Artist: Tangerine Dream
Record: Phaedra
Label: Virgin
Year: 1973
Sounds Like: Krautrock, Ambient, Electronica, Prog
Country: Germany
Tangerine Dream were/are a an Electronica/Progressive band from Berlin, Germany. They have been releasing albums and music for more than 40 years with Edgar Froese as major figure in the band. Froese died in 2015 and with him a lot of the concept of the group. Tangerine Dream had multiple line up changes and their sound was mostly focused on experimentation and argumentation of synthetic formulas to develop audible emotions and perceptions. Phaedra was their first release under Virgin Label departing from their previous experimental and cult label Ohr. Recorded in only six weeks, Phaedra received practically no Airplay, however it managed to reach number 15 in the UK and was a financial success for the band. John Peel regarded Phaedra as the best album of 1974.
Regina:
This record is like that impulse you have had once or twice in your life but never managed to do anything with it. Progressive rock, loved and hated in the modern musical culture, is a decisive standard to assimilate what we hear today, it bases its existence on a sort of philosophic ideal in which we all are capable to keep discovering sounds and wondering ''why?''. Why do we have to listen to the same stuff all the time and why we can't break the rules? Why should we break them, as well. Progressive rock goes and orbits towards that, but it could have been impossible to imagine it without Krautrock. You know, 'Kraut'' electronic music taken to a mainstream level or at least to a popular level. Krautrock is the essence of Germany; the Germany destroyed by war and sadly taken by American culture to a massive, and sometimes, annoying degree. Electronic music was loathed by the time Krautrock started, It was perceived as anti rock music and distant to all the things that Rock (American and Brit rock) represented. Yeah, rockers are sometimes the most closed minded creatures alive. But Germans, tireless as they are, didn't give up and kept experimenting with their noises, with their synths and with their souls and brains. Providing their machines with exquisite sensations and textures to be able to express their synesthetic random symptoms. This is Phaedra. Water always joins water and Germans, cold, androgynous, machine-like creatures found in Kraut music and electronica, their grial, the things that they could exhibit as theirs. Tangerine Dream, among many other samples of raging technological sounds (Kraftwerk, Neu, Can, Ash Ra Tempel or Cluster) were there to build the wall. Phaedra is the best album by TD, ominous but relaxing, easy to enjoy but also weird and disturbing, hypnotic but also unnerving. When you close your eyes and pay attention, you can feel like swimming in stars, and this happened in 1973, thinking that something could recreate such a tremendous experience so many years ago, is nothing but astonishing. That VSC3 so 70s yet so spectral and coming from shouts of Lost cosmonauts is the imprevisible amplification of the master minds behind this blatant shock wave. This artificial sound has more soul than many orchestras out there. The juxtaposition of sequences with mellotrón to create a tribal sound and the wake of electronic music at early age. Become a new lost cosmonaut, and have nightmares of despair and menacing starry emissions.