Alpha Centauri – Tangerine Dream (1971) – Album Review

Album: Points Of No Return

Artist: Tangerine Dream 

Release Date: March 1971

Some people would say that Alpha Centauri is Tangerine Dream before the polish. But, to me, these dudes sitting in a dark room with tape running, experimenting with sound, fucking around with organs and oscillators is a towering steel structure holding steady against the hard winds of this world. The sound holds its ground through persistence alone.

There aren’t mistakes on this album, it’s just a bunch of artists in the choppy waters of technology that’s desperately trying to keep up with what the human mind can imagine. Sometimes righting the ship makes the music sound a little raw, a little uneven – just like life. The charm and brilliance of this record is the journey one takes to the arrive centered at the destination. I think Alpha Centauri is the perfect blueprint for everything that came after in their career. Albums like Rubycon and Phaedra owe their weight to this rawness. The pieces are loose, messy, and unpredictable, but every second carries intention.

For me, the real fun starts at Track 3 (Alpha Centauri). Every tone feels ungoverned, free from any expectation that it should resolve or behave. Listening to it now, I can’t help but wish someone had slipped this on the turntable when I was an infant – some rogue daycare worker deciding that cosmic drones were better lullabies than lullaby standards. Maybe that kind of exposure would’ve rewired my brain before the world could.

If you listen to this album, at the very least it gives you something real: an unfiltered experiment that still hums with human uncertainty. At the best, it makes you grateful that sound can still feel this alien, this deliberate, and this alive.