Fifty years in the past, digital music acquired a brand new beat when Tangerine Dream launched Phaedra. The pioneering German group’s fifth studio album noticed the Berliners relocate to the English countryside, and its motorik grooves performed a key function in what was being outlined as krautrock. In early 2024, to have a good time the album’s fiftieth anniversary, Prog informed the story behind one of many biggest experimental digital albums of all time, its legacy and the synthesiser that knowledgeable its sound.
November 1973. Frayed bell-bottoms have been the peak of trend; Pink Floyd culminated their Darkish Facet Of The Moon tour and the Mariner 10 spacecraft blasted off on a mission to ship again the first-ever pictures of Mercury to an eagerly awaiting Earth. In the meantime, within the little Oxfordshire village of Shipton-on-Cherwell, three visionary musicians armed with cutting-edge expertise have been about to change the musical panorama eternally. Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke – in any other case often called Tangerine Dream – flew from Berlin in Germany to Richard Branson’s The Manor to report an album that may change their lives and that of the many individuals who would hear it. It was a report that was to realize nice issues, blowing minds with its sheer invention and provoking many years of digital music.
For Branson, it was a propitious time. Virgin Information was within the second yr of its existence and using excessive on the exceptional success of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The label’s mail order service was in full swing, offering followers in England with advance entry to the cream of American imports. By no means one to relaxation on his laurels, the entrepreneur had travelled in individual to Germany to recruit his newest act.
By the point they signed to Virgin, Tangerine Dream had already launched 4 albums by way of German experimental label Ohr. They’d additionally undergone a number of adjustments in personnel, with founding member Edgar Froese the one fixed. For his or her earlier two long-players, nevertheless, Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973), they’d settled on what’s now thought of their basic line-up.
Froese was the group’s inventive powerhouse and polymath; an instinctive musician who’d additionally studied portray and sculpture on the Berlin Academy of Arts. On tour in Spain together with his first band, The Ones, Froese had carried out a particular live performance for the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. It was a gathering that infused him with a ardour for experimentation. Returning to Germany, he shaped Tangerine Dream in 1967 with a long-since forgotten line-up of Lanse Hapshash (drums), Kurt Herkenberg (bass), Volker Hombach (sax, violin, flute) and Charlie Prince on vocals. By the point Christopher Franke joined in 1971, after a stint as drummer for The Agitation – later renamed Agitation Free – Steve Jolliffe, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler had all handed by the band’s ranks.
Peter Baumann additionally got here on board that yr, on the essential level when the band have been shifting from guitars to electronics. For Baumann, a profession in music was by no means deliberate.
“Oh, no, in no way,” he admits. “Every little thing that occurs in my life is an accident. And it was a quite simple story: I had a buddy in class, and we have been simply chatting. He mentioned, ‘I’m enjoying in a band, why don’t you come alongside and hear?’ So I went. That they had a bass participant, guitar participant, vocalist and drummer, however no keyboard. So I mentioned, ‘Why don’t I am going on keyboards and be a part of you?’ And that was it.”
Primarily a covers band, this was a great expertise for Baumann, however not fulfilling. It was one other accident of destiny, an opportunity assembly, that
initially led to his involvement with Tangerine Dream.
“I used to be at a live performance – Emerson, Lake & Palmer,” he recollects. “They began late, so I started to speak to the oldsters behind me. There was a man with lengthy, darkish hair named Christopher. We have been chatting about what we have been doing. He mentioned he performed in a band. I mentioned, ‘I do some experiments with music as properly.’”
Bonding over a shared love of instrumental data, the 2 exchanged particulars and, per week later, Baumann acquired a word from Franke urging him to get in contact as they have been searching for a brand new keyboard participant.
“So I known as up,” recollects Baumann, “and a few week later, they invited me to carry my keyboard and meet them at a rehearsal room. The remaining is historical past.”
Over their following two albums, Zeit and Atem, Tangerine Dream set about exploring new sounds.
“The music was evolving, intuitively,” says Baumann. “You’re at all times attempting new issues and also you say, ‘Hey, that appears to work’, however we by no means actually mentioned the music a lot. It was extra like: have a great joint after which begin enjoying.”
