{"id":31211,"date":"2026-07-08T05:30:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T09:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=31211"},"modified":"2026-07-09T07:59:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T11:59:09","slug":"the-romance-of-peter-baumann-part-1-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/the-romance-of-peter-baumann-part-1-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Romance of Peter Baumann (Part 1 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A much shorter edit of this conversation (and the associated one discussing Schnitzler) first appeared on The Tonearm<\/em>.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201870s and early \u201880s that began with Romance 76<\/i>. He also worked closely on projects with celebrated experimental musician (and groundbreaking pioneer in krautrock) Conrad Schnitzler.<\/p>\n

Bureau B has recently released vinyl reissues of Baumann\u2019s Romance 76<\/i> and two of Schnitzler\u2019s challenging albums, Convex<\/i> and Control<\/i>. I spoke with Peter Baumann about his solo debut, and \u2013 in a third installment \u2013 about his friendship and working methods with Conrad Schnitzler.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Before Tangerine Dream, you played organ in a covers band. What kind of material were you doing? <\/b><\/p>\n

At first it was everything that you would hear in an American Forces GI club in Germany. We played a lot of old classics. \u201cHouse of the Rising Sun\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You joined Tangerine Dream in time for the making of their third album, 1972\u2019s <\/b>Zeit<\/b><\/i>. How did your entry into the group change the group\u2019s direction from what they had been doing with Steve Schroyder as a member?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s an interesting question. Obviously, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Tangerine Dream used a wide array of instruments. Did you yourself have a primary machine that you worked with? <\/b><\/p>\n

Really, anything that made noise!<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, how did you first encounter the landmark EMS VCS3 synthesizer? <\/b><\/p>\n

I remember vividly. Christopher [Franke] said, \u201cIn London, there\u2019s this company that makes these things called synthesizers.\u201d They had a great [promotional] line: \u201cEvery picnic needs a Synthi.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

How do you think that the discovery of that instrument changed your compositional and performance approach? <\/b><\/p>\n

Well, never compositional<\/i>, because we didn\u2019t 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: \u201cI want to go further down that road.\u201d And you could subconsciously feel that in the music, it has some kind of looking forward to \u201cWhat else could relate to where I am right now?\u201d It was a very interesting process.<\/p>\n

In an era when synthesizers had no presets or \u201csave\u201d feature, were there times where you would stumble across a particular texture that you liked, only to lose it forever?<\/b><\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Later, when we did [1974\u2019s] Phaedra<\/i>, 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\u2019t have the [\u201csave\u201d] option, and we didn\u2019t sweat it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the \u201870s, what did you see as the relationship between studio recordings and live performance? <\/b><\/p>\n

Well, you can take a pee break when you\u2019re in the studio!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What were you intending to do with <\/b>Romance 76<\/b><\/i> that you felt that you couldn\u2019t within the context of Tangerine Dream?<\/b><\/p>\n

I made Romance 76<\/i> while I was still a member of the band. Edgar was doing a solo record called Aqua<\/i>. 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: \u201cOh, this is fun! Let me do some more of it.\u201d It was really just the enjoyment of recording. There was no big idea behind it.<\/p>\n

So you didn\u2019t necessarily begin with the goal of making a solo album?<\/b><\/p>\n

It was in the back of [my] mind, but I didn\u2019t construct it. It really was improv, or a similar process. \u201cOh, I like this. I\u2019ll do a little bit more of that.\u201d I tried a lot of things, half of which I threw away. But it never was like, \u201cOh, I have to make a record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31214,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,43,64,73],"tags":[5922,2116],"class_list":["post-31211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-krautrock","category-reissue","category-vinyl","tag-peter-baumann","tag-tangerine-dream","cat-41-id","cat-43-id","cat-64-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31211"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31872,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31211\/revisions\/31872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}