Electronic Meditation is Tangerine Dream's debut and is very unlike anything else they ever did. It's actually a rock album, with guitar and drums. Many Krautrock bands at the time were doing just what TD were doing on this album. Their lineup was quite a bit different in those days. The band then featured Edgar Froese (as always) on guitar and organ, Conrad Schnitzler on violin and flute, and Klaus Schulze on drums. And yes, this is the same Klaus Schulze who would later make a name all to himself as one of the big names of electronic music (up there with Jean Michel Jarre, Tomita, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and of course, Tangerine Dream).

You notice one thing missing in this version of Tangerine Dream: the synthesizer. It's not even here. As close as you get is are electronically treated instruments through sound generators available at the time. Now, not everyone likes Electronic Meditation, the sound quality isn't the best, for one thing. And because it's not either the strange, exploratory space music of their following three albums, Alpha Centauri (1971), Zeit (1972), and Atem (1973), or the electronic albums they recorded from the mid 1970s on, it's obviously a big shock.

The album starts off slowly with "Genesis", which contains mostly drones, odd uses of flutes and cellos, before coming to the next song, "Journey Through a Burning Brain" which contains a lot of spacy organ, and as the cut progresses, it becomes more and more intense, until the guitar kicks in. Then things get totally wild and out of control. I could hardly believe the intensity of the music. And this continues on for the next two cuts, "Cold Smoke" and "Ashes to Ashes". The final cut, "Resurrection" features some speaking in reverse in what I presume is German, before ending the way it started, with the strange drones of "Genesis".

I was in utter disbelief when I heard this album. I already knew them as an electronic act, and as an act doing strange, otherwordly, exploratory space music, but nothing like that. I totally love this, so if you're looking for mindblowingly intense Krautrock album, get this album.