With Phaedra, nevertheless, that modified.
“The key distinction was that it was the primary report the place we had
a Moog synthesiser,” remembers Baumann. “That was very distinctive on the time, and it actually set the flavour for the primary piece.”
The synthesiser in query got here to the group by way of an uncommon path. Someday in 1969, The Rolling Stones had bought a whole modular system from Moog, one of many very first commercially obtainable. The Stones’ experiments with the nascent expertise finally led nowhere. Dissatisfied, they bought their tools to the Hansa Studio in Berlin, an institution that may later develop into well-known by its use by David Bowie, Iggy Pop and others. Again in 1973, Hansa accepted a suggestion for the Stones’ previous Moog from Tangerine Dream’s Christopher Franke. A discount at solely $15,000 – an equal of about £90,000 in in the present day’s cash.
Franke paid for the Moog utilizing the band’s advance from Virgin. Baumann recollects how the group’s contract with Branson’s firm took place.
“He [Branson] was searching for bands. And I feel it was Simon Draper [Virgin Records co-founder] who informed him there have been a number of bands in Germany – Faust, Can and Tangerine Dream – that he ought to try. So he got here to Berlin. We acquired alongside famously, and he made us a suggestion.”
Quick-forward to November, 1973 when the group decamped to Oxfordshire and arrange house in The Manor.
“We recorded fairly properly in Germany,” says Baumann, “however The Manor studio was a complete totally different ball sport. We had a very nice
16-track machine and actually good outboard gear. It was a lovely facility. For 3 weeks we acquired in there and recorded Phaedra.”
It was a report that grew organically.
“We by no means had any clear thought of what we have been going to do,” stresses Baumann. “There was one commonality – that’s we’d begin very, very merely and see what occurred. Even in reside concert events we began from one word after which developed from that one word. That was the one factor that we ever mentioned.”
Tangerine Dream’s influences on the time got here largely from fellow
sonic experimenters.
“We listened to a whole lot of instrumental music,” recollects Baumann. “Stockhausen and Ligeti – a whole lot of classical composers who did very experimental issues.”
Born in 1928, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an early innovator in digital music. Practically 20 years earlier than Phaedra was realised, his pioneering Gesang Der Jünglinge had blended human voices with electronically generated pulses, tones and white noise. Across the identical time, Transylvania-born György Ligeti had begun utilising micropolyphony – dense strains of sound shifting at various tempos and rhythms.
“From the favored bands,” says Baumann, “we listened to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma after which The Darkish Facet Of The Moon. The instrumental sections – they have been our favourites.”
The genius of Froese, Baumann and Franke, based mostly largely on intuition, lay in combining these disparate components into an entirely unique mannequin. Even throughout recording, that they had no thought how Phaedra would sound in its ultimate type.
“We recorded fairly a bit,” explains Baumann, “and a whole lot of it was junk that we threw out. However clearly [the title track] labored very properly, and so we refined it a bit bit within the studio. It’s not a reside scenario, so within the studio we may do some overdubs.”
It was a strategy of going backwards and forwards between the three.
“We by no means mentioned the music; we’d simply say, ‘I prefer it’, or ‘I don’t like that.’ So, , it was a collaboration on many various ranges, and it was extraordinarily intuitive. There was, particularly with Phaedra, by no means any combating or disagreements or something like that. It was actually a really instinctual and homogeneous collaboration.”
In keeping with Baumann, the novel setting they discovered themselves recording in helped to form the music.
“In hindsight, it was a a lot better environment. We loved being within the nation; The Manor was an awesome facility and we beloved being there. And we’d by no means earlier than labored three weeks in a row. Though I used to be, on the time, 19 or 20 years previous. I wasn’t paying a lot consideration to the larger image.”
Even when issues have been going properly, the band had no sense that the Phaedra mission would quantity to their largest success thus far.
“We simply knew that we favored it,” says Baumann. “I imply, there was actually no comparability. It was so distinctive. No person else was doing something like that. We simply loved it. And we thought it was cool. Very cool.”
