Jurriaan Andriessen was actually quite at home in the classical world but chose to record three synthesizer albums in the late 1970s, the first of which, “The Awakening Dream” (1977), is an outstanding excursion into experimental ambient and minimal music. Andriessen himself, 52 years of age at the time, called it a “a trance symphony”.
The music—perhaps surprisingly for a contemporary classical composer—is less in the tradition of his peers such as Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen and more in tune with the electronic sounds of the Seventies emanating from Berlin, Düsseldorf or Forst, the likes of Cluster, early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream