1 June : Electronic Meditation

Electronic Meditation is the first album attributed to Tangerine Dream, although this was the only line-up of the band with these musicians (Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulz and Conrad Schnitzler).

Tangerine Dream are a band that went through many line-ups and whose output varied accordingly, though Froese was at the centre of it all. My personal favourites of their albums are Atem and Zeit and I pretty much lose interest in them after Rubycon (1975). If Phaedra (1974) and Rubycon are good records to get high to (or so I’m told), I doubt Electronic Meditation would be.

Electronic Meditation is fairly rough, but an interesting listen nonetheless. Notably, for all that the later lineups of the band were associated with extensive use of synthesisers and sequencers, Electronic Meditation is built around tape loops and tape effects, with added drums, cello and flute. I’ve long thought that parts of Rubycon are reminiscent of Delia Derbyshire, especially her Blue Veils and Golden Sand, and I rather think that when Froese was putting the ideas for Electronic Meditation together he’d also been listening closely to An Electic Storm by White Noise, which also featured Delia. Delia was famously antithetical to synthesisers, at least in the nineteen sixties, and made her name with tape loops and collages.

One of the tracks on Electronic Meditation features a reversed recording of Froese reading out a Dover-Calais ferry ticket, and I rather think that he’d taken a trip to London to see and hear Pink Floyd: there are echoes of Saucerful of Secrets here too.

It’s worth a listen, though, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, and it is surprisingly resonant. At the time it was recorded (1969) civil unrest and civil rights were crucial issues in Europe and the US. When I listened to this for the first time this afternoon, I also had on my phone screen the foootage of an Australian TV crew being assaulted by the “police” in Washington DC. It was the perfect fit.

I have the album as an MP3 on my old Creative Zen MP3 player (bought in New York in summer 2007 and still going strong). It is available on Spotify and as a YouTube playlist: