Peter Baumann’s Old and New Dreams

Peter Baumann left Tangerine Dream—the pioneering German electronic group founded by the late Edgar Froese—for good in 1977, after helping shape the emotive synth sound found on albums like Phaedra and the soundtrack to Sorcerer. Since Baumann’s departure, Tangerine Dream went on to release something like 75 more studio albums, not including their abundant soundtrack work and live material. Baumann, on the other hand, has produced only a handful of records, most of them from the late-‘70s. 

Nightfall, released on May 16, is his second solo album of this century, following 2016’s Machines of Desire. While that album explored the darker side of the silicon romance of his ‘70s output (Daft Punk learned a thing or three from Baumann’s 1979 masterpiece Transharmonic Nights), Nightfall has more of an introspective feel, with Baumann mixing his austere electronic explorations with more natural tones and timbres, including hand percussion, saxophone, guitar, and chirping crickets. 

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Most of the song titles on Nightfall indicate themes of isolation and disorientation—“Lost in a Pale Blue Sky,” “On the Long Road,” and “A World Apart.” And though the shadowy melodic palette of these tracks does tend toward the sinister, there’s little sense of aimless wandering. Baumann’s keys can be abstract or ambient, foreboding or mechanistic, but he keeps a sense of momentum in play. “On the Long Road” opens with a digital pulse strung between sparse, booming drums, mysterious, rotor-like flapping sounds, and industrial echo. It ends about four minutes later, the pulse still there, after an interlude of buzzing, spidery guitar and xylophone-esque murmurs. Likewise, the nebulous choral layers of “Lost in a Pale Blue Sky” are held together by a booming, intermittent heartbeat, its toll creating a tidal gravity. Baumann’s music may be adrift, but it knows where it’s going.

Nightfall gathers shape as the album progresses, as if following a cycle. “From a Far Land” features an insistent keyboard motif reminiscent of the neon-lit ‘80s, minus that decade’s demonic excess, and a recurring smeared synth tone that provides some ominous drama; if it were a little more up-tempo, it’d sound like the theme to a posh sci-fi thriller. By the time “I’m Sitting Here, Just for a While” arrives, with its probing bass notes and flutelike synth melody, a balance seems to have shifted—the starry void of space has been replaced by the deep well of the inner self. The title track closes the album, with its serene vocal effects and an eerie glow to the rustling wind of the percussion, while the tentative synth melody has a surprisingly spontaneous spark that sticks out among the nocturnal dirges. It’s not enough to prevent the light from vanishing, but Baumann at least makes dusk’s descent feel like a necessary return, providing a haven for the weary and a respite from the disillusions of the day.

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