The prolonged classes weren’t with out their challenges. Talking in an interview for Mark Prendergast’s complete examine of digital music, The Ambient Century (2000), Edgar Froese confirmed:
“Technically, the whole lot that would go incorrect did go incorrect. The tape machine broke down, there have been repeated mixing console failures, and the audio system have been broken due to the unusually low frequencies of the bass notes.”
Frequent energy cuts added to the band’s woes. A miners’ strike was in full swing and business customers of electrical energy have been prohibited at sure instances. To additional complicate issues, incessant rain discovered its method in by the roof of the previous constructing, resulting in a mass scramble to guard valuable devices and tools by binding it in plastic sheeting. A specific low level occurred when Froese witnessed the Manor’s resident Irish wolfhound amble in, elevate its leg, and urinate in opposition to the band’s Mellotron.
Regardless of these travails, employees at The Manor did their finest to keep up a great environment, and progressively Phaedra took form. The band labored lengthy days, starting mid-morning and toiling on into the small hours. With no presets or writeable reminiscence, establishing the Moog alone proved to be time-intensive. The outcomes, although, have been value it. The synthesiser’s driving arpeggiated bass line supplied a shocking bedrock for the group to construct on, utilizing Mellotron, guitars and electrical piano to assemble a hypnotic, layered soundscape. A quirk of the brand new tools was its excessive sensitivity to warmth: when the Moog warmed up, it additionally went out of tune. The trio used this to their benefit, letting the Moog have its method and incorporating the outcomes into the title observe.
The completed album was launched within the UK on the February, 20 1974 and, to the common listener, Phaedra will need to have gave the impression of a broadcast from an alien planet. The title observe alone proved a revelation. Occupying the whole lot of facet one, Phaedra itself builds from an uneasy synth effervescent, progressively coalescing right into a hypnotic, polyrhythmic entity, shifting like a kaleidoscope by multicoloured clouds of Mellotron tones. The three tracks comprising facet two, Mysterious Semblence At The Strand Of Nightmares, Actions Of A Visionary and Sequent ‘C’ type one thing of area rock symphony, taking the listener on a beguiling journey to unusual, distant galaxies. Phaedra supplied music that seeped into the soul. Nothing fairly prefer it had invaded the UK’s airwaves and bedrooms earlier than.
Not surprisingly, some responses from critics have been brazenly hostile, together with an notorious diatribe from Melody Maker’s Steve Lake, who described the report as “gutless and spineless, devoid of inspiration” Regardless of such vitriol and spurred on by publicity from far-sighted radio DJs reminiscent of John Peel, Phaedra progressively grew into one thing of a phenomenon. In an exquisite little bit of poetic justice, it broke Melody Maker’s personal Prime 10. Baumann was as shocked as anybody by the report’s success.
“It was very humorous – per week or two after it got here out, I used to be in Italy with
a girlfriend and I acquired a telegram from Richard [Branson] saying, ‘It’s important to come to London, your report is within the Prime 10.’ I assumed, what’s he speaking about? I had no thought, so I known as him, and he mentioned, ‘No, no, Peter, it’s within the Melody Maker Prime 10.’ And so I went to London to do a ton of interviews.”
It was an astonishing feat for such a radical report.
“We have been a very experimental band,” says Baumann. “We weren’t rock, we weren’t pop, and we performed for comparatively small audiences in Germany. We didn’t even promote a whole lot of data in Germany. Atem and Zeit bought perhaps a few hundreds, perhaps 10,000 – we by no means bought a lot at first. So, I had no expectations. I used to be completely shocked and, , it was a life-changing occasion.”
Phaedra hit No.15 on the UK album chart, proving the critics incorrect and opening the floodgates to a surge of curiosity within the new music coming from throughout the English Channel. Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, launched within the UK a number of months later, reached No.4 on the UK album charts and listeners quickly sought out formidable sounds from different radical German teams reminiscent of Faust, Can and Amon Düül II.
Phaedra’s success propelled Tangerine Dream to a brand new degree of celeb.
“I feel we took it just about in our stride,” displays Baumann. “The primary time it hit me was after we did a few concert events after the album acquired profitable: the primary was in London [at Victoria Palace Theatre on June 16, 1974]. There have been hundreds of individuals there and that was sort of gorgeous. It simply hit me: oh my God, there are literally individuals liking it!”
