Tangerine Dream, Optical Race

Sterile and formulaic, but it's the right kind of sterility and formula, and the album even brags about it, too: in the CD liner notes, on the other side of the flap from the die-cut cover, it proudly states it was produced on an Atari ST complete with the fuji. (No doubt Jack Tramiel didn't pay a dime for that plug, either.) Birthed in the midst of their more approachable, synth-heavy 1980s phase, they still take too long to get to it — nearly all of the first four tracks are well-produced but uninteresting — but persistence rewards you with gentle beats ("Cat Scan" and the title track), some precision melody weaving that makes the most of the algorithmic approach ("Turning Off The Wheel") and an appealing slow closer ("Ghazal (Love Song)"), even if the saccharine's a little heavy to the taste. For formulaic, sterile new age fusion you could do a lot worse. (Content: pure instrumental.)

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Tangerine Dream, Rubycon

Another ostensible masterwork of the 1970s synthesizer craze, I have always had the sense that there was a greater picture here, that the album's palpable formalism was artfully obscuring some greater musical basis my ears and soul were yet to discover. Technically, it is daring and rich, and I suppose with appropriate chemical support one might dig it in the abstract. But this album, every bit the foamy river of myth its name descends from, has one flaw, and it's a big one: its appalling tracking. If the group could have made it a single 35 minute composition, pinning you to your chair, forcing themselves upon your auditory canals, chaining you to the hi-fi so that you couldn't get away, they would have; only the realities of the LP caused them to relent, if only a little. Seventeen indivisible minutes a side of music so experimental it would weird out Philip Glass is not an album to be enjoyed — it is an album to be endured. (Content: pure instrumental.)

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