PHAEDRA

I read how brilliant this album is on prog archives and a magazine rated it among the best of prog rock albums so naturally I had to taste and see. Unfortunately, the taste was bitter and to this day I just cannot grasp this album, yet I love most prog rock.

Tangerine Dream fail me completely.

I have no interest in their brand of music or their slow meandering wallowing of techno ambience. I can appreciate their influence on ambience and experimental music, in a similar sense to Soft Machine's approach to jazz, however one needs infinite patience to appreciate this and as much as I tried to enjoy this, I found it to be a cosmic brain drain.

Tangerine Dream are certainly progenitors of electronic music and glacial landscape music like no other band. I have a strange affinity for cold, bleak music such as Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jarre, but it is at least accessible as music, whereas Phaedra feels like filler music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, or background music for the TV show Cosmos. There is no structure to the music, and it labours on minutes and minutes of one note cold stark rhythmless and patternless, almost improvised sessions. At times we have a synth pad that continues and there are no changes or beats and it is totally draining.

The only tracks of note are the excellent sounds of "Sequent C". and to some extent "Movements of a Visionary" is interesting, especially the intro section, and deserves its place as one of the best ambient pieces I have heard. I have the album Stratosfear also, and rate that a lot higher than this so-called masterpiece. Even then TD are an acquired taste and not for the average music listener.

The music is so difficult to absorb, it becomes tiresome and I do not know what it all means. It is so slow moving, at a snail's pace at times, and the changes in substance are so subtle they are hardly noticeable so it very quickly loses the attention span and is absolutely forgettable. Artistically, there is obvious purpose behind the music and some will revel in this, but not me. I was completely lost when I first heard it, and I still can't find more than 2 stars for "Phaedra".