CYCLONE

Clearly the most successful stage of Tangerine Dream was the so-called Virgin Years, between 1973 and 1983. Indeed during those years the band recorded several acclaimed albums like Phaedra, Stratosfear or Tangram, just to mention some of them. In the middle of this period there was an isolated experiment and this was Cyclone. This moment coincides with the departure of Peter Baumann, whose last presence was in the previous album Sorcerer. The band recruited and english multi-instrumentalist called Steve Jolliffe, who in fact was a band member in the very early years as a flute player, even before the recording of Electronic Meditation. The novelty was that Jolliffe would sing in two tracks and his aura would fly over the entire album. This fact divided the Tangerine dream followers. Edgar Froese, TD mastermind, said once talking about Cyclone "As far back as I can recall some people have thought we're geniuses and others have dismissed as a bunch of dumb knob-twiddlers". The truth is that probably the majority of TD fans dismised Cyclone and a minority love it. You can count myself between this minority. The album begins with what I think is a prog masterpiece of 13 minutes long called Bent Cold Sidewalk, with real drums, flutes and an extraordinary voice, all of it over the typical TD kind of music. Starting with a vocoder intro, the piece gets into a four minutes sung section. The voice of Jolliffe sounds amazing and the same goes for the melody line, which added to the kind of lyrics creates a sort of mysterious enviroment. After that the track flows into a fascinating instrumental section of six minutes long to then returns to a sung conclusion with the same motive than the begining. Amazing really. Second track is by far the weakest, sung again, luckyly it is the shortest piece of the album. Finally, Madrigal Meridian is a typical Tangerine Dream instrumental, very well designed, with a "train" rhythm pattern over which the synths make a great job. About this Jolliffe said "For Madrigal Meridian, Chris (Franke) worked out some nice bass and sequencer patterns, and we just sort of began jamming over the top of that". Highly recommended at least to give it a spin and check the feelings.