Tangerine Dream - Phaedra

By Daniel Johnson
October 4, 2007

When Edgar Froese brought his Tangerine Dream to life in 1967, the seeds of deconstruction that would dissolve the band's acid rock into a disembodied pool of first-generation synth wash had already been sown - in Froese's mind at least. He imagined the quintet as a canvas for the Dadaist notions he'd developed while studying under Salvador Dali and bottom feeding from the Berlin avant-garde scene. It just took the Dream a few releases to get there - to un-band in a sense, dropping the rock instruments entirely. Their their new toys? Heefty analog synthesizers and mellotrons, which weighed about as much as a refrigerator but were the only place to go for the hot, largely unheard-of cosmic sounds. It was space-aged voodoo at the press of a key. Tangerine Dream were reborn and lugged their massive machines around to tour cathedrals while releasing synth epics with super-sized track lengths and, in the process, inspired a tone and scope for electronic music that would influence everything from Enya to M83.

Phaedra was probably the most sublime statement of this early period, if only for the unstoppably gorgeous "Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares," the second part in a four-movement symphony of sound design. It's one of the most regal chord progressions ever invented and, played through the swishy filters and helicopter-blade bubbles of their sequencers, sounds dark and subliminal, like a person getting their memories shop-vac'd out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style.