Bicentennial Presentation
By Peter Baumann
“When Tangerine Dream needed to replace their keyboard player Steve Schroyder, 18-year-old Peter Baumann joined the band and worked with them for around seven years.”
Baumann briefly left Tangerine Dream a couple of times in 1973 and 1975 but took part in their successful 1974 album Phaedra, one of the first electronic music successes, becoming a Top 10 seller on the Melody Maker charts. You might remember our review if you follow our electronic music history journey.
Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1953, Baumann is nowadays known for his solo career and for founding his record label Private Music in the 80s, one of the most influential new-age labels ever. Baumann and his label signed artists like Yanni, Patrick O'Hearn, Jerry Goodman, Suzanne Ciani, and his former bandmates Tangerine Dream. In 1996, Private Music was sold to Windham Hill Records' parent company, BMG, which still distributes some of the back catalogs of its more successful artists.
“In 2009, he also founded the Baumann Foundation, a think-tank that explores the experience of being human in the context of cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and philosophy.”
Baumann, unfortunately, didn't experience the same commercial results he had while being part of Tangerine Dream with his solo works. He recorded his first solo album, Romance76, while touring with Tangerine Dream, and the beginning of his solo career led him to leave the band in 1977 in a definitive way.
Romance76 is an album we could almost consider split into two parts. The first is more electronic. The second part is more ambient and is composed using orchestrations. The second part of the album probably inspired Baumann's future works, which are more focused on ambient music and considered inspiring for the future development of the so-called new-age music.
The song I chose to talk about is the opening track, Bicentennial Presentation. The difference you notice with albums of this era are the presence of more structured and defined melodies. The album sounds like a mix of the immediate style of Kraftwerk beats and the immersive landscapes of Tangerine Dream and Cluster.
The song starts with a hi-hat beat, arpeggiators, and oscillators, followed by the main synth melody. Then comes a mysterious element: a laugh (I'd say probably of Baumann himself), which happens at the 2'33" mark. Why? It's funny to think about Baumann laughing because he enjoyed the Moog synth and the oscillators effects, which he was modulating to create the composition's sonic spectrum.
If you are a musician, you probably know that you often laugh at the excitement of certain sounds and melodies you are making. So I guess this could be the reason why that laugh remained in the final mix, or perhaps Baumann couldn't get rid of it and was forced to leave it in the final version of the song. It could be fun to ask him what happened.
