Today's Cassette, Friday December 13, 2019.

It was time to listen to something on cassette again after not doing so for a good while.  Tonight it's Phaedra, Tangerine Dream's first release on Virgin Records in 1974.  The album proved a success for both TD and Virgin, reaching 15 on the UK Album Chart that year.  It was also the debut of the sequencer driven sound that the group would become famous for.

Edgar Froese, 1944-2015.

Tangerine Dream founder, and sole consistent member, Edgar Froese has died at 70 of a pulmonary embolism.  In memoriam here's "Thru Metamorphic Rocks" from Tangerine Dream's 1979 album Force Majeure.  That's Froese on guitar.



Appropriately I was listening to a live version of "Choronzon" when I read he died.

Its always interesting the things you notice when you listen to a recording through different speakers, in a different listening position and so on. I was just listening to Tangerine Dream's "Cloudburst Flight," off the album Force Majeure, while reading and noticed for the first time drummer Klaus Krieger's bass drum patterns on that piece. In places he's playing multiple bass drum hits per bar instead of the standard hits on the 1st and 3rd beats or variations thereof. I suppose he's trying to emphasis the sequencer patterns being used or something along those lines. Krieger had gotten involved with the band on their previous album Cyclone along with vocalist/keyboardist/horn player Steve Joliffe, an album most TD fans, and Chris Franke and Edgar Froese for that matter, tend to view as a failed experiment. Krieger would not be back for the next TD album Tangram, which is kind of ironic given that they got pretty heavily into drum machines as the '80s began.