Tangerine Dream – Phaedra

I was always fascinated by the sonic background warble on Hawkwind records, the oscillators and cheap noise generators of DikMik or the cosmic sequences of Tim Blake, and so sort out records that featured the use and abuse of machines. Phaedra is the sound of circuits tripping hard. It feels as if their operators could barely contain them, wild currents of notes flow through a swirling cosmic soup, morphing and evolving in unpredictable ways. Who is playing who it's hard to say? Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann are listed as musicians but it's really the interface of human and machine that makes this record so beguiling, like watching some new being making its first stuttering steps on uncertain limbs.

I heard the same glorious collision of ingenuity and technology in acid house and especially in Detroit Techno, you can certainly hear the echo of Phaedra in Jeff Mills Purposemaker output, where the instruction manual is chucked in the trash and devices are allowed to speak. I still have no clear idea how these how these machines work, but I remain interested in what they have to say.