Tangerine Dream

Look through any self-respecting quality music publication or website and peruse through a list of the most important and influential psychedelic albums of all time and you can be pretty sure to see Kaleidoscope's Tangerine Dream ranked high up there, along with your Sgt. Peppers, your Forever Changes, Satanic Majesties Request, Axis: Bold As Love, Odyssey and Oracle, and The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

This seminal album of quintessential English psychedelia is one of the most highly prized artifacts that define the psychedelic genre. Like some of the most highly collected and prized albums from that time, mint copies can now go for way in excess of £1000.

Thus, given the record's rarity and collectability, matched to the recent explosive interest in all things psyche, garage, and underground, you would be excused for thinking that this slice of perfect late '60s progressive underground pop would have been given the full reissue and remastering treatment already. Surprisingly, though, you would very much be mistaken.

But to those of you who know the checkered history of Kaleidoscope, this will perhaps come as no surprise! Following the discovery of a batch of the original master tapes that were languishing in the vaults of Universal and have laid largely unheard for 50 years, further following a couple of shared festival billings at Austin and Copenhagen Psyche Festival with another legend of the scene, Mr. Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 fame.

Sonic has been holed up in his Lisbon studio, painstakingly remastering the album from the original ¼" tapes. The remastering of these ¼" tapes though is only part of the story, as along with the discovery of these a significant number of ½" tapes and other material was also discovered which is penned for a future release when the band's entire works will be presented in a definitive box set of all four of their studio albums (including all their Fairfield Parlour recordings) plus BBC Sessions, live recordings, alternative takes, new mixes, unreleased tracks, and material from the band's own archive including pre-Kaleidoscope demos when they were known as both The Sidekicks and The Key.