The Romance of Peter Baumann (Part 1 of 2)

A much shorter edit of this conversation (and the associated one discussing Schnitzler) first appeared on The Tonearm.

Peter Baumann has had a fascinating career. Long before founding indie record label Private Music, and even longer before establishing the Baumann Foundation think tank in San Francisco, Baumann was a strong melodic force within German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream. While still with that group, he launched a solo career, crafting a quartet of albums in the ‘70s and early ‘80s that began with Romance 76. He also worked closely on projects with celebrated experimental musician (and groundbreaking pioneer in krautrock) Conrad Schnitzler.

Bureau B has recently released vinyl reissues of Baumann’s Romance 76 and two of Schnitzler’s challenging albums, Convex and Control. I spoke with Peter Baumann about his solo debut, and – in a third installment – about his friendship and working methods with Conrad Schnitzler.

Before Tangerine Dream, you played organ in a covers band. What kind of material were you doing?

At first it was everything that you would hear in an American Forces GI club in Germany. We played a lot of old classics. “House of the Rising Sun” and things like that; really standard American fare of the time. The reason we got there was that the guy who put the band together was American, so he had access to the clubs in Berlin. Every weekend we had a gig there for six hours in the evening. We had to repeat ourselves a few times, playing the same songs.

That went on for a couple of years, and then a bass player friend of mine and I were interested in doing experiments. And that led to where I ended up.

You joined Tangerine Dream in time for the making of their third album, 1972’s Zeit. How did your entry into the group change the group’s direction from what they had been doing with Steve Schroyder as a member?

Well, that’s an interesting question. Obviously, it’s hard to pinpoint. I always tended to be very spacious: the more echo and reverb, the better. And not too much high end, which can be aggressive in and of itself. So I was emphasizing a lot of warm, low-end atmospheric sounds with some accents that had that high end on them.

Tangerine Dream used a wide array of instruments. Did you yourself have a primary machine that you worked with?

Really, anything that made noise!

Speaking of which, how did you first encounter the landmark EMS VCS3 synthesizer?

I remember vividly. Christopher [Franke] said, “In London, there’s this company that makes these things called synthesizers.” They had a great [promotional] line: “Every picnic needs a Synthi.” We visited them in a little townhouse, and we were in the backyard starting to play with this thing. You had all the sounds in this little box! First it was an L-shaped [setup], and then they had the whole Synthi in a suitcase. We were just fascinated. Edgar [Froese] bought one, Christopher bought one, and I bought one.

How do you think that the discovery of that instrument changed your compositional and performance approach?

Well, never compositional, because we didn’t compose anything, ever; it was all improvised. And now that you ask me, I think that one of the core elements that worked for our approach to music was that it was always a process of discovery. You would feel something: “I want to go further down that road.” And you could subconsciously feel that in the music, it has some kind of looking forward to “What else could relate to where I am right now?” It was a very interesting process.

In an era when synthesizers had no presets or “save” feature, were there times where you would stumble across a particular texture that you liked, only to lose it forever?

We didn’t concern ourselves with that. There was no option to do that. I had a Farfisa organ that had a couple of presets, so that was about as far as I could reconstruct anything.

Later, when we did [1974’s] Phaedra, for instance, we would record something and then fly it into different sections, or we would keep it for later because it was a cool sound. But as far as the sound itself, we didn’t have the [“save”] option, and we didn’t sweat it.

In the ‘70s, what did you see as the relationship between studio recordings and live performance?

Well, you can take a pee break when you’re in the studio!

I think that the core of the [live and studio] pieces had a similar origin, but [in the studio] we did some overdubs, we did some editing, and also we could fine-tune the outboard gear. We could do all that much better in the studio than live, certainly.

What were you intending to do with Romance 76 that you felt that you couldn’t within the context of Tangerine Dream?

I made Romance 76 while I was still a member of the band. Edgar was doing a solo record called Aqua. We had some extra time between tours, and we never really rehearsed. We tried out new instruments, but there was plenty of time. And in one of the rooms where we tried out new things, I took an eight-track recorder and started to play around: “Oh, this is fun! Let me do some more of it.” It was really just the enjoyment of recording. There was no big idea behind it.

So you didn’t necessarily begin with the goal of making a solo album?

It was in the back of [my] mind, but I didn’t construct it. It really was improv, or a similar process. “Oh, I like this. I’ll do a little bit more of that.” I tried a lot of things, half of which I threw away. But it never was like, “Oh, I have to make a record.”

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