RUBYCON

While the walls of the youthful yet fragile citadel of progressive rock music were beginning to crumble, TD was reaching its peak powers; all the familiarization and experimenting with their rather complicated equipment and sound manipulation techniques and miles of concert performing was paying off with a more confident trio of musicians and a more refined sound in the studio. Rubycon represents the achievement of that plateau of mastery as the previous album, Phaedra, was still showing engineering and sound quality flaws. While listening to the opening eight minutes of Rubycon, Side One, one can very easily find oneself thinking, "This is where Vangelis came from," but M. Papathanassiou had already released five solo albums since his departure from Aphrodite's Child--two of which were showing his very fast and deep descent into the music of the soon to be defined electronic or "ambient" instrumental soundtrack music. Where the Berlin School musicians and Vangelis differ the most is put on display with the entrance of the pulsating, forward-driving sequence in the ninth minute. This is no Vangelis! The clarity here, the emotion evoked, the sound as a whole, is vastly different from the other non-Berlin School artists exploring electronic soundscapes at the time (1974-5). The final, zither-based section of eerie water-based sound experiments takes us to the break. Weird. (9/10) Side Two opens with gong and slow motion siren- and bird-like sounds wafting and drifting in and out of the soundscape. Cool! And a bit unsettling. While the morphing, floating sustained siren remains insistent in its place at the sound foundation, by the end of the third minute it turns into voices, multi-level choir voices--ghosts singing a perpetual drone of frustration and lament. At the end of the fifth minute a lower-mid-range sequence rises up to push away the voices of the dead. A couple of higher pitch synths throw in intermittent bursts to liven things up, but it is the shifting, morphing, mixing sequence that keeps my attention focused, urges the pilgrim onward. Awesome! Tangerine Dream, Masters of electronic music, have arrived! Edgar's guitar in the mid-section is a welcome addition--a feature of TD music that I will enjoy as they use it more--especially on the live album, "Encore!" recorded on their 1976 American tour. The final "flute"-dominated couple minutes are very serene and heavenly. The goal has been reached. Wonderful display of the potential of electronically-generated (and treated) music. (10/10)

A masterpiece of progressive rock music and one of the shining moments in the history of Progressive Electronic music.