TANGERINE DREAM
MARS POLARIS ALBUM TDI RELEASE: SUMMER 1999 REVIEW: JULY 30, 1999 
On January 3 NASA's Mars Polar Lander was launched from Cape Canaveral for its mission to Mars. On December 3, it is supposed to enter the Martian atmosphere. It will be interesting to see what it will report back to its overpopulated neighbour. Tangerine Dream just couldn't resist using this as a theme for their new release. With "Mars Polaris" they add a new album to their countless list. These living legends made ambient electronic music long before many of today's artists in that field were born. This album is therefore more interesting than a similar record of an unknown artist, but is it worth buying? Well, "Mars Polaris" offers instrumental pieces and the question is how long you can listen to it before you are bored. At first, I'm impressed with the massive, deep soundscapes that completely fill the room. It makes you relax, think, dream..., just at it is supposed to. But I get restless in the long run, so I guess the album offers too little variation during it's 71 minutes. And it is a bit too intense to be used as pure atmospheric background music. It's nice that "Mars Polaris" is a theme album though, with the booklet filled with new beautiful pictures and some facts. Did you know that, even though Mars is much smaller, its surface has about the same land area as Earth? And that Mars actually has a nice earth summer temperature from time to time, 27 degrees C? MIKAEL KAHRLE |
  |