Phaedra

When Baumann returned from his trip to Asia, Tangerine Dream were playing their latest demos for Virgin, and the record company, [...] owned by Richard Branson, signed a five year world-wide contract with the group. It was a contract that would later be extended to a total of ten golden years on Virgin. A new album went straight into the making, and at the end of 1973, Tangerine Dream left for England and Virgin's recording studio -- The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire. The production, which would be released as Phaedra, began on 20th November and lasted for about three weeks.

Tangerine Dream had received an advance from the forthcoming album sale and the money was straight away invested in a big Moog Modular synthesizer -- one of the big monsters you often see the musicians pictured in front of.

The instruments, and the technologies as a whole, created a lot of problems while the recordings took place and almost everything went wrong. It would often take several hours just to get the instruments in tune and make a usable sound. On those first electronic machines there was nothing like memory to save the sound, the tuning and other parameters from session to session.

Edgar Froese: "We worked each day from 11 o'clock in the morning to 2 o'clock at night. By the eleventh day we barely had 6.5 minutes of music on tape. Technically everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. The tape machine broke down, there were repeated mixing console failures and the speakers were damaged because of the unusually low frequencies of the bass notes. After 12 days of this we were completely knacked. Fortunately, after a two-day break in the countryside a new start brought a breakthrough. Mysterious Semblance was recorded on 4th December, Peter and Chris were asleep after a long recording session, so I invited my wife Monique into the studio. I called in the studio engineer and recorded it in one take on a double-keyboard Mellotron while Monique turned the knobs on the phasing device. The piece is on the record exactly as it was recorded that day. And this practice was due to continue for the rest of the session. For example, on the title track, Chris pressed the button to start the bubbling bass note. Unfortunately the bass pattern didn't work the way it should have -- after a few seconds, as you can hear on the album, the note drops in but out of tune. Chris then started tuning the bass sequence while running it. What he didn't know was that I had told the engineer to press the recording button whenever music or some sounds could be heard. So what you hear in the beginning of Phaedra is a rehearsal! Even when I started playing the melody line, it was just a try -- no one thought it would go on the record." (Interview with Mark Pendergast, January 1994, Tangents)

Even if almost no one knew about Tangerine Dream in England, Phaedra quickly became very popular: The band had not given any interviews to the music press and besides John Peel's shows, nobody played their music on the radio. But Phaedra nevertheless managed to slip into Melody Maker's album-list and gained a high ranking. Later on, it received gold in several countries!

So this third release, Phaedra, from the trio Froese, Franke and Baumann, in many ways became a turning point in their careers.

Edgar Froese: "We've always been interested in Greek mythology, and the titles on this album come from there. Not just Greek, but Egyptian, Indian, European, philosophy mixed with a bit of humour. I have to say that, although I liked the recent Virgin compilation, Dream Sequence, it includes a very strange two minute edit of Phaedra which shocked us. It's as bad as the rest of the compilation is good. There are people who think Phaedra was the last decent piece of music we recorded, but fortunately there are others who think Tangram was our first record."

(Interview with Johnny Black, thisBEAT, issue 17, April 1986)