Irmin Schmidt

"Here is a further soundtrack offering by former Can-keyboarder Irmin Schmidt. His next album will be an autonomous non-soundtrack, but will only follow four years later. The previous Filmmusik albums were collections of selected music from different soundtracks, but this one has all music of the TV series Rote Erde. This series was a major success in Germany, and probably for this reason it was decided to release the soundtrack as full album. As a consequence, unfortunately, most music here cannot stand quite as convincing on its own as the exciting and adventurous Filmmusik 2, 3 & 4. Also, the music is mostly melodic, nicely consumable, and somewhat repetitive, with the main theme used in various ways (as makes sense for a soundtrack). In fact, as a soundtrack, this worked very well, and furthermore the main theme (Titelmusik) is stunningly beautiful (if not exactly progressive, despite the somewhat nonstandard chord progression), so chances are this sold quite a bit better than Irmin's earlier collections; let's not forget all of this came at a time when progressive music wasn't exactly loved by the media."