Stratosfear

The harmonica was a joke. Berlin, August 1976, a room called Audio Studios, and Tangerine Dream had been fighting their equipment for weeks. Peter Baumann's new sequencer had taken its makers a year to build and was finished only two weeks after recording began. When they finally got it working, the multitrack machines broke down. Smoke came out of the Dolby units. One day Froese turned up with a harmonica, his answer to machines that would not behave. He played it over the opening of the third track, and nobody wanted it gone. It is still on the record.

Where it sits in music history

The first three Virgin albums were shaped in England. Phaedra and Rubycon were recorded at The Manor, the country house studio in Oxfordshire, and Ricochet was rebuilt there from tour tapes. In 1976 the band went back to Berlin. Early that year they rented an old cinema in the city to record William Friedkin's Sorcerer. In August they tried somewhere new: Audio Studios, a room normally used for orchestral sessions.

For Froese it was a nightmare. Looking back, he said Baumann struggled with the new sequencer and that everything that could go wrong, technically or musically, did. He and Franke often walked out of the studio in a bad mood. Studio time cost a fortune and the sessions dragged on for weeks. Master tapes went missing, finished tracks were mysteriously erased, and in the end the mixing desk went up in smoke. The three of them also argued about which pieces should make the album.

Christopher Franke remembers the same summer quite differently. Stratosfear is a special favourite of his, because it has a feeling of open space. He recalls playing for up to two hours without stopping. Improvised electronic music usually meant setting up and stopping over and over, and here they fell into long unbroken stretches. Acoustic instruments came back a piece at a time to add colour. For him it was the next big step after Phaedra. Two men in the same room, and two different records.

You can hear why it sounds different by reading the credits. Besides Mellotron and Moog, Froese played twelve- and six-string guitars, grand piano, bass guitar and mouth organ. Franke played harpsichord. Baumann brought a Fender Rhodes and the new rhythm computer. The pieces got shorter and the melodies moved to the front. Where the last two albums had two tracks each, this one has four. The title is worth a second look too: stratosphere, with fear slipped inside it.

Tracklist

Two pieces a side, and none of them reaches twelve minutes. The original pressing lists the opener at 10:04, though it actually runs past ten and a half. The timings here follow the listing at the fan archive Voices in the Net.

"Stratosfear", as it goes

The title track opens on slow, stately synthesizer chords. Then a single melodic line unwinds, and each time it comes round it holds you a little tighter. AllMusic's John Bush picked it as the best thing on the album, and that slow reveal is the reason he gave. What to listen for is the sequence underneath. Baumann's new rhythm computer lays down percussion that is dry and exact. Set it next to the drums Franke played by hand on Ricochet and the difference is obvious at once. A machine now holds the beat a person used to keep, and it does not waver. Before long your foot is tapping. This is the first Tangerine Dream piece you find yourself humming afterwards.

The band loved it too. They played it on stage countless times, and in 1995 they re-recorded it as "Stratosfear 1995" for Tyranny of Beauty.

The rest of the record

"The Big Sleep in Search of Hades" runs just under four and a half minutes, the shortest thing here. In 1976 it was edited down, along with the title track, for a promotional single. Hades is the underworld of Greek myth, and Froese said some of the album's titles connect to Greek philosophy.

"3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh from Okefenokee" is the harmonica track. The Okefenokee is a swamp straddling the border between Georgia and Florida. Among all the studio machinery, that harmonica at the start sounds strikingly human. A title about the edge of a swamp at three in the morning hangs on that one sound.

"Invisible Limits" closes the album at more than eleven minutes. Mellotron strings, harpsichord and acoustic guitar are scattered across a sequencer rhythm. Mark Prendergast, writing a history of this period in 1994, singled it out as the clearest example of the new sound. At the end the machines step back and a piano and flute melody is left. The whole album seems to have been walking towards those last few minutes.

How to listen

• Do not miss the first minute of the third track. That is where the harmonica is.
• Play one side of Phaedra first, then put this on straight away. Your ears will tell you what came in over those two years.
• On headphones, at night. The piano at the end of "Invisible Limits" needs a quiet room.

What happened next

In October, the month it came out, the band set off on a European tour: more than thirty shows across Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, England and Scotland. The album entered the UK chart in November and reached number 39, much where Ricochet had landed. Not every review was kind. Robert Christgau wrote that the band should leave accessibility to Kraftwerk.

The next spring and summer Tangerine Dream toured America twice and sold out both times. The live album Encore came from those tours, and after the last show in Boulder, Colorado, in September 1977, Baumann left the band. So Stratosfear became the trio's last regular studio album together. The melodic road it opened picks up again on Force Majeure in 1979.

The one track to send a friend

Send "3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh from Okefenokee". The title track is better known, but this one tells you more about how the record was made. Add one line with it. The harmonica at the start was never meant as a performance. It was a joke, played at a room full of broken machines, and it stayed.

Where to get it

The 2019 edition is the one to have. Ben Wiseman remastered it from the original tapes, and it adds part of the 1975 Coventry Cathedral concert and two single edits. It is the same as disc thirteen of the box set In Search of Hades. The 1995 Virgin "Definitive Edition" CD has a track title and Baumann's name misspelled. For the record as it first appeared, look for the 1976 UK LP in its laminated gatefold sleeve. Drop the needle at the start of side two, and in a swamp at three in the morning, the harmonica breathes first.

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