RUBYCON

When Karlheinz Stochausen published his paper "...wie die Zeit vergeht..." (How time passes by) in 1957, he was essentially talking to a closed circle of colleagues, who periodically met in the legendary Darmstadt seminars. But the word got spread, as to influence a wider audience. And which was the word? That music is basically time, not only in its rhythmic dimension, but also in the others, such as pitch, - which is the way how we perceive sound above the 16 cycles per second threshold, when the distinction of the individual impulses vanishes, - and timbre, which is the way we perceive the waveform, and it can result from the addition of several different frequencies. The problem was that musical instruments were not constructed to do a continuous shift from rhythms to pitches, experiencing so the "threshold effect", and also that each instrument comes with its own pre-fixed timbre built-in, not allowing the modification of this characteristic at will during the performance.

But, as we know, the problem of one generation can easily be the joke of the next. One of the "infected" by these ideas was, of course Edgar Froese, and by the time he was putting together Tangerine Dream in 1967, electronic instruments capable of doing the aforementioned tricks were leaving the laboratories and falling in the hands of people like them. By the time they recorded Rubycon, sequencers and synthesyzers were already doing exactly what the band wanted, generating and modifying layers of sound with an amazing sense of flow. These are creatures of liminal vibration, so strange in the realm of rhythm, as in the realm of melody, though retaining a bit of both, and mutating their tonal colours with chilling fluidity.

So, welcome to a concert hall of the mind, where the old barriers had fallen, and new questions were raising. Where is this journey taking us? Which can be the place of this piece of time made music in our busy world and life? I think the existence of these questions speaks for itself. After all, only a masterpiece can be able to interrogate its own value as art.