Peter Baumann

Born on January 29, 1953, in Berlin, keyboardist and composer Peter Baumann spent many years as a core participant in the pioneering electronic ensemble Tangerine Dream. A performer schooled in classical technique, he started his first rock outfit at age 14 and passed through several transient bands before entering Tangerine Dream in 1971. Over the next seven years, interrupted only by brief absences, he helped widen the scope of electronic music on landmark releases such as Zeit, Atem, and Phaedra. Although he departed the group in 1977, his solo path had already begun the previous year with Romance '76, an album that signaled a shift toward electronic pop frameworks. He also produced Cluster’s 1979 album Grosses Wasser and additional solo recordings by the duo’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

Following his own 1979 release Trans-Harmonic Nights, Baumann left Germany for New York City and turned his attention to Repeat Repeat, the most dance-floor-directed of his projects, which appeared in 1981. Two years later he joined Conrad Schnitzler and Gregor Schnitzler in the new-wave side project Berlin Express, which issued the single “The Russians Are Coming.” After finishing the more pop-oriented Strangers in the Night in 1983, he launched Private Music, a label that grew into a leading new-age imprint through its roster of Yanni, John Tesh, and Shadowfax. The enterprise occupied most of his efforts for the rest of the decade. In 1990 he seemed ready to resume performing with Blue Room, whose members included Paul Haslinger and John Baxter, yet the band’s intended debut was abandoned in 1992. Discouraged, Baumann divested his stake in Private Music and withdrew from the music industry altogether. He later settled in San Francisco, where in 2009 he founded the Baumann Foundation to explore the nature of awareness in relation to human health and well-being.

Late in 2014 the impulse to make music returned; he installed a studio in his basement and traveled to Austria to reconnect with Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese for a possible new collaboration. Froese died soon afterward, but Baumann continued working that year with the group’s remaining members. His first solo album since 1983, Machines of Desire, was released by Bureau B in 2016.