Tangerine Dream - Rubycon

Rubycon is a classic of electronic music and still sounds fresh today. If pieces of it sound familiar, its because three decades of ambient and film music has drawn from early TD's innovative use of electronic voices, sound textures and analog synth rhythems. Remember that TD did not use sequencers to produce their music at this time - they played it pretty much live. It ranges from dark and spooky to grand and etheral and feels more like a classical composition as it moves from theme to theme and through a variety of sound environments. It generally stays melodic or harmonic, mostly through arpeggiation, with only occassional dissonance - they were shooting to be a popular afterall, in contrast to some of their German counterparts. This is one of the classic electronic albumns by which you compare everything else that followed.