Phaedra - Tangerine Dream

Advantages: Smooth, slick, scary, silvery
Disadvantages: Sizeable, short, sexless

That's how Paul Morely described his experience of listening to this album; and you can understand why, it's far from innocent. Entirely instrumental and with no discernable temperature, "Phaedra" is a trudge through a swamp of early-modern electronica: slow, misty and bleak, still human despite being completely mechanical, strangely alive, like soup. Each of its four tracks, unsettlingly, is shorter than the previous one (except the first, "Phaedra", ...
...the day) - "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares", a title so superb that the CD version of this album can't choose between "strand" and "stand", and frankly, who can in good conscience? is a ten minute, well, nightmare, beginning with the distant sounds of laughing children playing in an abandoned factory, and ending in a far from aerodynamic wash in the clouds of Jupiter, a la the dialogue-less sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But ... Read review

Advantages: One of the best 'electronic' albums ever
Disadvantages: It is somewhat short

...After the success of their 1974 release "Phaedra", Tangerine Dream released their last organic sounding masterpiece "Rubycon", before becoming a more conventional sounding electronic band. To try and describe the purely instrumental music on this album is difficult. Most people regard electronic music as pings, beeps and other more farty sounds, but here the early synthesisers and manipulated sounds create a wash of noise somewhat like the aural equivalent of a watercolour. The first piece (Rubycon Part One) sounds like a life-cycle of some alien sound creature. The beginning with its gong like sounds conjuring up something stirring in a dark damp cave before bursting into life in the sunshine with eerie bird-like calling. A pulsing sequencer sound builds up to carry our creature onwards through layers of sounds forming, swirling... Read review

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