Phaedra [Original recording remastered]

I first heard this record in 1980 when I first started getting interested in electronic music. It struck me then as fairly unorthodox and pioneering even then, what it must have sounded like in 1973 given the sounds of the time, must have been astonishing.

Given the wave of 'ambient' releases in the eighties and nineties it can be hard to remind yourself the orginality of these soundscapes. It's also astounding to try and get your head around the difficulty of producing an album from the technology (the sheer size of the synthesizers and sequencers was awesome) at the time let alone going on tour with it.

The title track is a menacing, bubbling affair which develops structure as it progreses but never enough to produce a 'beat' as such. The second side has the beauty of 'Strand' and 'Sequent' which must have influenced a whole wave of musicians and studio engineers who heard this record.

It is the ultimate crossover record between their pre-virgin abstract development and the increasing structure of mid-70's output that was to follow.

It's not an exaggeration to say that this one particular album changed my life. I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard it as a naive seventeen year old, shortly after release and the massive effect it had on me as those ethereal sounds first coalesced between and around the speakers. I love it with a passion and play it regularly to this day, finding new aspects of the instrumentation and arrangements to enjoy each time. The sounds are spontaneous and send an icy shiver down ones back, unlike the warmer feel of the followup, the mighty "Rubycon."

Up to the release of Phaedra, I'd had an interest of popular Electronic Music, having been brought up on the likes of the original Doctor Who theme, Wendy (Walter) Carlos, Barry Gray's amazing "spacey" soundtracks and effects for Gerry Anderson's classic TV series' especially the supremely "spacey" ending music of "UFO" and, a little later, TONTO's Expanding Headband, a vintage masterpiece of an album.

None of these aforementioned records/soundtracks prepared me for the first time I heard this album. The other worldly soundscapes, those sequencer rhythms swirling and almost lost in a sea of reverb, getting in tune, building to a climax and then followed by a quieter, more meditative section, completely blew my mind. The other tracks were awesome too, if not *quite* as mind blowing as the title track, although recently I've come to appreciate their worth much more fully, especially "Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares." The final two tracks, "Movements Of A Visionary" and the awsome "Sequent c" sum up TD of this period for me, the delicate sequencing in the former track and the l-o-n-g delays on the flute on the latter final track.

One thing that comes to mind regarding this record is that it would be almost impossible to re-create this again either live, or in the studio. A couple of acts have had a go (not forgetting the awful - in my opinion - Phaedra 2005 by TD's own Edgar Froese), but NOTHING equals the original!

If you have ANY interest in electronically derived music, I'd recommend this CD without hesitation. It was a benchmark in its day and it's fair to say that all of TD's early to mid seventies output (the Peter Baumann years in fan-speak) basically created a whole new genre (not forgetting ex-band member Klaus Schulze, who was also creating lengthy soundscapes with similar instruments to different effect).

One final thing - most early LP's of this record suffered badly from the mid 1970's oil crisis, resulting in noisy LP pressings and poor quality control. The sound quality was a bit ploddy too (I've several LP copies still). The current SBM CD issue sounds very much better to me and it's now possible to play this loudly without the sound muddying up... The end of the title track has also been put at the beginning of the second track for some reason - not a problem if the album is played all the way through!

This album is so important to me, I've had several goes at re-writing this review and cannot quite get across what I wish to say. By today's standards these compositions STILL sound as fresh as if they were done last week. The sound is now better than ever, although a little "dulled" compared to the crisp, squeaky clean sounds of TD's current releases (please give "Madcaps Flaming Duty" and the "Nagasaki" series a few plays to hear what they're doing today)...

