Tangerine Dream
Electronic Meditation

It is said that this LP was entirely recorded in an abandoned factory in Berlin. Among dust, out-of-use machinery, and scraps.

In 1970, the German Tangerine Dream released this "Electronic Meditation," beginning their journey into Cosmic Music starting from the more "otherworldly" side of psychedelia from a couple of years earlier: no nude maidens in euphoric LSD trance, no glances to the folkloric past, no positivist rhetoric. This musical pursuit turns its gaze toward the understanding of the Self through a radical cybernetic dehumanization: synthesizers, treated tapes, feedback guitars, icy dissonances. The ensemble, with this mysterious and ultimately disturbing work, ventures into the unknown territories that Syd Barrett saw from afar a few years earlier, staying (fortunately) in environments still reassuring and musically accessible.

The German group does not aim for the warmth of psychedelic fumes and acid spices but collects the burnt remains of "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" and throws them into the infinities of the cosmos, brutally reshuffling the Pop rules of the time, making it an instrument of personal satisfaction and complacency. The result is a new music, never heard before, a daring sonic exploration, vaguely held together by a presumed conceptual net (the first track is titled "Genesis," the last "Resurrection"). A shapeless series of indistinct noises, roars, metallic rustles wrapped in expanded keyboards; frayed structures, tribal rhythmic patterns that spin aimlessly. Besides various synthesizers, feedback, even a clumsily played fluttering flute.

The second track, "Journey Through A Burning Brain," in its distressing 12 minutes, presents the greatest early Pink Floyd influences but without the characteristic childlike melodies. A noisy ascent that repeatedly reaches pure cacophony, and "Cold Smoke" follows suit, with the same saturated and psychotic atmosphere. "Ashes To Ashes" is different, contrasting keyboard delusions with vaguely blues and rock-inspired solos and guitar passages, at least in form, because in these grooves, "earthly" music is just a specter. In total, five tracks of pure experimentation, a gamble with themselves, exaggerations on the verge of listenability: a formless magmatic sphere, a creative chaos that will lead, years later, to the tepid calm of Phaedra, still light years away.

A work difficult to categorize and impossible to evaluate objectively, in the long run unsustainable, naive, unclassifiable.