Editing Tangerine Dream (section)

===Rise to fame: the Virgin years===
The band's 1973 album ''[[Atem (album)|Atem]]'' was named as one of British DJ [[John Peel]]'s records of the year, and this attention helped Tangerine Dream to sign to the fledgling [[Virgin Records]] in the same year.<ref name="Larkin"/> Soon afterward they released the album ''[[Phaedra (album)|Phaedra]]'', an eerie soundscape that unexpectedly reached No. 15 in the [[UK Albums Chart]] and became one of Virgin's first bona fide hits.<ref name="Larkin"/> ''Phaedra'' was one of the first commercial albums to feature sequencers and came to define much more than just the band's own sound. The creation of the album's title track was something of an accident: the band was experimenting in the studio with a recently acquired [[Moog synthesizer]], and the tape happened to be rolling at the time. They kept the results and later added recorder, bass guitar, and [[Mellotron]] performances. The Moog, like many other early synthesizers, was so sensitive to changes in temperature that its oscillators would drift badly in tuning as the equipment warmed up, and this drift can easily be heard on the final recording. This album marked the beginning of the period known as the 'Virgin Years'.

Their mid-1970s work has been profoundly influential in the development of electronic music styles such as [[New-age music|new-age]] (although the band themselves disliked the term)<ref>{{cite web |last=Fatali |first=Liberi |title=Tangerine Dream: Madcap's Flaming Duty |work=Sputnikmusic |url=https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/15463/Tangerine-Dream-Madcaps-Flaming-Duty/ |access-date=25 November 2018}}</ref> and [[electronic dance music]].<ref name="independent">{{cite web|author=Perrone, Pierre|title=Edgar Froese : Leader of electronic band Tangerine Dream whose influence has been felt for more than four decades|date=27 January 2015|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/edgar-froese-leader-of-electronic-band-tangerine-dream-whose-influence-has-been-felt-for-more-than-10006676.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220526/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/edgar-froese-leader-of-electronic-band-tangerine-dream-whose-influence-has-been-felt-for-more-than-10006676.html |archive-date=26 May 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|work=[[The Independent]]|access-date=17 June 2019}}</ref>

In the 1980s, along with other electronic music pioneers such as [[Jean-Michel Jarre]] (with whom Edgar Froese collaborated on Jarre's 2015 album ''[[Electronica 1: The Time Machine]]'') and [[Vangelis]], the band were early adopters of the new [[Digital data|digital]] technology, which revolutionized the sound of the synthesizer, although the group had been using digital equipment (in some shape or form) as early as the mid-1970s. Their technical competence and extensive experience in their early years with self-made instruments and unusual means of creating sounds meant that they were able to exploit this new technology to make music quite unlike anything heard before.