Issue 110

This month's Electronic Sound cover feature is the fascinating story of Tangerine Dream's 'Phaedra' album and we're bundling the issue with an exclusive orange vinyl seven-inch featuring edits of two tracks from this groundbreaking 1974 release.

Tangerine Dream’s debut for Richard Branson’s still-shiny Virgin label, 'Phaedra' came out exactly 50 years ago and was greeted with a mixture of curiosity, excitement, confusion and contempt. While electronic music was nothing new by this point, the sequencer-heavy sound was electronic music as it had never been heard before. The album is widely and rightly recognised as a 24-carat classic now, of course, setting the Berlin group on the path to superstardom. They stayed with Virgin for the next decade or so, releasing a string of magnificent records that also included ‘Rubycon’ (1975) and ‘Force Majeure’ (1979).

Elsewhere this issue, we have interviews with the current incarnation of Tangerine Dream, who have produced some great work in recent years, and with one-time Kraftwerk man Karl Bartos, who tells us about his soundtrack to a century-old German expressionist film. We have other features on Yard Act, Maya Shenfeld, Martha And The Muffins, Drew Mulholland, Tristan Perich, Om Unit and Office For Personal Development too. If you haven't come across OPD before, they're a synthpop group masquerading as a sinister corporate cult. Or maybe that's the other way round...

To accompany the magazine, we have an orange vinyl seven-inch featuring edits of two pivotal tracks from 'Phaedra' – the much acclaimed title cut and the equally brilliant ‘Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares’. Both glittering analogue jewels, they showcase Tangerine Dream at their pinnacle. When ‘Phaedra’ was released in America, Virgin put edits of these same two tracks back-to-back on a promo-only single that was mailed out to a small number of journalists, radio DJs and store owners. The promo has been one of Tangerine Dream’s rarest records for many decades.  

As with all our music releases, this seven-inch is strictly limited and is only available to readers of Electronic Sound, so be sure to get your copy straight away.