Initially recorded at Virgin Records’ Manor Studios in November 1973, Tangerine Dream (TD), using a Moog synthesiser for the first time, constructed an album that resonated with creativity and boundary pushing. Phaedra was produced by three musicians who sat at large banks of synths, moving switches and turning dials rather than playing guitar or keyboards. The sounds they made meant Phaedra would become a landmark album for Virgin, introducing what was described as ‘sequencer driven music’ to a wider audience, as well as becoming a defining statement of what came to be called the ‘Berlin School sound.’
This album, however, performed live at the Barbican along with several other pieces, is Phaedra being reimagined for a new generation by the same band, now comprising three different musicians, none of whom were even born when the original Phaedra was recorded. Band leader Thorsten Quaeschning had, however, played with original band leader Edgar Froese, who gave his blessing for the band to continue just before his death.
The two pieces, ‘Phaedra 22’ and ‘Phaedra 24’, between them capture the spirit, though not the intensity and precision, of the original.
The other three tracks on Phaedra open the show, with ‘Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares’ reimagined as more dreamlike and floaty. If you know TD, you’ll have a good idea what the rest of the set sounds like, and you won’t be wrong. It’s mostly a series of short pieces taken from across the fifty year history of the band, with mesmerising meditative sounds and sonic landscapes being created. Most pieces performed are from previous albums, though the ‘Hippolytos Sessions 1–8’ are mostly improvisational pieces. It’s worth noting ‘Rare Bird’ sounds like a Jean Michel Jarre piece. The sounds and images created make it easy to see why the band has provided the score to so many films, such as Sorcerer, which is performed here, as their pulsating synths and mesmeric landscapes evoked fire the imagination.
Phaedra was arguably the first album to put the Mellotron to more effective usage, rather than just being used for the standard ‘orchestra in a box’ approach taken by many of the prog bands of the time. Most bands used Mellotron to create a backdrop behind more traditional instruments, whereas TD used it to weave a whole new sonic universe, mindmaps for the imagination, creating synth lines and patterns of sound as the three performers conjured up ethereal and abstract sounds.
The current TD are nowhere near as revolutionary or improvisational as when Froese, Baumann and Franke comprised the band who recorded Phaedra, which slotted in nicely with the prog ethos of the time, but they’ve captured their spirit of adventure, which clearly comes across in how they employ the sounds created.
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