Rubycon

Tangerine Dream

A Portal to the Inner Cosmos

You know those fancy spas, the ones that advertise how they'll bring you to your mellow place and, for a premium fee, lead you through calming meditations and salt scrubs and such? They don't want you to know about records like this. For a whole lot less money, Tangerine Dream will chill you out, loosen the grip of the grid, and help you transition to a quieter, more reflective state of mind.

The music Tangerine Dream made during the mid-1970s, its most creative period, has been described as "space ambience" and "stoner nirvana." It's all that and an EPCOT ride too, a tour through vast desolate lunar landscapes (or a hyperreal simulation). This two-part piece continues the basic ideas the German trio, formed by Edgar Froese in 1967, explored so skillfully on its previous album Phaedra, the oft-maligned ambient milestone that put the group in the Top 20 of the British Album charts for the first time. There are lush cascades of echo-chamber sound and slow-moving swirls of otherworldly strings created on the tape-based instrument known as the mellotron.

But Rubycon adds more rhythmic synthesizer blips, recurring patterns that pulsate beneath the surface. And its "Part Two" is much darker than anything on Phaedra: Propelled by solemn electronically generated male voices, it begins in the murky oceanic depths. As the voices trail off, the music seems to brighten, slowly ascending until, in the final moments, glimmers of daylight poke through. This voyaging vision of sound, ever-unfolding and not quite ever arriving, has been imitated endlessly since 1975. But somehow its admirers haven't quite captured the openness and faraway grandeur of Tangerine Dream.

Genre: Electronica, Rock
Released: 1975, Virgin
Key Tracks: "Rubycon," "Rubycon (Part II)."
Catalog Choice: Phaedra; Stratosfear
Next Stop: Klaus Schulze: Moondawn
After That: David Torn: Cloud About Mercury
Book Pages: 761–762

Share this page:

Comments:

#1 from Whit Andrews, Over there - 09/23/2008 9:10

...And listening to it now, what I hear is much more compelling, but also much weirder. There’s a sameness to the layers of sound, an undifferentiated sort of metamorphed thick ambery syrup. It’s like there was much more difference when the tracks were laid down, but then they were fused, and now we can only tell there are different tracks because we can see them, but they sound the same. Or we can’t see the difference, but we can hear it…. [More at link]

Post a Comment:

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Note that your comment will be reviewed by an editor before it appears on the site.


About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

More about the book

site design: Juxtaprose