The 101 strangest records on Spotify: Leda – Welcome to Joyland

In 1977, the 24-year-old German composer and songwriter Peter Baumann left Tangerine Dream, the band he’d joined aged 18, for the third and final time. There had been a solo album in 1976 and there would be another in 1979, but in that very moment the question remained: what to do next? And how exactly would he pay for the upkeep of his Paragon Studio in Berlin? Something needed to be done to generate some fast income and, inspired by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s I Feel Love the answer became clear: Baumann and his collaborator, musician and ethnomusicologist Hans Brandeis, would make a cash-in disco record.

Artistic integrity be damned! Except, it’s not that easy for musicians to cast off who they are and, while there’s nothing at all wrong with disco cash-in records, this one ends up with a wonderfully off-kilter arthouse element to it anyway. Awash with beautifully twiddled and arpeggiated synth runs, tracks such as White Clouds and Space Ride are deeper, more experimental and more downright odd than any bandwagon-rider needs – or ever tries – to be.

Endless Race is so utterly perfect a piece of wafting, breathily erotic late 70s analogue porn that if it were released on a tiny German label today a certain proportion of the world would implode on contact. Wait for it to hit the money shot at 1:26 and watch in amazement as your own hands reach involuntarily for a set of shonky disco lights you might not even own. The title track is brilliantly cold electro-cabaret, City of Light is ludicrously, fabulously camp yet still fairly bizarre, Carousel is bloody awful. But who’s counting? Not Baumann (who appeared as Hacoon Mail while Brandeis was Cyril Claud). As for Leda – that wasn’t even her name. No one knows her name – not even the internet. The idea was to create mystery, but the only thing created was a crashing flop. But what a crashing flop!