The breakthrough — the birth of the Berlin School. Phaedra is Tangerine Dream’s most famous and important album, the record that made their name and helped invent a whole genre of electronic music, the pulsing, hypnotic, sequencer-driven sound that became their trademark.

The short version

The fifth album by Tangerine Dream, recorded in England and released in 1974 as their first for Virgin Records; four tracks, around thirty-seven minutes. It was the band’s international breakthrough and the birth of their classic sequencer-driven sound, later known as the Berlin School of electronic music. Made by the celebrated trio of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann, and built around a vast, otherworldly side-long title track, it is one of the most important and influential electronic albums ever made, and the doorway to the band’s most famous era.

The birth of the Berlin School

After the British disc jockey John Peel had championed their album Atem, Tangerine Dream signed to the young Virgin Records, and in late 1973 travelled to the label’s Manor studio in the English countryside, the same house where Mike Oldfield had made Tubular Bells. There the classic trio of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann recorded Phaedra. The sessions were famously difficult: their temperamental new Moog modular synthesizer, with its sequencer, kept drifting out of tune as it warmed up, and equipment failures and power cuts plagued the work, leading Froese to recall that everything that could go wrong did. Yet from that chaos came something new. Phaedra was the first Tangerine Dream album to feature the pulsing, sequencer-driven sound that would define them, and the genre that came to be called the Berlin School. Its title is drawn from a figure of Greek myth.

The sound

Vast, hypnotic, otherworldly electronic music, drifting and cosmic yet strangely melodic. The great new element is the sequencer: Christopher Franke’s Moog modular lays down pulsing, arpeggiated patterns that run like a hypnotic heartbeat beneath the music, over which Edgar Froese’s Mellotron, guitar and bass and Peter Baumann’s organ, electric piano and flute drift and swirl. The mood is one of endless interstellar travel, eerie and beautiful by turns, full of gliding Mellotron, ghostly effects and slowly shifting textures. The accidental instability of the overheating Moog only adds to the sense of drift, as tones waver and slide. For all its strangeness, the music feels carefully composed rather than chaotic, closer to a modern classical work than to rock, and it opened up a whole new landscape of sound.

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The songs

The heart of the album is its side-long title track, Phaedra, a seventeen-minute journey that layers a pulsing bass sequencer with flute, Mellotron and drifting electronic effects, moving through many passages, from serene, melodic keyboard lines to eerie, gaseous, almost stormy stretches, yet always holding together with a composer’s logic. The second side gathers three shorter pieces. Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares is a solo Edgar Froese piece built on rich, sweeping Mellotron, Movements of a Visionary rides a hypnotic backbone of pulsing synthesizers and wordless voices, and the gentle Sequent C’ is a short, delicate flute coda by Peter Baumann. Together they range across the many sides of the band’s new sound.

Reception and legacy

Phaedra is regarded as one of the most important and influential albums in the history of electronic music, and the record that made Tangerine Dream’s name around the world. Curiously it was only a modest success at home in Germany, but in Britain and America it opened doors, becoming their first chart album and eventually a substantial seller. More lasting than any chart figure is its influence: as the birth of their sequencer-driven sound and of the Berlin School, it shaped ambient and electronic music for decades, and its title track is still hailed as a landmark, unmatched for its depth of atmosphere. Endlessly admired and imitated, it remains a cornerstone of electronic music and, for many, the essential Tangerine Dream album.

The verdict

A landmark and a masterpiece, the essential Tangerine Dream album and one of the most influential electronic records ever made — the birth of their hypnotic, sequencer-driven Berlin School sound, wrapped in vast, drifting, cosmic beauty. Come to it above all for the extraordinary side-long title track, one of the great achievements of electronic music, and let it carry you into deep space. Play it whole, in the dark. From here, Atem for the album whose acclaim won them Virgin, and Force Majeure and Hyperborea for more of their celebrated Virgin decade. A doorway to the cosmos.

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