Forma Tadre’s ‘Navigator’ pressed on vinyl for 30th anniversary
Forma Tadre’s 1996 debut album “Navigator” is now available on vinyl for the first time via new label Analog Frontier, limited to 300 copies.
German electro-industrial project Forma Tadre’s 1996 debut album “Navigator” is available on vinyl for the first time, as the opening release on the new label Analog Frontier. This 30th Anniversary Edition is a 2xLP gatefold pressed on 160g Electric Seaglass Blue vinyl, limited to 300 copies, and is sold through Analog Frontier’s Bandcamp page alongside a digital edition.
Analog Frontier describes itself as a label dedicated to pressing CD and digital-only albums to vinyl for the first time, and “Navigator” is its debut release. The gatefold carries entirely new artwork built from period polar-expedition photography. The images include work by Herbert G. Ponting, official photographer of the British Antarctic (“Terra Nova”) expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. The package also includes a double-sided insert with the album’s full lyrics.
Side D of the vinyl edition adds two tracks that have never been released before: “First Land,” recorded in 1995, and “No Gene For Fate,” from 1997. Both date from the “Navigator” era of Forma Tadre’s catalogue. The 13-track edition runs:
- “Navigator (Part One)”
- “FX on a Human Subject”
- “Plasmasleep”
- “Date Unknown”
- “Navigator (Part Two)”
- “Serpent Charmer”
- “Looking Glass Men”
- “Mesozoic Tree Ferns”
- “Gates”
- “Celebrate the Cult”
- “Navigator (Part Three)”
- “First Land”
- “No Gene For Fate”
“Navigator” was written, produced and mixed by Andreas Meyer, the sole member of Forma Tadre. Andreas Torkler handled mastering for the original eleven tracks. Meyer mastered “First Land” and “No Gene For Fate” himself, and Steve Eagle did additional mastering for the vinyl cut.
B.A. Donahoo designed the new gatefold artwork, with additional art elements by Jared Cote and Steve Eagle. Hansjoerg Schifferer plays guitar on “Serpent Charmer” and “Celebrate the Cult.” The lacquer was cut at Complete Mastering and the vinyl pressed at Onyx Record Press.
Originally released in 1996 on the German label Off Beat, “Navigator” was Meyer’s first release as the sole member of Forma Tadre. The album departed stylistically from the project’s earlier three-piece incarnation. “Navigator” centers on a theme of exploration and combines symphonic instrumental passages with EBM tracks. Meyer’s interest in the occult and in H.P. Lovecraft informed tracks including “Date Unknown,” “Celebrate the Cult,” “Gates” and “Mesozoic Tree Ferns.”
The 30th Anniversary Edition is available as a digital album and as the limited vinyl edition on Bandcamp. Shipping of physical copies to the EU is currently on hold due to new EU customs policies.
About Forma Tadre
Forma Tadre began in 1986 as a three-piece band in Lower Saxony, Germany, with Andreas Meyer among its members. Meyer took the project’s name from a portmanteau of Tangerine Dream’s album “Force Majeure,” after Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra” prompted him to buy his first synthesizer. The band played live and recorded the EP “Brightful Times” in 1987, produced by German producer Robert “Bobby” Giddens, who had also worked with DAF. Two of the three members subsequently left without recording further material. Meyer was the sole member of Forma Tadre by 1994.
After the trio dissolved, Haujobb’s Björn Junemann encouraged Meyer to send demo tapes to record labels, which led Off Beat to sign him. In 1996, Meyer released “Navigator” as his first album under the Forma Tadre name, built partly from songs he had written separately from the band under the working title “P-Songs.” Around 1995, Meyer also worked with a female vocalist on a separate, classically-oriented project named Eisriesenkönig, which released a single track on Off Beat’s 1996 compilation “The O-Files.” After “Navigator,” Daniel Myer of Haujobb approached Meyer to collaborate, and the two formed Newt. The duo released two albums and a single between 1997 and 1999. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Meyer produced remixes for acts including Haujobb, La Floa Maldita, New Mind, Wumpscut and Assemblage 23.
Forma Tadre’s second album, “Automate,” followed in 1998 and shifted toward a more ambient sound. After close to a decade of silence, Meyer returned Forma Tadre in 2008 with the 13-track album “The Music of Erich Zann,” inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name. In 2019, “Brightful Times” was reissued as a hybrid vinyl-and-digital edition that added eight tracks recorded between 1987 and 1992 to the original four-track EP. In 2020, Forma Tadre released two archival anthologies. “Navigator Travelogue” collected remixes, singles, demos and unreleased tracks from 1994-1997, and “P-SongX, the hidden path” gathered personal recordings that predated “Navigator.” In 2021, Forma Tadre released “Geiger’s Day”, its first album issued on CD in 20 years. In 2025, the project followed with the digital archival compilation “Seven Century Factory”, which drew on demos and sketches recorded between 1997 and 2007.
This reissue follows the 2019 vinyl-and-digital edition of “Brightful Times.” It extends Forma Tadre’s archival reissue campaign to “Navigator,” the project’s 1996 debut album.
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