As a part of the 2025 anniversary launch of Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra, a number one authority on the band, Wouter Bessels, supplied in depth liner notes. uDiscover is proud to current an excerpt from these liner notes, which explores the making of this vastly influential album.
The five-year contract that Edgar Froese signed with Richard Branson’s Virgin Data in early September 1973 was an enormous turning level for Tangerine Dream. Till then, the band had launched 4 albums for the underground German label Ohr: Digital Meditation, Alpha Centauri, Zeit, and Atem. These had been albums that had seen the band experimenting and creating a brand new language in improvised music by pushing the boundaries of what their predominantly conventional musical palette of drums, guitar and organ would permit. Tangerine Dream remained very a lot a cult band, identified solely to a couple open-minded listeners. Signing to the just lately established Virgin report label introduced a chance for the band to outline their sound utilizing the most recent developments in digital musical devices and studio know-how, while experiencing the standing and publicity a label like Virgin may present. Their early life had been accomplished.
By the point of their signing to Virgin, the line-up of Tangerine Dream had stabilised as Edgar Froese, Christoph Franke and Peter Baumann, who had been working collectively since June 1971. Whereas this trio’s debut work Zeit (1972) was a minimal, summary and atmospheric work, their follow-up Atem (1973) noticed the band spending extra time structuring and refining their materials. Influential British DJ John Peel proclaimed Zeit as Album of the Yr on his BBC radio present and his enthusiasm paved the best way for the group to realize extra consideration. Mockingly, by late 1973, curiosity and publicity for the band in Germany was comparatively minimal in comparison with the UK, France or Austria.
“People who associate us with electronic music have possibly forgotten that the hardware was just a bridge to reach our musical goals,” Froese informed Completely Wired in 1986. “I still think that even without all that stuff, we are still able to use our imagination and follow our fantasies; if you lose your imagination, then you cannot create anything – even if you’ve got the most expensive computer in the world.” Franke added: “Electronics were just one possible way to go. If some genius created a better Mellotron, maybe we’d just use acoustic bits and pieces. We didn’t have to have the electronic synthesiser to create that style; the idea was there and then we looked for the instruments. Today kids get an instrument and see what they can do with it. Then they look around and start to copy, which is okay to start. We were in the position that we didn’t have anyone to copy. We started from scratch.”
Certainly, Tangerine Dream utilized precisely this strategy in November 1973 when the band entered Virgin’s Manor studio in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire. While the band flew into London’s Heathrow Airport, a truck filled with their tools was pushed from Berlin. Assisted by engineer Phil Becque, the band settled into the agricultural studio to report many hours of fabric through the subsequent two weeks.
Standard devices corresponding to a guitar, bass guitar, organ, flute and grand piano had been electronically handled to make them sound alien and totally different. As well as, every band member used a VCS3 or Synthi-A/AKS synthesiser, Froese utilised a Mellotron M-400, Baumann a Fender Rhodes electrical piano and Franke a Modular ‘Big Moog’ synthesiser, just lately acquired from Bruce Hatch, {an electrical} engineer dwelling in San Francisco for a reported $15,000.
“The Moog 960 Sequential Controller had access to every note and allowed improvisation by manipulating the controls as it played,” Franke informed Sound On Sound in 1994. “I used it for two years, but because each note was set by a tuning knob, you couldn’t go up and down the pitch, as it was step-less. My idea was to quantise the pitch and timing by having lots of switches, three marked 1‑12 for semitones and fractions and one from 1‑8 for octaves. Then we built a programmer, as we had a lot of Moog sequencers, and we could then play one sequencer for four bars, another for eight and so on.”
“Richard Branson said we could come over to record in Oxford, where he’d got a recording studio,” Baumann informed DJ Journal in 2019. “It was in a really nice country manor. But when we arrived, there was nobody there. We finally found everybody – they’d been eating hash brownies and were watching movies in the basement. They could barely show us our rooms, but we settled in and began working the next day. We started recording, and then it was 12 hours later. ‘Phaedra’ was the first track. Christoph had just got a Moog sequencer and was noodling around on it. I was with Edgar in the recording booth and said, ‘This sounds cool, let’s record it’. I was doing most of the mixing, so I was instrumental in beginning ‘Phaedra.’ I would take a lot of reverb and send the reverb onto delays and back through other delays. It was all very atmospheric.”
Every day the band improvised music, however little or no of the fabric dedicated to tape glad the group. Edgar Froese recalled the frustrations of those early classes in a 1994 interview: “Phaedra was the first album in which many things had to be structured. The reason was that we were using the Moog sequencer (all driving bass notes) for the first time. Just tuning the instrument took several hours each day, because at the time there were no pre-sets or memory banks. We worked each day from 11 o’clock in the morning to 2 o’clock at night. By the eleventh day we barely had six minutes of music on tape. Technically everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The tape machine broke down, there were repeated mixing console failures, and the speakers were damaged because of the unusually low frequencies of the bass notes. After twelve days of this we were completely knackered.”
Happily, issues improved, and the band finally managed to seize the dazzling title piece that finally comprised the entire of the primary aspect of the album. The primary half of the piece was underpinned by a sequencer rhythm, a primary for the band, however one thing that grew to become a attribute of the band’s Seventies work (and past). Nonetheless, because the piece unfolded a ghost within the machine noticed the Moog regularly shifting out of tune, which gave the observe an unbelievable sense of urgency and unhinged momentum. Not for the primary time the know-how took on a lifetime of its personal. Because the sequencer lastly reached a peak and spluttered into silence, the second half of the piece returned the band to its earlier strategy of making cosmic textures with clusters of atmospheric sound, earlier than closing with a Froese’s transferring Mellotron chords, as he moved although the instrument’s choir and strings settings. The sound results coda of the sound of kids was added through the mixing of the album because it didn’t seem on the multi-track tape. This may increasingly have merely been a realistic resolution to extend the aspect size by an additional minute, for the reason that music itself barely runs to 16 minutes. Nonetheless, it made an appropriately haunting ending to the primary aspect of the album.
Returning to The Manor in early December 1973 to attempt to full the second aspect of Phaedra, the piece “Movements of a Visionary” was a extra managed and sedate collective improvisation, whereas “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares” and “Sequent C” had been solo items by Edgar Froese and Peter Baumann respectively. The previous is actually Froese exploring the chances of his just lately acquired Mellotron, handled with varied phasing results, whereas the latter is an extract from an extended piece Baumann improvised to tape utilizing a picket recorder (not a flute as it’s typically credited), overdubbed a number of instances and fed by way of a number of delays to create an elegiac coda to the album.
Phaedra would come to be considered a basic and a watershed second within the historical past of digital music. Alongside the best way there have been many hours of improvised studio session materials that was rejected and left within the vaults, the perfect of which is now newly blended and introduced on this field set for the primary time.
Order the Tangerine Dream Phaedra field set now.
