Tangerine Dream – Phaedra -

597

5 Stars

Audio CD (paid link)

Tangerine Dream was formed in 1967 by Edgar Froese in Germany. Little did the world know what a pioneer this man would become.

Froese virtually single-handedly created Electronic Music / Electronica / New Age Music and many other names given to Tangerine Dream’s music as it is very hard to put it in a pigeonhole and give it a label.

Tangerine Dream have released over one hundred official studio albums, over sixty soundtrack albums (including such smash hit movies as Firestarter and Risky Business), live albums, plus the soundtracks to many TV series and video games.

Edgar Froese as a solo artist has released over twenty-five albums. The amazing thing is they also had an extremely heavy touring schedule as well. If you add on officially approved bootleg albums from the Tangerine Tree series (of which at present there are over eighty-five) and a collaboration with Brian May of Queen, you are looking at over two hundred albums. Quite a collection for somebody to have. Even stranger if they try to listen to them end to end.

An early picture of Tangerine Dream on Stage. Keyboards on either side and for this section of the show a female violinist adding color and shade to proceedings. At least giving the male members of the crowd something nice to watch on stage, apart from two blokes sitting still under a light show. Good job with the music, and light shows were spectacular.

Although Edgar Froese was the only continuous member of the band until his sudden and tragic death in 2015, the classic lineup of Tangerine Dream has always been Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann, who performed together in the mid-1970s.

After hearing some improvisational music from Edgar Froese, Richard Branson signed them to his new Virgin Records. The first album from Tangerine Dream with the Virgin Label was Phaedra in 1974. The album reached number fifteen in the British charts where it stayed for fifteen weeks with sales going into six figures. Quite incredible for that era to have such a hit album with no radio play to back it up. Sales were by word of mouth only. Whereas sales were miraculous in the United Kingdom, sales barely reached six thousand in their homeland of Germany.

The music took its listener into uncharted territory. The opening song is based on the improvisation that Richard Branson had heard before. Clocking in at over seventeen minutes long, it takes you on a journey of many musical colors. It starts with soaring mellotron lines and hypnotic pulsing sequencer patterns with waves of synthesizers coming at you from all directions.

*In later years Tangerine Dream normally had a drummer center stage, giving the audience a focal point and some much needed action.*

Many people at the time had to go out and buy new equipment to play this new sort of music as the old music systems just were not up for the job. The title track took up the first side in the days of vinyl.

Opening side two was ‘Mysterious Semblance At The Strand of Nightmares,’ a ballad compared to what had gone before it on side one. If a very eerie ballad.

‘Movements of a Visionary’ starts off with bursts of colored noise and sparkling showers of VCS3 sounds that are soon joined by synthesized pulses that build throughout the musical structure, finally letting go at the end. The final music, a solo synthesizer piece, is provided on sequence ‘c.’

Over forty years later, the music is still quite mysterious but mightily compelling.

Even after Edgar Froese’s death, Tangerine Dream carry on producing albums and playing live concerts. Before his death, Edgar Froese chose Thorsten Quaeschning as his successor, so Edgar Froese’s musical legacy may last many lifetimes. So might his band.