The Keep (1997) is the twenty-third soundtrack album by Tangerine Dream and their fifty-eighth overall. It is the soundtrack to the movie The Keep (1983). A limited run of 150 CDs were sold at a concert by the group in the UK in 1997. Virgin soon announced that the album would be available for general release in early 1998, but legal issues with the film studio stopped the release. In 1999, Tangerine Dream's own record label sold 300 copies of the Millennium Booster album set that included The Keep with a different cover. It was finally given a proper release in 2020, as part of the Pilots of Purple Twilight: The Virgin Recordings 1980–1983 boxset. This release omitted three tracks, and has a different track sequence.

Track listing

Of the sixteen songs on the soundtrack, only four actually were actually used in the film. "Puer Natus Est Nobis" is a Christmas mass composed by Thomas Tallis around 1554 - this track is from the introit, "Gloria", and is credited as "Gloria" from the "Mass for Four Voices". "Canzone" is an original composition used in the film. "Heritage Survival" and "The Night in Romania" are both segments taken from the 1982 Dominion concert, with some slight mixing and overdubbing. Both of these tracks, as well as segments from the Logos Live album can also be heard in the film. "Sign in the Dark" is also taken from the Dominion concert, but was not used in the film. A rerecorded version of "The Challenger's Arrival" was released on the album Tangerine Dream Plays Tangerine Dream in 2006, and in 2007, "Ancient Powerplant" was included in the Ocean Waves Collection, available for download from the Tangerine Dream website.

Personnel

Additional personnel

The vinyl release

A persistent story that The Keep was released on 12" vinyl in 1984 has become an urban legend. Several Tangerine Dream fans relate a story whereby they saw the record in the shops but were not able to purchase it due to a lack of funds. Upon returning to the shop, they found that the record has been withdrawn for some nebulous legal reason, and that all copies have been destroyed. No actual copies of such a vinyl release had ever been noted publicly by any collector until 2013. A bootleg LP pressing of the 1984 LP was issued in 2001 in Italy or France under the title The Keep Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, on Sunday Records (SUN-65275). Almost no one realized at the time that the music on it was from the 1984 LP and not the leaked studio tapes that comprised the contents of most of the bootleg CDs nor the official TDI CDs, and so many of the people who own this bootleg LP might never have played it and therefore don't realize its significance to this day. A track from this LP entitled "The Night in Romania" appeared on YouTube on 16 December 2013, said to commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the release of the film. This track was discovered years ago by Stéphane Piter, who has a website devoted to the film and is making a documentary on the film, but he didn't think the track was real until he shared it with Steven Feldman of the website Molasar's Homepage on 29 October 2013. Steven recognized that this version of "The Night in Romania" is not the same as the version on the officially-released TDI CD, mainly because the track ends like the version in the film, not the version on the TDI CD. Notably, a studio version of this tune had never been bootlegged. Additionally, Kit Rae premiered a photo of what may be the front cover of the 1984 LP on his website The Keep Score by Tangerine Dream: Strange Obsessions for the Music from an Obscure 1983 Supernatural Horror Film in November 2013.

Radio interviews

In 1987, Sender Freies Berlin interviewed Edgar Froese, and three tracks from The Keep were played. Westdeutscher Rundfunk interviewed Froese in 1989 and played three tracks from The Keep:

Bootlegs

Covers

Fan releases