It was the primary time that the band encountered their UK followers head to head. They knew that Phaedra was promoting properly, however experiencing the adoration shut up was a shock.
“In a reside setting,” says Baumann, “it’s actually a totally totally different ball sport. And it actually hits you that hundreds of individuals are spending their money and time to come back to listen to you. That was distinctive.”
For him, the album was a private turning level, one the place he started to grasp {that a} long-time profession in music was potential.
“I didn’t plan something,” he muses. “I simply did what I loved doing and so they [Froese and Franke] appeared like a few cool individuals to journey with, hang around with, and make music with. And, , there was no method that I may have deliberate making a residing off of it.”
After Phaedra, although, music grew to become a full-time job.
“You compromise in,” says Baumann, “and then you definitely do the subsequent report, and also you do a tour right here and a tour there. Then we went to America and did tons of interviews. It grew to become a way of life.”
The three younger musicians tailored properly, their pure level-headedness a stable anchor in opposition to the strains and excesses of the enterprise.
“It wasn’t that troublesome,” Baumann recollects. “, Tangerine Dream was not about personalities. None of us was a star or a particular individual. It was at all times the music that was entrance and centre. We had some groupies and stuff, however it was by no means as wild and loopy as with among the rock bands.”
Phaedra sits proud among the many many positive entries in Tangerine Dream’s in depth discography, and its affect has by no means dimmed.
“I feel one of many causes,” says Baumann, “is that it was one of many first digital data and it grew to become sort of a landmark for lots of folks. The distinction with Phaedra is that it’s extra like an inside expertise slightly than an exterior expertise, the place individuals leap up and down, screaming, at a rock live performance. It has a really totally different environment that lends itself very properly for individuals to hear at house with headphones.”
It’s an album tied to the individuality of the time of its genesis. The novelty of the expertise and the set-up of the music enterprise created excellent situations for such an album to seep into the general public consciousness.
“Yeah, it’s a really totally different ball sport now,” Baumann displays, “and likewise the distribution could be very totally different. Every little thing is far more fast-paced. When you would launch a report like Phaedra in the present day, it will not be observed, or little or no.”
The ever-present entry to music, he argues, has to some extent lessened its particular aura.
“Again then there have been no computer systems and music was a way more essential a part of individuals’s lives than in the present day.”
Within the Seventies, particularly in Germany, experimentation inside standard music was rife. Bands have been shifting away from the ever-present three-minute verse-chorus tune with a conventional drums, guitar and bass set-up in the direction of a extra inward-looking sound.
“I feel it’s the German mentality, ,” Baumann displays. “Over time there have been very, only a few actual rock bands, . That they had their pop music, however testosterone-driven rock music, that simply was not a German factor. You had the Scorpions on the time, and perhaps one or two different bands, however I feel Germans, they reside extra of their heads than of their guts.”
Phaedra is a landmark of such cerebral, transformative music and, half a century on, it continues to resonate. And Baumann continues to be shocked by its enduring recognition.
“Right here we’re 50 years later doing an interview. And yeah, I didn’t assume that it will final that lengthy,” he admits.
As with all long-lived band, Tangerine Dream have drifted out and in of prime focus however have by no means ceased to be related.
“There are phases when it’s extra noticeable,” he agrees, “after which much less – it goes by waves.”
For Baumann, it’s been a protracted journey with loads of excessive factors. “Enjoying the Royal Albert Corridor [in April 1975] was clearly one thing you don’t neglect,” he says. “Additionally Reims Cathedral [France, 1974] and New York Metropolis [on several occasions].”
Of enjoying reside, he admits, “It’s like intercourse. Generally it’s the very best factor on this planet. And typically it’s simply one thing that you need to do. But it surely’s at all times higher doing it than not!”
And was Phaedra the album that began all of it?
“I don’t hearken to it fairly often,” he confesses, “however after I do, , it’s actually timeless. It was at all times in its personal world; it didn’t match into any class.”
Legions of followers would absolutely rush to agree.
