This page gathers the musicians of progressive electronic music: the synthesizer players who took the long forms of progressive rock and rebuilt them with oscillators, sequencers and tape. Six of the seven names here are solo artists, from France, Greece, Germany and the United States, and the seventh is a French group led by a guitarist.

The short version

Progressive electronic is the name AllMusic gives to a branch of electronic music that it files under new age. In AllMusic’s description, the style lives in unfamiliar territory, where the results are often shaped by the technology itself, and its players tend to transform sounds rather than imitate acoustic instruments. The roots are in West Germany at the turn of the 1970s, in what German musicians called kosmische Musik, “cosmic music”, and in the sequencer-driven style that grew out of it in West Berlin, the Berlin School. From there the sound travelled: to Paris, where Jean-Michel Jarre recorded “Oxygène” in his apartment, to London, where Vangelis built his own studio, and to the United States, where Larry Fast released his albums under the name Synergy. Much of this music is wordless, but not all of it, and I flag the exceptions below.

From the cosmic couriers to the concert stage

The term kosmische Musik was coined in 1971 by Edgar Froese, the founder of Tangerine Dream, and the producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser later used it to market Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel. In 1972 Kaiser’s Ohr label put all three, together with Popol Vuh, on a compilation simply called “Kosmische Musik”. The players worked with the EMS VCS 3 and the Moog modular synthesizer, with sound processing and with tape, and they leaned on serious electronic composition more than on rock songs.

The Berlin School is the part of that story that matters most on this page. The German reference works place it in the mid-1970s and name it after West Berlin, where its main players lived. Its pieces were long, often twenty minutes or more, so a single LP side could hold one track; programmed sequencer patterns ran underneath while the players improvised solos and textures on top, and the Mellotron was as much a part of the sound as the synthesizer. An important meeting point was the Electronic Beat Studio led by the Swiss composer Thomas Kessler, where Agitation Free, Ash Ra Tempel and the early Tangerine Dream rehearsed. Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra”, released by Virgin in 1974, was one of the first commercial albums built around sequencers, and Christopher Franke, who had come to the band from Agitation Free in 1971, is credited with bringing those machines in.

Three of the soloists on this page came straight out of that circle. Froese founded Tangerine Dream in West Berlin in 1967 and started his solo career with “Aqua” in 1974; he died in 2015. Peter Baumann, born in West Berlin, played keyboards in Tangerine Dream from 1971 and left for good in 1977, after the band’s first American tour, releasing “Romance ’76” that same year. Michael Hoenig, born in Hamburg, was the keyboard player of Agitation Free from 1971 to 1975, and in 1975 he stood in for Baumann on a Tangerine Dream tour of Australia and a concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He recorded “Departure from the Northern Wasteland” at Aura Studio in Berlin and released it on Warner Bros. in 1978, then moved to Los Angeles, where he went on to score films, television series and video games.

The other names took different roads. Jean-Michel Jarre, born in Lyon, joined Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1969, and his first record, “La Cage” backed with “Erosmachine”, came out in 1971. “Oxygène”, released in France in December 1976, reached number two on the UK Official Albums Chart in 1977. On 14 July 1979 his free concert on the Place de la Concorde in Paris drew more than a million people, the first of several entries in the Guinness records, and on “Les Chants Magnétiques” (1981) he used the Fairlight CMI. Vangelis, born Evangelos Papathanassiou in Greece, came from the band Aphrodite’s Child, settled in Paris and by the end of 1974 had moved to London, where he set up Nemo Studios. He auditioned for Yes in 1974 and turned the job down, later worked in a duo with Yes singer Jon Anderson, won the Academy Award for his “Chariots of Fire” score in 1982, and wrote music used by NASA and the European Space Agency. He died in 2022.

