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A Personal History of Electronic Music |
I've tried to pick out the best and most approachable albums here - I hope they will offer someone a useful starting point.
Phaedra, Rubycon and Ricochet are all superb, also widely available cheaply, (under £7 from Amazon at the time of writing). Stratosphere and Force Majeure are also neat. Great value is the compilation called 'Tangerine Dream' with all of Phaedra, Half of Rubicon, and a bit of Stratosfear.
For early works try Timewind or Blackdance. Bleakly impressive. For later, Dark side of the Moog 5, a bit more cheerful.
Patashnik or Microgravity are my favourites, but Substrata II is more widely available, and great value.
Apollo Atmospheres, (soundtrack commissioned by NASA), or 'Another Green World'. For beautiful minimalism 'Music for Airports', for quirky songs try 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy'.
You. Steve Hillage in full flight in this surging triumph of burbling synths. Jon Hopkins: Opalescent Very approachable, very melodic, not much in the way of fuzzing synthesisers. An easy starting point.
I am based in the UK so that's the sources I recommend - But even if you are based elsewhere you might want to visit these sites, to try the streaming audio and actually hear the music. Isn't the net great?!?!
Online shop, for ambient music with an edge. A nice mix of little known albums, and those albums rightly regarded as classics. Some great value bundles, a very helpful proprietor, and lots of clips to listen to. And unlike the big online shops, he actually has the stuff listed in stock. (If there is one thing that drives me up the wall about Amazon and its imitators, it's the way they list hundreds of obscure albums they don't stock!)
Another nice online shop, with lots of clips to listen to, and reviews. Perhaps the reviews could be a bit more critical at times, and the shop layout is a bit messy, but the service is great, the range is great, and again the stuff listed is actually in stock.
The Biosphere home site. Minimal and elegant, like his music! Be sure to check the MP3 download area, where there's a nice large range of stuff for you to listen to, for free.
The Tangerine Tree Project, where you can get details of freely available fan recordings of live concerts in huge amounts. Note that the second link also contains instructions on downloading these disks by FTP. These are stored as SHN files, which are easy lossless compression. The end result is that they are VERY big files, and there are a LOT of them. So don't even think about it unless you have broadband, and plenty of blank CD's! Sound quality is variable. It's generally agreed by fans of the band that their best live work was done in the mid seventies.
The official web site of the original great electronic music band.
The official web site of the prolific Klaus Schulze.
The web home of Brian Eno.
The online home of Gong - Be Warned! The cover for 'Acid Mother Gong' is perhaps the worst ever published!
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