This album, named after the closest star to our solar system, plays, as a lot of early TD stuff, like a sort of cosmic symphony. It opens with "Sunrise in the Third System, which sounds like an overture on mostly organs, eventually fading into a screeching Moog flying through not-too-distant-by-interstellar-standards-space. There are more acoustic instruments on this than on most of Tangerine Dream's other albums, but true to form they are not really played like acoustic instruments. You might hear a few guitar notes in the background, but like every other sound they're only connected to the overarching rhythm in a vague way. There is rhythm here, but like everything about TD's sound it is too huge to comprehend while listening to it. The second track, "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola", is based around a slow-burning organ chord progression that sounds very reminiscent of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain," but instead of a lightning-hot guitar solo, it features slowly building backgrounds of Moog, thunder, and eventually flute and massive toms and cymbals exploding all over the solar landscape. The title track is long and slow, with lots of LFO's modulating pitch (emphasis on the L). The flute plays a melancholy and meandering melody while shimmering organs and Moogs map out the surface of the distant sun. This is not the best Tangerine Dream album to start with but it's still great, especially the second track.
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