design: Tadream Vision	CD release UK 1996 Design: Tadream Vision
CD release Malaysia 1995	CD release Germany 2009
CD release Germany 1999 Design: Edgar Froese

Tracks


		[a]	[b]
1.	Catwalk	7:21	7:21
2.	Birdwatchers Dream	6:52	6:52
3.	Little Blonde In The Park Of Attractions	6:57	6:57
4.	Living In A Fountain Pen	6:59	6:59
5.	Stratosfear 1995 [1995 re-recording]	5:08	5:08
6.	Bride In Cold Tears	4:53	4:53
7.	Haze Of Fame	8:30	8:30
8.	Tyranny Of Beauty	6:35	6:35
9.	Largo (from Xerxes)	4:12	4:12
10.	Quasar [Titled Quaser on some releases]	-	3:43
Total running time		57:27	61:10

Details


Recording date	July - September 1994
Recording site(s)	Eastgate Studios (Vienna)
Recording engineer(s)	Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese, Christian Gstettner
Composer(s)	Edgar Froese, Chris Franke, Peter Baumann, Jerome Froese, Georg F. Händel
Musician(s)	Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese, Linda Spa, Gerald Gradwohl, Mark Hornby, Gisela Kloetzer
Producer(s)	Edgar Froese

Notes

"Is my body something other than a swarming sea of living cells who revolve to a hereditary habit of millions of years, around one hidden essential point?"
- Gustav Meyrink

TD's 1995 studio album Tyranny Of Beauty follows the stylistic tradition of its predecessors. The track Stratosfear 1995 is a new recording of the 1976 composition basing on an idea of Jerome Froese: "I made Stratosfear just as a joke, maybe to put it on Tangents, and when we sent it out to Virgin they said that Stratosfear was a bit too heavy to go between the other tracks there. So we thought, OK, may be just put it on the next record..." (Future Music, August 1995)

Largo (from Xerxes) is a classical adaption of Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759). Edgar Froese: "It's a reference to a time when people had a completely different approach to music. If you listen to the original Händel piece you'll realise there's all different sorts of contrapuntual melody lines in there, different things against each other all the time. The interesting thing was to find a new melody line to go on top of all and then others which would not interfere. And what Linda did on her saxophone pretty much worked." (Future Music, August 1995)

Asked for the real meaning behind the title Tyranny Of Beauty Edgar Froese answered: "It's a wonderful thing to look at a beautiful face, or to watch someone moving a very attractive body or to touch a very aesthetic piece of art -- it reminds people of some immortal perfection which all of us would like to preserve for eternity. But the very well known fact is, that nothing in this strange world can be saved forever. We feel weak against this everlasting law. So what's the problem? What makes us feel so sad after realising that we can't stop things moving from perfection to dissolution? The solution could be that we stop to lie about reality and face things as they are -- which simply means applauding beauty as one attractive part of life and respecting and honouring those things which are in the process of dissolving, knowing that they enjoyed good times, watching and living among them. That includes not only humans -- it includes all parts of nature. A wise guy once said: 'A lie would have no sense unless the truth were dangerous.'"

The UK releases of Tyranny Of Beauty include the bonus track Quasar that was previously available only on the promotional Tyranny Of Beauty CD-5 and the Italian Tyranny Of Beauty CD-I. A Malaysian release with different artwork contains this bonus track as well.

Edgar Froese about Quasar: "The German company QuasiMIDI called us and said 'Hey, you are getting our instruments, maybe you can do a demo song for the Frankfurt Music Fair for us, and it would sound nice if you can do something like dance.' So we said 'Okay, we'll do something like that but maybe it's the only piece in our whole career like that that we'll release in a techno-dance style. " (Future Music, August 1995) In fact, Quasar somewhat anticipates the style of music that would be released later the same year as The Dream Mixes.

Re-Releases

The 1999 re-release by TDI, now featuring a completely different cover artwork, includes Quasar as bonus track, too, though this is not mentioned in the track listing of the first pressing. The track listing was then corrected with the second pressing (click on image on the left to see a larger scan of the back insert of both pressings).

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; though not featured in the track listing on the digipack back side, this release does include Quasar as well.

Releases


Europe	1995: Virgin CD [a]: 840 275-2
Germany	1999: TDI/EFA CD [b]: 63020-2; incomplete track listing CD [b]: 63020-2; corrected track listing 2009: Membran CD [b]: 232652; digipack
Italy	1995: Les Folies Art CD [a]: LFAD 1235
Malaysia	1995: Divine/FORM CD [b]: FR CD 20058
Saudi Arabia	1995: Megastar/Sidi CD [a]: STARCD1 190530
UK	1995: AMP CD [b]: AMP-CD 027 1996: TDI CD [b]: TDI002CD
USA	1995: Miramar CD [a]: 23046-2
Tyranny Of Beauty was also released as part of the set The Grammy Nominated Albums.