Rock On! Wednesday, June 14, 2023 – Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese, Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, Cluster & Vangelis

Psychedelic, heavy, prog and more innovating sounds spanning the late 60s and the early 70s – Wednesday January 25th. Dan’s pick of the week: Tangerine Dream (Phaedra), Edgar Froese (Epsilon in Malaysian Pale), Brian Eno (Another Green World), Cluster & Eno (Cluster& Eno), Klaus Schulze (Timewind) & Vangelis (Spiral).

Tangerine Dream is zonder twijfel een van de meest invloedrijke elektronische groepen aller tijden. Hun muziek heeft een grote invloed gehad op ambient, new age, techno, trance en progressieve rock, maar ook op de moderne compositie van filmmuziek. Opgericht als een psychedelische rockgroep in 1967 door Edgar Froese, werd de groep aanvankelijk geassocieerd met de Krautrock scene door vroege abstracte albums abstracte albums zoals Electronic Meditation en Zeit.

Psychedelicsight.com review: “Tangerine Dream veteran Peter Baumann says the German group’s groundbreaker “Phaedra” was a result of “happy accidents” — not hallucinogenics. “We didn’t have psychedelic drugs,” the keyboardist told Shindig! magazine in 2020. “The music was psychedelic enough.”

Tangerine Dream came out of West Berlin’s psychedelic/surrealist art scene, with that aesthetic permeating much of its work through the mid-1970s. Tape loops, analogue synthesizers, found sounds and typical rock instrumentation stirred the brew for the group’s first four experimental albums.

With 1974’s “Phaedra” came the introduction of a sequencer, leading almost immediately to what is widely recognized as the Tangerine Dream sound. That eerie pulsating wash would resound in myriad ways down the decades, across several genres and media. (…)

Today we’d likely file “Phaedra” under electronica, trance, dark ambient or even progressive, but make no mistake: This is music for heads, strange, hypnotic and spacey. Group leader Edgar Froese called it kosmische musik. The late ’60s brought quite a few adventurous long tracks to popular music, but few soundscapes as we know them were heard in rock music before “Phaedra.” Tangerine Dream elevated soundscapes to an artform.”

Wednesday, June 14, 12:00 noon CET Brussels – 11 a.m. GMT London. Repeated: 16:00 & 20:00 hrs CET Brussels, 3 p.m. & 7 p.m. GMT London
Ends: 12 midnight CET Brussels, 11 p.m. GMT London.