Artist: Tangerine Dream
Album: Phaedra

Released: 20 February 1974
Label: Virgin

Phaedra Tangerine Dream
Everything has a beginning. For Spacemusic it was the 1974 release of Phaedra (37:33). Presenting ideas so far outside normal experience a new way of listening had to be established in order to fully appreciate its four innovative realizations. As our minds grasped and strained to receive such wonder the more sensitive among us still contemplate how this miracle of electricity could ever have been made by human hand. Free from the corruptions of tradition Phaedra astounded listeners with its immense scale and otherworldly perspective. The question of what counted as EM became newly charged, as the resulting sparks illuminated a time yet to come.

After several early releases of surreal sound collage Tangerine Dream produced the groundbreaking Phaedra. Art belongs to the subconscious, and this work did so attempt to portray sonically the most enigmatic region of the brain. Seeming like a sound structure the listener was passing through, meeting this music at its initial release felt like an encounter with something too immense or powerful for our reasoning to comprehend. Unable to look to the world for answers, we remain quietly stunned.

While the timbre and tone of Phaedra were stirring in and of themselves, they were also part of a greater concept. In their search for meaning Tangerine Dream deployed murmuring Moogs, organ drones, ethereal Mellotrons and engine room sequencers - exposing us to instruments and ideas unknown to previous generations. Pushing the music field forward several light years, uninhabited hymns emerge from a cloud of dreams hovering above a darkening sonic plain. Heightening the ominous character of the soundscape, a surging mixture of thought zone oscillations, modulated effects and summoning chords insist on a strange, beautiful independence. Heading for mysterious regions, we move west with the night.

Today there is a nostalgia for the decade of discovery specific to the 1970s - where every day it seemed new visions and perspectives were informing forward-looking musicians, and so making their way to us by way of the local record store. Each new album reframed the one that preceded it, and held amazing new realms on just the two sides of a vinyl LP. The promise of technology, along with our cosmic yearning and faith in the future all balanced beautifully on Phaedra - after which The Universe seemed a bit more comprehensible. Using Electronic Music to explore ideas of the spirit and further the human condition, this music was among the first signs of a new age - which we wait for the world to recognize still.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   21 May 2026

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