Tangerine Tree

Tangerine Tree was a fan project operating from 2002 through 2006 with the goal of collecting, preserving and distributing unreleased concerts and other audio material by the band Tangerine Dream. The creators of the Tangerine Tree project received permission from Tangerine Dream to release the collection on a strict non-profit basis. Several of the Tangerine Tree volumes have been used as the basis for official Tangerine Dream releases. The project collected just under 300 hours of material (291:39:26).

Material was collected from audience recordings, soundboard recordings, recordings of radio and TV transmissions and in some cases the purchase of studio masters. Only recordings of a high quality and a unique nature were considered for the core Tangerine Tree volumes. These recordings were professionally re-mastered and released on CD-R and accompanied by high quality artwork for the CD labels and case liners.

Tangerine Leaves releases were based on material that did not meet the quality standards of the Tangerine Tree or from concerts that were not considered notable among a series of concerts. If a better source was found, a Tangerine Leaves volume might have been deprecated and replaced by a Tangerine Tree volume. Starting from 1980, the music played during each of the shows in a single Tangerine Dream concert tour were very similar, so it was impractical to release many volumes of the Tangerine Tree with similar content.

Audio DVD Tree volumes consisted of about two sets of the Tangerine Tree volumes on a DVD that played to a slideshow of the CD artwork. These releases were standard DVDs with a menu structure and were available in both PAL and NTSC versions.

For almost four decades, much of this material had been traded on an informal basis and many were sold as bootlegs. Much was unidentified, misidentified, low quality and/or a multiple generation copy. Tapes were starting to degrade, as many were as much as forty years old. In the late 1990s, several collectors created the Digital Tape Tree project and distributed the material on CD-R. Collector Heiko Heerssen received permission from Tangerine Dream as long as there was no commercial gains from the project and on 9 January 2002 began to make appeals on the Tangerine Dream discussion group to gather all of the material together and create a formal project that would use the best available sources to provide the definitive version of each recording. A large number of previously unknown recordings were discovered and included in the project. All of the Digital Tape Tree volumes were replaced by later Tangerine Tree or Tangerine Leaves volumes.

In September 2002, before Tangerine Tree set three was released, an interim Classic Tree was established for distributing copies of non-remastered already-circulating bootlegs. All of the concerts used in the Classic Tree were subsequently released as Tangerine Tree volumes in superior quality, rendering the Classic Tree volumes and the bootlegs they represented obsolete.

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