MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, musician and electronic-music pioneer Edgar Froese died in Vienna, Austria, on January 20, 2015, at the age of 70, after suffering a pulmonary embolism.

As the founder and only constant member of Tangerine Dream, Froese helped transform the possibilities of synthesizer-based music and became an important figure in film scoring, contributing to more than 60 soundtracks including Sorcerer, Thief, Risky Business, Firestarter, Legend and Miracle Mile.

Edgar Willmar Froese was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, on June 6, 1944, and grew up in West Berlin. He studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Arts while pursuing music, initially concentrating on guitar. After encounters with Salvador Dalí and the experimental culture of the late 1960s, Froese founded Tangerine Dream in Berlin in 1967 and increasingly turned toward synthesizers, tape manipulation and electronic sequencers.

Tangerine Dream’s international breakthrough came with Phaedra (1974), recorded by Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. Its hypnotic sequencer patterns, vast electronic textures and slowly evolving melodies became a landmark of the so-called Berlin School of electronic music. Albums including Rubycon, Stratosfear and Force Majeure consolidated the group’s reputation and attracted the attention of director William Friedkin.

Friedkin commissioned Tangerine Dream to score Sorcerer (1977), his nightmarish thriller about desperate men transporting explosives through the South American jungle. Remarkably, the group composed much of the music before seeing the completed film. Its pulsating sequencers, ominous drones and electronic rhythms gave the picture an atmosphere of relentless dread and helped establish a new vocabulary for electronic suspense scoring.

Hollywood subsequently embraced the Tangerine Dream sound. Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) used shimmering electronics and driving rhythms to complement James Caan’s nocturnal criminal world, while Risky Business (1983) paired the group’s dreamier textures with images of affluent suburban adolescence. Other important scores included Firestarter (1984), Ridley Scott’s fantasy Legend (1985), Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire western Near Dark (1987), and Miracle Mile (1988), whose accelerating electronic pulse became integral to the film’s apocalyptic tension.

Froese also worked independently of Tangerine Dream. His solo albums included Aqua, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale, Stuntman and Pinnacles, while his principal solo film score was Wolf Gremm’s dystopian Kamikaze 1989 (1982), the final film starring director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

As personnel changed, Froese remained Tangerine Dream’s creative anchor. The group continued producing albums and soundtracks through the 1990s and 2000s, while its earlier work became increasingly influential on ambient music, techno and modern electronic film scoring. One of Froese’s final major screen-related projects came with the video game Grand Theft Auto V (2013), for which Tangerine Dream collaborated with Woody Jackson, The Alchemist and Oh No on an enormous body of interactive music.

Froese is survived by his second wife, artist and musician Bianca Froese-Acquaye, and his son Jerome, himself a former member of Tangerine Dream. His first wife Monique, whose photography and artwork helped shape the group’s visual identity, died in 2000.