Phaedra

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.

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.