Just because this was the first Tangerine Dream LP since their debut to include no LP-side-length compositions — and their first-ever to include zero songs longer than 12 minutes — doesn’t mean that the last album by the group’s Franke/Froese/Baumann lineup was a compromising pop move. It was a more compelling transitional gambit than that, where their sense of ambient exploration and rhythmic monomania began to fully encompass more traditional instruments (piano, electric and acoustic guitars, harpsichord) while still finding unconventional ways to make them sound as alien as the synthesizers they’d turned into cosmic sonic travelogues. The title cut is so evocative of a familiar yet uncannily extraterrestrial sense of place, breaking through the surly bounds of Earth to find out how much faster than light you can go, that it’s practically a bonus to get that feeling from the rest of the album, too. “The Big Sleep in Search of Hades” takes you to from pastoral bliss to future-ancient civilization in four and a half minutes, “3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh From Okefenokee” sounds more like music for space cowboys than anything to ever bear that label, and “Invisible Limits” rides out a tumultuous storm to the closing electro-acoustic equivalent of god rays piercing the clouds. No wonder that the visionary-director likes of William Friedkin and Michael Mann subsequently jumped at the chance to add them to their Rolodexes.