As clueless as it still seems all these years later, I enrolled at Baylor University without giving much thought to the fact that it’s a Baptist college and, as such, there would be a lot of attention paid to, well, religion.

Good ol’, Texas-style Southern Baptist-ness!

Not really my thing, but that was my fault and not Baylor's.

In any event, for all the Baylor folks' well-meaning and kind efforts, when I finally heard the voice of God – alone in my dorm room on a melancholy, rainy Saturday afternoon – it had nothing to do with where I went to college or their message.

Rather, I’d just purchased an album called Phaedra by a Berlin band called Tangerine Dream led by a visionary named Edgar Froese – and it exploded in my ears and brain and heart in such titanic and utterly unique fashion it still sorta freaks me out.

Over four tracks, Phaedra is what it would sound like if deep space was in fact a dark ocean and you were swimming through it to Mars. Massive and spectral washes ease over you with no rhythmic or instantly recognizable melodic components – all blending with blips and snow-swirl noises and the sinister aural impressions of helicopter blades.

I don’t know how many hundreds of times I went to sleep with Phaedra in my headphones, but, in spite of its dark qualities, it was and is a calming, gorgeous and overwhelmingly massive record that affected me in a way that not many albums have.

For decades now, every nuance and note and sound of Phaedra have been as firmly tattooed in my brain as “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but on that first afternoon I literally had no cerebral or sonic context to catalog or process what I was hearing.

To listen to Phaedra now – something I do regularly – is still a miraculous experience, but I’m not sure it would similarly resonate with a first-timer today. And that’s Froese’s own fault. As the only constant member of TD over a half-century, his work on over 100 studio, live and soundtrack albums – along with a rich solo career – were hugely influential on ambient music, New Age, progressive rock, symphonic movie scores and what has become electronic dance music. Folks may not know Froese had a profound impact and I wonder, for example, if Skrillex or Deadmau5 even know his name. Weird.

There are many Tangerine Dream and Froese albums that are dear to me, and I’d certainly recommend Zeit, Encore, Stratosfear, Rubycon, Underwater Sunlight, the soundtracks to Sorcerer and Risky Business, and the Aqua and Epsilon In Malaysian Pale solo efforts.

Froese was a genius and, sadly, on January 20, he passed at the age of 70 after suffering a pulmonary embolism.

As a small sampling, you can listen to “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares” from Phaedra as well as an excerpt from the title track on Epsilon In Malaysian Pale. I hope you like them.

If Baylor has its way, there is an afterlife. And, if so, God will have greeted Froese by saying, “Wow, that Phaedra album sounds just like me! A little more sinister than I'd like, but that's no big deal. How'd you do that?”