The countercultural energy that had fuelled early 70s communes, cooperatives and concept albums found itself increasingly short of gas after 1973’s oil crisis and the post-war period’s first recession. So the mid-70s were a political and cultural interstice, expressed in music by a gradual shift from the organic to the electronic, which tracked industry’s own transition from the manual to the automated. By 1974 synthesizers had become part of the sonic palette not just of prog (Hawkwind’s Hall Of The Mountain Grill) but of pop (ELO’s Eldorado), and soul (Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale, The Isley Brothers’ Live It Up). With the present uncertain and the future up for grabs, Tangerine Dream were the first to make synths the totality of their sound-world, with Phaedra released in February of that year.
While Kraftwerk’s Autobahn usually get credit for this synthetic shift – despite still utilising guitar, flute and violin – Phaedra predates it by a good eight months. Equally, while former Dream-member Klaus Schulze’s Cyborg and Tomita’s Snowflakes Are Dancing bookend Phaedra, they still allied synths to ‘real’ instruments in the Wendy Carlos continuum – an actual orchestra in Schulze’s case, an analogue thereof in Tomita’s. Phaedra, by contrast,uses synths to create sounds without real-world correlates, a sonic landscape from which the organic has been seemingly excised. This represents a receptivity to societal currents that, from our half-century’s AI-encroaching retrospect, is both cosmically uncanny and creepily unnerving. Yet there’s a warmth to Phaedra’s futurism that contrasts, paradoxically, to their earlier, more organic albums, but particularly to the electronic dronescapes of 1972’s Zeit. This combination of the revolutionary and the reassuring is what enabled Phaedra to cut through the soggy soft rock and flavourless bubblegum of mid-70s music and hit no. 15 in the UK charts. Cybernetic scientism is imbued with countercultural optimism – the future informed by rather than eclipsing the past; machines working in concert with humans.
Phaedra, therefore, is located at a median point between the pastoral, spacey, meditative ‘kosmische’ of early Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Schulze and Popol Vuh, and a more urban, rhythmic and melodic electronica that would travel through Donna Summer’s 1977 ‘I Feel Love’, synth pop and beyond. The development of the sequencer – purchased by the Dream from Virgin’s advance – enabled the repeating note-patterns Phaedra deploys as a rhythmic pulse, like Pink Floyd’s ‘On The Run’ (Dark Side Of The Moon) but with greater sonic density and rhythmic dynamism. TD’s new use of melody, meanwhile, likely derived from the restrictions of monophonic synths like the VCS3, with each note having to be played individually. But the fact that Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Cluster’s Zuckerzeit were contemporaneously embracing melody suggests a cultural direction of travel, with West Germany the lodestone of popular music as it was in politics in this period.
Phaedra’s side-long title track performs a paradigm of this process in real time: from avant to ambient, organic to electronic, pastoral to urban. The none-more-cosmic introduction fades in on oceanic, spacey reverberations, but within a minute the reverb becomes rhythmic, foreshadowing the fade-in of a circular Moog bassline (from 1:20), doubled by echo after two minutes. Ghostly Mellotron melodies drift across the sound spectrum across the bass-riff, taken up by a VCS3 (from 3:37) – just two notes, but the phasing effect gives synths a new sensuousness, in a sign of things to come. From melody, the track’s emphasis shifts to rhythm (from 4.40), the urgency of the Moog bassline providing not just a percussion-less pulse but a melody-free hook. There’s an urban quality to the sound here, underlined by ‘Autobahn’-like traffic effects, zooming right-to-left across the stereo spectrum – the cityscape – with the synth-bass attaining a thrumming, camber-rattling density. Chris Franke then turns the Moog’s notorious malfunction into meaning, its pitch rising steadily upwards (from 8:53), evoking acceleration, forward-motion, progress, before the pattern starts to fall apart – hence, entropy, chaos, breakdown – then stopping altogether. The piece then goes into an entirely kosmische space-pastoral, all oceanic drones and rural rustle, with synthetic bird-like sounds (from 11:30), similar to Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ (Meddle), before being joined by celestial, ‘Saucerful Of Secrets’-style mellotron chords. Yet the pastoral gradually merges with the urban, as distant clunks of percussion, thickening bass frequencies and seismic mellotron chords achieve an engineered solidity alongside the evanescent spaciness.
This same dialectic between forward-motion futurism and ‘in the moment’ hippiedom imbues the gorgeous ‘Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares’. There’s no rhythmic pulse now, just Edgar Froese drawing sonorous chords out of that ultimate prog instrument, the mellotron, as electronic wind whistles, sizzles and sweeps. ‘Mysterious’ is entirely kosmische in its spacey grandeur, while simultaneously being filtered (literally, courtesy of Froese’s wife, Monique) into something more modern and grounded. ‘Movements Of A Visionary’ again starts off kosmische, but amidst the spacey swooshes there’s a driving bustle, an abstraction of rhythm that foreshadows the cyclical bass-synth pattern which fades in from 1:45 to become the core of the track. Dabs of sound drift in and out of the treble frequency – twinkling organ, tinkling electric piano – but they’re as much neon light as starlight, as industrial as celestial. While Peter Baumann’s brief album-closing recorder piece, ‘Sequent C’, is so electronically enhanced it sounds almost like a synth, it’s only almost. Hence true to the album, its signoff combines the pastoral with the urban, the cosmic with the domestic.
The staggering 100 minutes of outtakes on this 6-CD reissue affirm that the original release’s organic-to-electronic shift was entirely deliberate. The stunning ‘Flute Organ piece’ and lovely piano based ‘Version 2A’ and ‘Second Side Piece’ would – particularly with less functionalist titles – have shifted the balance to the bucolic and organic. These outtakes and an immaculate recording of the band’s first British live shows from 1974 are testament to the creative fecundity not just of Tangerine Dream but of this particular temporal and cultural moment. Because, given the exponential one-dimensionality of Tangerine Dream’s machine music hereafter, Phaedra works so effectively precisely because it’s transitional. Audibly poised at a cultural pivot-point, Phaedra captures a time when a technological future could be conceived in countercultural, human-centred, and hence utopian terms.
