Issue 110 PDF

This month's Electronic Sound cover feature is the fascinating story of Tangerine Dream's 'Phaedra' album.

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...