Larry Fast, from New Jersey, gave his synthesizer albums a project name: Synergy. The series began in 1975 with “Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra” on Passport Records, an album made only with synthesizers and electronic instruments, and ran until “Metropolitan Suite” in 1987. His road to Passport went through Yes: after meeting Rick Wakeman during a radio interview, he travelled to England to work with the band on “Tales from Topographic Oceans”. Heldon is the odd one out, a group rather than a soloist. The guitarist Richard Pinhas started it in France in 1974, took the name from Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel “The Iron Dream”, and released the early records himself; Pinhas named Robert Fripp, and Fripp’s work with Brian Eno, among his influences. AllMusic’s Jim Dorsch called Heldon’s seven albums of the 1970s “groundbreaking”.

A word on vocals, since it is easy to get wrong. Jarre’s “Oxygène” is wordless, but his “Zoolook” (1984) is built from fragments of human voices speaking in many languages. Vangelis wrote mostly wordless music, yet Jon Anderson sings “So Long Ago, So Clear” on “Heaven and Hell”, and choirs and singers appear on other albums. I explain the Berlin side of the story in my article What Is the Berlin School?, and the instrument behind much of it in The Modular Moog on Stage.

If this is your scene, my books go deeper →

The bands in this guide

Six solo artists and one band. For the soloists the year is that of their first solo release; for Heldon it is the year the group began. Each card opens the artist’s page and the album guides.

Elsewhere on Prog Atlas

The German pioneers of this music live in my German Progressive Rock & Krautrock section. Tangerine Dream is the common thread: Froese founded it, Baumann played in it for six years, and Hoenig stood in for him in 1975. Klaus Schulze drummed on the band’s 1970 debut “Electronic Meditation”, co-founded Ash Ra Tempel with Manuel Göttsching, and moved toward the Berlin School by the middle of the decade. Agitation Free is Hoenig’s old band and the one that gave Tangerine Dream its sequencer player, Christopher Franke; Hoenig also worked briefly with Göttsching in 1976. The German reference works list Harmonia and Michael Rother among the Berlin School pioneers, and Cluster, Kraftwerk and Popol Vuh belong to the same kosmische family.

A few links lead outside Germany. Vangelis came from Aphrodite’s Child, the band he played in from 1967 to 1971. Yes crosses this page twice, through Vangelis’s 1974 audition and his work with Jon Anderson, and through Larry Fast’s sessions for “Tales from Topographic Oceans”. Fast also played synthesizer for Peter Gabriel on records and tours from 1976 to 1986, and supplied much of the synthesizer sound on Nektar’s “Recycled” (1975). Heldon’s leader Richard Pinhas also worked with musicians from Magma and Heldon’s line-ups included Jannick Top.

Where to start

I would start in Berlin with “Phaedra” (1974), which Rolling Stone’s Dan Epstein called “an early masterpiece of progressive electronic music”. Then go to Paris for “Oxygène” (1976), the wordless album that took Jarre to number two on the UK Official Albums Chart. For Vangelis, “Heaven and Hell” (1975) was the first album he made at Nemo Studios and the first time he worked with Jon Anderson; AllMusic’s Steven McDonald called it a “dark, thundering album”. Froese’s “Epsilon in Malaysian Pale” (1975) is the record David Bowie named as an influence on his Berlin albums, and Pitchfork’s Andy Beta placed it on the magazine’s list of the best ambient albums. Hoenig’s “Departure from the Northern Wasteland” (1978) is the one AllMusic’s Linda Kohanov counts among the classics of progressive electronic music, crediting its use of the sequencer as a compositional tool. For the American side, “Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra” (1975) is where Synergy began.

Related scenes

The German roots of this music are in German Progressive Rock & Krautrock. Kosmische Musik was the German counterpart of space rock, which you will find in Psychedelic & Space Rock. Vangelis’s first band sits in Symphonic Progressive Rock, and Yes and Peter Gabriel, the two names that connect to Larry Fast, are in British Progressive Rock.

Browse my books in the footer →