RUBYCON

I have no doubt this is Tangerine Dream's best effort, an absolute forerunner of things to come many, many years later. Most people say that Kraftwerk's best works (from Autobahn to The Man Machine) represent the real breaking point in electronic music, foreshadowing new wave and electro pop. However, Rubycon, in my opinion, does more than that, displaying such intense soundscapes which pave the way to to the whole techno-trance movement in the 1990s (by chance, in Italy we call it "progressive techno"...). The beauty of this album comes out of a peculiar contrast: even if it has less improvisation than Phaedra, in Rubycon the band manages to develop a freer, more liquid form, coherent but also abstract and deeply imaginative. The two tracks inside the album feature the same structure, that is, they are subdivided into three "movements". Part 1 starts with an extremely slow cadence supporting a polytonal melody and shaken by strange synthesized noises; than the music flows naturally into the second movement, depicting through mellotron chords and synths imitating seagulls a spacey seashore. You really get the impression you are travelling, when an astounding passage, rich in suspense, leads you to the third movement, where we can find the typical TD rhythm patterns, underlined also by a synthesized percussion which sounds as recorded twenty years later! Part 2 starts as a tribute to Pink Floyd's Echoes, of which TD take and recreate the central section. An impressive passage with choirs "a là" Ligeti opens the second movement, with fast and hypnotic rhythm patterns - sequencers are here used at their best! Finally the soundscape takes us back to the seashore, with the sound of waves, a fascinating buzzing synth and flutes which create lingering melodies, never solved and therefore... extatic! I consider Rubycon a masterpiece, and I have no fear in giving it five stars.