The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Tangerine Dream
- Released
- December 1975
- Album
- First live album; seventh overall
- Original programme
- Ricochet Parts One and Two
- Label
- Virgin V 2044
- Music
- Froese, Franke and Baumann
Why it matters
A live album composed in performance and in the edit
Ricochet answered a difficult question created by Tangerine Dream's success: how could a group whose concerts depended on improvisation issue a live record without reducing an entire tour to one supposedly definitive night?
The trio and its studio collaborators treated the accumulated tapes as compositional material. Performances from Britain and France were selected, mixed and assembled into two album sides rather than presented as an untouched chronological recital.
That procedure does not make the record less live. Its tempos, transitions and volatile balances retain the feeling of musicians steering analogue systems in real time before an audience.
The album translates the sequencer language of Phaedra and Rubycon into a more urgent public form. Repeating figures arrive faster, percussion-like attacks bite harder, and Edgar Froese's guitar occupies more foreground space.
Part Two widens the vocabulary with a descending grand-piano opening before Mellotron and electronic pulse pull the music into a larger arc. As Tangerine Dream's first live album and seventh release overall, Ricochet documents the trio at the point where British concert demand had become central to its international identity.
Its historical importance lies in the productive tension between event and artifact: the concerts supplied risk and interaction, while editing made an album with its own proportions. The result established that electronic live albums could be more than proof of technical replication; they could be newly shaped works made from performances that would never recur in exactly the same form.
Europe 1975
The 1975 tour enters the Manor
Phaedra had reached the UK Top 20 in 1974 and Rubycon the Top 10 in 1975, giving Tangerine Dream an unusually large British audience for long-form instrumental electronics. Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann toured Europe during 1975 with synthesizers, sequencers, Mellotron, keyboards and guitar rather than a conventional rock rhythm section.
Their concerts were not fixed performances of the studio albums. Shared tonal plans and equipment roles could guide a set, but the trio generated substantial stretches of music in the room.
Recordings accumulated from dates in Britain and France. In a contemporary interview, the musicians described searching through more than forty sets of tapes before assembling the first side at the Manor.
The official Tangerine Dream account identifies Part Two as drawing mainly from the concert at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, while describing the album more broadly as mixed from British and French performances.
That distinction matters because it resists a false single-venue story. Ricochet represents a tour and a subsequent act of selection, not one complete concert.
Chris Blake is credited as recording engineer and Mick Glossop as mixer on the original release record; their work helped convert changing concert tapes into a coherent stereo album. Virgin issued the finished record in December 1975 as V 2044, between Rubycon and the studio album Stratosfear.
Froese–Franke–Baumann
A trio operating one shared electronic field
Franke's sequenced figures frequently provide the moving grid, but they should not be mistaken for an automated backing tape; accents, filters and surrounding harmony keep changing their apparent weight.
Froese's guitar is especially important in Part One. Sustained notes and sharpened attacks cut across the electronic repetitions instead of simply doubling them.
His opening piano on Part Two creates a rare exposed acoustic threshold before the ensemble's familiar electronic depth returns. Baumann adds Mellotron and keyboard colors that can turn a repeating pattern from bright motion into choral or orchestral shadow. Because the three performers share the writing credit, the album's long curves are best understood as ensemble structures, even when one instrument briefly becomes identifiable.
Blake's recording role concerns the capture of concerts whose balance could change from venue to venue. Glossop's mix and the trio's selection process are audible in the clean movement between contrasting passages, but the record does not disclose a complete bar-by-bar map of which concert supplied every segment. The appropriate boundary is therefore precise but modest: name documented roles and the mainly Croydon basis of Part Two, while leaving unverified microscopic allocations unstated.
Concert architecture
Sequencer velocity, Mellotron shadow and guitar flare
Part One enters with a bright, fast sequence whose repeated cells create forward pressure before the surrounding harmony has fully settled. Electronic percussion-like strikes and bass pulses thicken the grid, while Mellotron color changes the perceived size of the room. Froese's guitar arrives as an unstable lead voice, sometimes floating above the pattern and sometimes pushing directly against its accents.
The side does not pursue a verse or theme-and-variation design. It changes by replacing layers, adjusting density and letting one pulse open a route to another.
Part Two begins from the opposite end of the spectrum: descending piano phrases establish gravity, silence and physical key attack. Mellotron flute color broadens that acoustic space, after which a sequencer gathers speed and turns reflection into propulsion. Later passages alternate between compact rhythmic machinery and long, suspended chords, so momentum repeatedly seems to ricochet off a wall of atmosphere. The album's clarity is striking for edited concert material, yet small fluctuations in attack and balance keep it from acquiring the polished stasis of a wholly overdubbed studio construction.
Track guide
Two sides, two different routes through motion
Ricochet Part One
The first side begins in motion: a quick electronic pattern establishes an asymmetrical-feeling surface even when the pulse itself remains regular. Low sequences and clipped attacks gradually add mass. Guitar then supplies a more humanly inflected line, bending and sustaining across the grid while Mellotron colors recast the background. Rather than announcing separate movements, the piece crosses thresholds of density—rush, suspension, renewed acceleration and release. Its assembled origin helps explain the unusually decisive transitions, but the energy still belongs to concert interaction. The closing stretch reduces the apparent distance between rhythm and texture until pulse becomes atmosphere rather than ending with a conventional cadence.
