Christopher Franke Appears at Anime Expo

A special guest of Pioneer at ANIME EXPO, German-born musician and composer Christopher Franke appeared in the Pioneer room on Saturday afternoon to answer questions about his work as music composer for the TENCHI MUYO IN LOVE movie as well as his music for the science-fiction TV series BABYLON 5. Questions ranged from his feelings about scoring music for an anime film to how his musical style has changed since his electronic music days. Franke was a principal member of the electronic keyboard band Tangerine Dream from 1969 to 1987, a group noted for ushering in a new era of "electronic eclectic" music.
Mr. Franke discussed how he scored the music for TENCHI by first watching TENCHI OVA and television shows to determine the look and feel of the characters and situations, then proceeded to create the musical backgrounds and themes based on film footage from the movie. Mr. Franke turned out to be a very personable man, willing to talk at length about specific synthesizer methods and techniques in addition to addressing questions about his years in Tangerine Dream. For scoring music with the Berlin Philharmonic, for example, he implements a real-time studio quality digital telephone session, linking Berlin and Los Angeles and enabling him to work without having to leave his studio.
Franke also noted that much of his motivation for writing the kind of music heard in shows such as BABYLON 5 or the TENCHI movie comes from his own interest in the science-fiction genre. When asked about a possible live concert tour, Franke expressed interest in doing another series of stage performances sometime in the near future; on August 24th at the Shrine in Los Angeles, Pioneer is hosting an event that includes a 30-minute live concert by Franke, featuring highlights from the TENCHI movie.
At the conclusion of the panel. Mr. Franke was kind enough to provide autographs and take pictures.
Franke founded the record label Sonic Images in 1991. Sonic Images not only provides a venue for releasing his own work but that of other musicians as well. The Sonic Images web site provides a full catalog as well as ftp-accessable files of Franke compositions in both sheet music and MIDI format.

--Christopher Scott Rider