Track Listing

1. Rubycon, Pt. 1
2. Rubycon, Pt. 2

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53658 in Music
• Brand: TANGERINE DREAM
• Released on: 1992-06-29
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Album Description
UK Super Audio CD reissue of 1975 album for Virgin.

Amazon.com essential recording
Tangerine Dream's 1975 album picks up where 1974's Phaedra left off--with sequenced teases of palpitating synth under ambient washes of cosmic sound and traces of melody. If Phaedra was the marsh of dank electronic washes and eerie sounds in the night, Rubycon is that marsh just before dawn, awakening in a dusky light of bubbling metallic sequences and murky movements of lush synth. There's plenty of dreamy sections here, continuing on for several long delicious moments while creating a cosmic space that hovers between the unconscious and awakening. "Rubycon, Part II" builds an electronic wind tunnel of sound before breaking like a sunbeam through a cathedral and soaring into softly urgent skies of nuanced melody. The piece moves as an ocean wave, washing gently into a shore of tinkling cosmic rocks that reverberate and find hints of subtle, aching harmony before finally evaporating into the album's end. A brilliant ambient work. --Karen Karleski

Customer Reviews

Tangerine Dream at the height of their power.
"Rubycon" is surely Tangerine Dream's finest hour. I see this album as the culmination of their early ultra-ambient work. It took the disparate ideas displayed on the previous album, "Phaedra" and coalesced them into a hugely satisfying whole.

The album is worth the money for the first ten minutes alone; this is experimental synthesis at it's best, layers of beautifully sculpted sound mixed with those awesome repeating bass sequences... it just doesn't get any better than this.

I feel the later albums lost the plot with the introduction of recognisable melodies. The mix of weird / tune was only fully realised on the "Poland" album (in my humble opinion). The track "Horizon" bringing back those early seventies strangeness and mixing it with eighties sequencing.

If you like "Rubycon", Froese's early solo works "Aqua" and "Epsilon In Malaysian Pale" are in a similar vein, but TD only rarely recaptured this kind of form.

Another Tangerine Dream Classic
"Rubycon" is TD's 5th album release,coming right off the huge international success of their previous release,the now-classic,"Phaedra".In many ways,"Rubycon" is similar to "Phaedra",both in style and in the use of instruments,such as mellotron,etc.,but there are also many differences as well,with one of the most obvious being the lesser amount of only two tracks instead of the usual four,but even with the fewer tracks,"Rubycon" is still able to dazzle you with its lush mellotron soundscapes and stimulating musical directions.The first piece,the appropriately titled "Rubycon",can be considered the light side of the album,with its gently pulsating mellotron in the background and the other synths taking you away,sucking you into a whole other dimension of sound that you will never want to leave from.The beauty of this early ambient piece surrounds and consumes you,leaving you in a natural,music-induced high.Once again,I find that words cannot fully describe the emotions that I feel while listening to this electronic soundscape of no return.Simply breathtaking.This brings me to the final piece,"Rubycon Part 2",which is the dark side of the album.From the very first seconds of listening to this piece,you will instantly know that this track will be different than the first.The first few minutes consist of what I believe to be some of TD's most darkest sounds ever in their entire history,with electronically generated chorus-sounding male voices that remind me of some gothic horror film,truly an eerie few moments of dark ambient bliss.Eventually,the artificial chorus gives way to some equally eerie sounding synths,continuing in this pattern for a good portion of the rest of the track.Simply astonishing,considering this was recorded in 1975!The final few minutes of the piece sees the eerie atmosphere slowly dissipating,and for the rest of the piece,the darkness gradually fades and the sun starts to peak out of the black clouds for the first time since the beginning of the album,with the piece ending with a beautiful,brighter melody of calm,and then,sadly,the album comes to a close,leaving you with the mindset that it could have gone on for all eternity and you wouldn't have minded.This album's theme is most accurately described as a journey to the darkest corners of the universe and back.A powerful early ambient masterpiece by Tangerine Dream.Very Highly Recommended!

Beautiful miniature
I adore this album. The two tracks presented are almost mirror images of each other. Part one opens with gentle, sporadic organ sounds but then suddenly opens out into a heavenly wash of sweeping synthesizer chords, with what sounds like a seagull crying overhead. This eventually fades into Part one's central "sequencer" section. Motivic, repetitive, and pulsing. Building repeatedly to small climaxes. This kind of music first appeared on side 1 of 1974's Phaedra. It's as though TD realized that side 1 of Phaedra was infinitely better than side 2, and tried to correct this by making a more rounded album in Rubycon. Part one ends with a haunting, eerie motionless section, setting the scene for part 2.

Part two begins with some of the most generically frightening music TD ever produced. Wailing synths rise and fall in pitch, giving the feeling of being inside a haunted house at a fair. Soon the synth sound is replaced by human voices in a demonic choral section that takes you out of the funfair and somewhere far darker! This music puts shivers up your spine if you're listening after dark with the lights out. Then comes part two's central "sequencer" section. Much darker than that in part one, but also much more syncopated. This is the "dark side" to part one's "light side". Just when all seems hopeless however part two fades into one of the most beautiful endings to any of their albums, a gentle dreamlike wash of sound and harmony reminiscent of the beginning of part one (although musically very different).

So there it is. Tangerine Dream's most perfect album? In my opinion it quite possibly is. It is the only time that they have ever created an album that plays like a symphony, in that both movements are well structured and work well separately. Yet when heard together they form a wonderful journey into the heart of darkness. And back.