"Phaedra" is, of course, the release that rocketed Tangerine Dream into the UK album charts for the first time, back in 1974, taking the conventional pop world by storm. TD were newly signed to Richard Branson's fledgling record company, Virgin, and this album did much to secure the future of both band and label. At the time, the general record-buying public in the UK had never heard anything like this. Brooding synthesiser sounds over complex pulsing sequencer patterns, where the intonation constantly shifted and where tunes and melodies and the other trappings of popular music were entirely absent was a concept entirely alien to the comfortable pop world of 70's Britain. The more ignorant pop critics of the day lambasted it, of course: mostly because they completely failed to understand any of it, and Tangerine Dream failed to fit into any cosy view of how 'pop' and 'rock' music was supposed be! Those people prepared to assess the music with their ears instead of by reading reviews in the music press were happy to be parted from their cash, however--much to the critics' eternal disgust!

The title track opens the disc and is the major work on it: almost 17 minutes worth of absolute perfection! Here you will find soaring Mellotron lines, hypnotic pulsating sequencer patterns and bass guitar lines, together with massive washes of synthesiser sound, quite incredible for the day, all contributing to a captivating whole. There are some amazing moments where the whole tonal centre of the work wanders most disconcertingly: apparently, some of these shifts are accidental and are the result of some frantic retuning of oscillators while the recording was still in progress! (Synths of those days responding drastically to changes in ambient temperature and tended to need constant retuning.) The result, whether intentional or not, is arranged to perfection and still sends shivers down my spine even now, 25 years on! The second half of the 'Phaedra' track is a contemplative mix of singing Mellotron, deep Moog sounds and other shimmering synthesiser voices, which at times sounds almost orchestral in its textures. Incredible!

'Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares' is a beautiful ballad for Mellotron, played over long washes of phased sound and pulsed coloured noise. Its other-worldliness harks back to earlier Tangerine Dream albums, but the delicate Mellotron tones mixed with heavy Moog voices lend it a much more polished air and confirm that Tangerine Dream were now a true musical force to be reckoned with.

'Movements of a Visionary' uses bursts of coloured noise, heavily reverberated and echoed to create an eerie introduction to a sparkling shower of VCS3 sounds, over a simple sequencer pulse. An organ line insinuates itself slowly as more sequencer pulses enter, drifting in and out of phase with each other, while the whole orchestra of sounds explores various ideas, in a way that is reminiscent of works on the earlier album "Atem". Finally, though, this track reduces to a simpler repeating pulse beneath a delicate synthesiser line, which brings it to a gentle conclusion in a way that is suggestive of a new style in TD's music. A short study ('Sequent c'') using a single synth voice then brings this whole epic disc to a close.

This release has been remastered by Simon Heyworth at Chop 'Em Out, and a very creditable job he has done, by and large. The sound leaps out of the speakers in a way it never managed from vinyl and yet remains true to the original. There are the occasional times when the mains hum inherent in the electronic instruments of those days has been exposed rather too much, but this is almost inevitable, I suppose, and it never becomes a major distraction from the beauty of the music. There are a couple of gaffs that have managed to make it through the quality control checking at Virgin, however. The most serious is that the closing minute or so of 'Phaedra' (track 1) has been mistakenly assigned to the opening of track 2 ('Mysterious Semblance...') instead! This is not too much of problem if playing the disc in its entirety, but is a nuisance if you like to programme your player to play single tracks. The other niggle is the poor proof-reading of the sleeve labelling, which has failed to catch the fact that 'Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmare' is incorrectly listed as '... at the Stand of...' in places and also, more seriously, that 'Sequent c'' (read this as 'Sequent middle C') has been nonsensically labelled as 'Sequent 'C'' throughout. All of this doesn't actually matter two hoots, of course, except that the disc is labelled "Definitive Edition", so you'd think they'd have taken a bit more care about these things, wouldn't you? (The purist in me is also saddened by the fact that the gatefold paintings by Edgar Froese that appeared in the original vinyl release have not made it into the CD sleeve liner. But then CD sleeve liners are such poor substitutes for LP jackets that I suppose this loss is inevitable! <Sigh!>)

In all fairness, I should also warn you that you only get 37 minutes of music for your money on this album, but that shouldn't stop you from buying it.