Ricochet Part Two
A descending grand-piano figure opens an entirely different space. Notes are allowed to decay, and the exposed acoustic sound makes the later entrance of Mellotron and electronics feel like a change of environment. The official band history connects most of this part to Fairfield Halls in Croydon. A sequencer eventually establishes firmer movement, joined by layered keyboards and sounds with a percussive edge. The piece repeatedly alternates between illuminated motion and darker hovering passages. Its narrative is musical rather than literary: solitary touch becomes collective mechanism, the mechanism expands, and the closing music withdraws without pretending that a staged concert finale is required.
Motion without plot
Impact, rebound and the drama of changing states
Ricochet is not presented as a story album and the two shared titles do not identify characters, locations or a chronological plot. The word ricochet nevertheless offers an apt image for music made from repetition, response and redirection. A sequence launches an impulse; guitar, Mellotron or another pattern returns it in altered form; editing can then place one response against another. Part One emphasizes impact and velocity, repeatedly redirecting its own forward movement.
Part Two makes reflection more literal through piano resonance before electronic motion gathers around it. The unnamed Parts One and Two encourage the listener to follow states rather than decode programmatic scenes. Concert provenance adds another layer to the title: sounds created in different rooms return through tape, are redirected at the Manor and reach the listener as one continuous object. These are interpretive relationships within the issued music, not evidence of a fixed narrative supplied by the band.
Virgin V 2044
A silver curve poised above dark water
The original Virgin cover avoids a stage photograph, crowd or bank of synthesizers. Its dark field and suspended metallic curve suggest a droplet, projectile or reflected arc without fixing the image to one literal reading. A small disturbance below the central form makes the title's idea of contact and rebound visible at a restrained scale. That restraint matches an album that carries concert energy but removes applause and star-performance display from its main identity.
Monique Froese is credited for photography in the original release documentation. The front presents RICOCHET and TANGERINE DREAM with considerable empty space, allowing the image to function as atmosphere rather than explanatory diagram. The LP's two-side division gives each part equal visual status even though their internal routes and source balance differ. Later archive packaging adds concert locations and contextual material, but the 1975 sleeve's abstraction preserves the record's refusal to behave like a conventional live souvenir.
December 1975
The concert album reaches the British chart
Virgin released Ricochet in December 1975 as V 2044. The Official Charts record begins on 20 December, shows a peak at number 40 and lists four weeks in the UK Top 100. That performance followed the stronger peaks of the two preceding studio albums but still placed an uncompromising two-track concert construction on the national album chart. The title Ricochet was applied to the edited album pieces rather than inherited from a studio composition already known to audiences.
Its lack of applause, announcements and familiar-song reprises could challenge expectations attached to the phrase live album. For listeners who had encountered Phaedra and Rubycon, the record revealed how the trio's sequential methods became faster, rougher and more flexible onstage. For the band, it closed a year of touring and recording with a release that transformed accumulated performance tapes into a concise new statement. The next regular studio album, Stratosfear, would retain electronic sequencing while introducing shorter pieces and more conspicuous acoustic-instrument colors.
Live construction
Live electronics beyond faithful reproduction
Ricochet remains a central document of Tangerine Dream's mid-1970s Froese–Franke–Baumann lineup. It demonstrates a concert practice based on generating new long forms rather than reproducing the studio catalogue in fixed arrangements. The album also anticipates later approaches to live-electronic editing, where selection and montage are acknowledged as creative stages rather than treated as contamination. Part Two's piano opening became one of the trio's most recognizable acoustic-electronic contrasts.
The faster rhythmic profile points toward the sharper themes and mixed instrumental palette heard on Stratosfear. Archival concert releases now let listeners hear longer performances from the period, making it possible to compare the tour's open scale with Ricochet's concentrated design. Those archives do not supersede the original album: Ricochet's identity rests on its two deliberate side-length arcs, not on completeness. Its lasting achievement is to preserve uncertainty inside a strongly shaped record—live decisions remain audible even after the tape has been made to serve a new composition.
Original programme
Keep the 1975 two-part construction intact
The canonical programme contains two pieces, one per LP side. Original timings are approximately seventeen minutes for Part One and twenty-one minutes for Part Two. The album should be described as live and edited, not as either a wholly untouched concert or a newly overdubbed studio set. Part Two draws mainly from Fairfield Halls, Croydon; the album as a whole also uses other British and French recordings.
Piano opens Part Two before Mellotron and sequenced electronics widen the field. The original record has no vocals, so its Instrumental classification is accurate. Modern Steven Wilson remixes and complete concert material belong to later archival packages. Preserve the side break: it sets a fast, immediate first construction against a slower acoustic entrance.
A listening path
Hear the edits as part of the performance
- Begin with the rapid Part One sequence and notice how its apparent accent changes when new bass notes arrive.
- Track the guitar as a pressure against the grid rather than only as a solo.
- Listen for transitions that feel edited without trying to assign each one to an undocumented venue.
- At the side turn, allow the grand piano's decay to reset the album's scale.
- Notice how Mellotron color connects acoustic resonance to the later sequencer.
- Follow Part Two's alternation between propulsion and suspended chordal space.
- On a later pass, compare a 1975 archive concert while keeping Ricochet's deliberate album construction distinct.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Ricochet official album history and programme — Tangerine Dream
- Ricochet original UK release group — MusicBrainz
- Ricochet original release credits — MusicBrainz
- Ricochet album record and credits — AllMusic
- Ricochet official UK chart history — Official Charts Company
- Contemporary discussion of concert-tape selection — Electronics & Music Maker archive
- In Search of Hades archival programme — Tangerine Dream