Tangerine Dream -Pheadra

This is one of those albums that people generally enjoy listening to alone. It's not a party favorite unless your party is with a bunch of mellow space cadets seeking darkness and euphoria and wishing to maintain an absence of consciousness, which can be wonderfully amplified by music like this.

This is Tangerine Dream's first Billboard charted album (yeah, can you believe that?). It charted all the way up to #196 in July of 1974. And just as good was Tangerine Dream's next dark dreamscape concept called "Rubycon" which I would imagine everyone already has if they already own "Phaedra." Then a live album called "Ricochet" came out which didn't chart on the Billboard Top 200 either, but what surprised me was that the next Tangerine Dream album "Stratosfear" entered the Top 200, all the way up to #158. I am not too particularly fond of "Stratosfear", but, it's hard to say why some albums get heard and some maybe not.

The Virgin years were Tangerine Dream's most tangible years for being innovative and recognized. Edgar Froese is really the only original member of Tangerine Dream through their entire 40 plus year existence. With over a 100 albums released (including many solo albums from Edgar Froese), I think only Klaus Schulze could possibly have more recorded material.

Klaus Schulze was one of the first original members of Tangerine Dream, but quickly left to have own solo career, and his material is available in single albums and various box sets.

The title track is like plunging into a sea of alien life forms befogged by a sense of mysterious danger...then the threat lifts, but the floating mystery remains. Large shapes loom in the background, Saurian, dense and cryptic. Then a new sea emerges and a new species, which could never have been guessed at from the previous forms encountered. These seal-like polyps call blindly to their lost progenitor, their bittersweet tragedy akin to humanity's own, despite differences in the way it is expressed.









Preferred Trendy Chemical Amusement aid for this Album:Weed, Barbituates, Alcohol