PETER BAUMANN
“I live my life in chapters,” says Peter Baumann. Those chapters have included an upbringing in Berlin at a time of heightened Cold War tensions between the West and the USSR, success as a musician in Tangerine Dream, a career as a solo artist, running a successful record label, setting up a philosophical think-tank and, latterly, a return to making music in his studio at his home in San Francisco.
Of course, he’s best known as one-third of Tangerine Dream.
Along with Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke, he played a crucial part in bringing the previously obscure and cultishly ethereal sounds of electronic music to a much wider global audience with 1974’s Phaedra. “Obviously the time in Berlin with Tangerine Dream was a very rich and rewarding chapter,” says the keyboard player, who joined the group in 1971. Baumann was there for 1972’s dark, brooding photoambient double album, Zeit, and the epic, cinematic impressionism of Atem the following year, which charted strange and unusual timbres, with Radio 1’s John Peel enthusiastically declaring it his ‘album of the year.’
With that seal of approval and influential endorsement, Richard Branson did a roaring trade importing and selling copies of Atem via his record shop business before eventually signing the group to the Virgin label, joining a roster of artists such as Mike Oldfield, Henry Cow, Hatfield And The North and Gong.
Strains within the band led him to quit in 1977 and after a series of solo releases he put his energies into creating the Private Music label in the 1980s, acting as a producer and a de facto A&R executive. By the millennium, he’d left music to concentrate on philosophy, science and evolutionary theory, an interest that led to him setting up the Baumann Foundation in 2009. However, proving that sometimes it’s possible, and now with a new project called Neuland with ex-Tangerine Dream member Paul Haslinger, whose first record is due for release later this year.
