Sorcerer (1977) was the first soundtrack album by the German band Tangerine Dream. It reached No.25 on the UK Albums Chart in a 7-week run, to become Tangerine Dream's third highest-charting album in the UK.
Sorcerer, the movie, is a 1977 American thriller directed and produced by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou. The second adaptation of Georges Arnaud's 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur, it has been widely considered a remake of the 1953 film The Wages of Fear, although Friedkin disagreed with this assessment. The plot depicts four outcasts from varied backgrounds meeting in a South American village, where they are assigned to transport cargoes of aged, poorly kept dynamite that is so unstable that it is 'sweating' its dangerous basic ingredient, nitroglycerin.
Sorcerer marked the first Hollywood film score for the German krautrock and electronic band Tangerine Dream. William Friedkin, during his visit in Germany, attended their concert in a derelict church in the Black Forest. The band seemed to him "on the cutting edge of the electronic synthesizer sound" that soon would become a staple in mainstream culture. He assessed their music as a mixture of classical music played on synthesizers and "the new pop sound", and described the experience as "mesmerizing".
