ELECTRONIC MEDITATION

"Electronic Meditation" is perfect dose for the addicted listener of "weird" music.

Funny that Tangerine Dream had it's dreamiest lineup with the debut album, "Electronic Meditation", an LP completely alien to the future space operas of the band. Besides the immortal Edgar Froese, who was and still is the creator and soul of Tangerine Dream, we have Klaus Schulze on percussion, and Conrad Schnitzler playing strings. It's a innocuously experimental album that sees all three musicians at the very beginning of their great career, two of the musicians of course will leave the band very soon, but will both have just as bright futures as legendary cult act Tangerine Dream.

If there are synthesizers used, they are barely hearable: this is a hallucinated, acid-like mixture of organ, flutes, strings, some percussion, and other strange effects. There's basically nothing really Electronic about this LP, as it focuses more on real instruments and puts them in this extremely trippy context: pure and simple Experimental music, a perfect dose for the addicted listener of "weird" music.

The songs themselves are what an extremely superficial cynic would call very similar one another, but a more careful listen would reveal the opposite: "Genesis" is a perfect intro for this album, feeling like a sort of distorted vision of a sunrise, the sunrise that will afterwards give that psychedelic kind of illumination to the rest of the album. "Journey Through A Burning Brain" has a perfect title that gives a very strong idea of it's music: toned down, somewhat repetitive, with plenty of strange effects, some strings in the background, flutes; the three musicians reach out to pretty much everything they have in their palette and just throw it into this slowly hypnotic piece, where it feels like everything is slowly melting. "Cold Smoke" is a little more dense in sound, however it doesn't quite give as much enthusiasm as the previous track: a little less repetitive, but admittedly it does have an interesting atmosphere that this album never brings up again. "Ashes To Ashes" is where things start getting noticeably less interesting: it doesn't bring up new, attractive sounds, and is merely repeating some ideas. "Resurrection" is similar to the first track "Genesis", however it's very anticlimactic, and doesn't give a final climax "Electronic Meditation" should have deserved.

A debut album that is not just a bunch of experimentations put together: The thing about Edgar Froese is that everything sounds carefully planned, (which is obviously absurd), and he manages to give his music a very effective meaning, so nothing he puts his hands on ever sounds like mere experimentations/ improvisations.

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