“Phaedra” gets the nod here as an originator, but the classic Tangerine Dream lineup of Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke went on to produce three other albums of similar quality, “Rubycon” (1975), “Ricochet” (1975) and “Stratosfear” (1976). (“Phaedra” was one of Virgin Records’ first hits, following “Tubular Bells.” It cracked the top 20 in Britain and charted in the U.S.) To the adventurous record buyer of 1974, “Phaedra” wasn’t easy listening, but it wasn’t work, either. The synthesizer-driven sound seemed less in the realm of the mad scientist and more in the realm of the artist. It felt like analogue music, even as it pointed to a digital future. One of Tangerine Dream’s early successes was in making electronic music that a lot of people could wrap their heads around. “Phaedra” took up half of the album and is at its heart. That was the sequencer part (the driving bass notes) of ‘Phaedra,’ ” Baumann said. “Edgar and I were in the control room and thought, oh, that sounds great, let’s record it. The hypnotic title track (18 minutes) took shape as group member Christopher Franke was experimenting with the sequencer. … Technically everything that could go wrong did go wrong.” Tangerine Dream on Amazon “Just tuning the instrument took several hours each day, because at the time there were no presets or memory banks. “We were using the Moog sequencer for the first time,” Froese recalled of the sessions at the end of 1973. The late ’60s brought quite a few adventurous long tracks to popular music, but few soundscapes as we know them were heard in rock music before “Phaedra.” Tangerine Dream elevated soundscapes to an artform. Group leader Edgar Froese called it kosmische musik. Today we’d likely file “Phaedra” under electronica, trance, dark ambient or even progressive, but make no mistake: This is music for heads, strange, hypnotic and spacey. (Tangerine Dream took its name from a misheard line in “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”) The trio’s psychedelic roots ran deep. It feeds off some of the great works of 1960s underground rock, notably those of Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson and band favorite Pink Floyd. Tangerine Dream’s classic “Phaedra” came at the dimming of the first psychedelic period. Purists will point to even earlier pioneers in electronic music, such as the American minimalists Steven Reich and Terry Riley, both of whom found joy in repetition and built on the crazy-quilt compositions of Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen. And Tangerine Dream itself released a quartet of albums in its “pink years” before “Phaedra,” including “Alpha Centauri” and “Zeit,” both offering plenty of room to wander for heads. Klaus Schulze, who briefly played drums in Tangerine Dream, released “Irrlicht” and “Cyborg” earlier in the 1970s, about the time Kraftwerk began its sonic adventures. Silver Apples operated out of the underground in the late ’60s. Miles Davis entered his electronic phase in the summer of 1969 with “In a Silent Way.” The same year, the English group White Noise used an early synthesizer on its dark and loopy sonic collage “An Electric Storm.” Beaver & Krause released “The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music” in 1967, about the time they evangelized for the Moog synthesizer’s psychedelic potentials at the Monterey Pop Festival. While “Phaedra” broke new ground, technologically and in its aesthetics, it has many antecedents in rock and jazz: That eerie pulsating wash would resound in myriad ways down the decades, across several genres and media. With 1974’s “Phaedra” came the introduction of a sequencer, leading almost immediately to what is widely recognized as the Tangerine Dream sound. Tape loops, analogue synthesizers, found sounds and typical rock instrumentation stirred the brew for the group’s first four experimental albums. Tangerine Dream came out of West Berlin’s psychedelic/surrealist art scene, with that aesthetic permeating much of its work through the mid-1970s. “We didn’t have psychedelic drugs,” the keyboardist told Shindig! magazine in 2020. Tangerine Dream veteran Peter Baumann says the German group’s groundbreaker “Phaedra” was a result of “happy accidents” - not hallucinogenics.
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