Amon Düül

In the Germany of the late Sixties, a hotbed of cultural avant-gardes – from cinema (Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder) to rock (Can, Popol Vuh, Ash-Ra Temple, Tangerine Dream) – and steeped in the climate of post-'68 social protest, the Amon Düül project was born (named after the Egyptian sun god Amon and Düül, a character from a Turkish novel). The band's original nucleus formed in Munich, within an anarchist-freak commune of about a dozen people, part of the international anti-war movement, where, amid free love and psychedelic drugs, they organized free-rock recording sessions.

A split soon occurred within the lineup: on one side Amon Düül I, with the Leopold brothers (Peter and Ulrich) and Rainer Bauer; on the other Amon Düül II, with Chris Karrer, John Weinzierl, Falk Rogner and singer Renate Knaup-Krotenschwanz. The former recorded for Metronome, the latter for Liberty, under the supervision of the guru of German indie-rock, Olaf Kubler.

Amon Düül II quickly take the upper hand over their "cousins", developing their intuitions into more complex sonorities, poised between avant-garde experimentation and naive primitivism. Their recipe is a free-form psychedelia in the vein of Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, in which acoustic, Eastern-tinged and electronic sounds noisily intermingle, alongside a typically Teutonic sense of the gothic. A sound that comes together on their debut album, "Phallus Dei".

The record, a sort of "rock opera" steeped in pagan ritualism, contains four tracks plus the long, 20-minute closing title-track (the remastered CD version also includes the four-part "Freak Out Requiem" and "Cymbals In The End"). Amon Düül II's music is experimental and strongly politically engaged, tied as it is to the "flower-power" utopia that was also dominant across the Atlantic. It ranges from electric free-rock to loose acoustic digressions, from beat-rock to the most tribal strains of folk: sounds that foreshadow the chaos and energy later condensed into punk music.

The magnificent overture of "Kanaan" plunges the listener straight into an arcane world, pervaded by Middle Eastern and esoteric sounds, with a backdrop of mournful choirs opening onto horizons worthy of Dante's inferno. The magic of this witches' dance stems from the combination of rock energy (the bass riffs, the electric jolts of the guitar) with the exoticism of strings and sitar, and from the alternation between Lothar Meid's grotesquely "Bowie-esque" vocals and Renate Knaup's hypnotic vocalizations. "Dem Guten, Schonen, Wahren" is another psychoanalytic nightmare: opened, of all things, by a mellotron, the track soon sinks into a chaos of Luciferian screams, murderous violins, tribal percussion and psychedelic effects; Meid's bizarre falsetto singing seems almost to follow a path of its own, far from the main melodic lines, while the childishly dreamlike lyrics let a few rays of hope filter through amid so much grand guignol.

The psych-folk of "Luzifers Ghilom" does nothing to dampen the blasphemous charge of these hallucinated, terrifying sonorities, with constant tempo changes and vocals that, left to drift in a sea of noise and percussion (including Shrat's bongos), grow ever more deranged and unhinged, while the female choirs sharpen the disorienting effect. The singer's demonic vocalizations continue on "Henriette Krotenschwanz", a shorter track that evokes the long night of the Inquisition, culminating in a choral military march.

The climax of this infernal sabbath is reached with the title track, a jam of over twenty minutes that strings together a sequence of spectacular sonic finds. It begins subdued, but soon a string of drones and cosmic noises, desperate screams and frenzied strings takes over. The band then plays as one, unleashing a series of increasingly crooked and chaotic improvisations, with percussion hammering away in the background. After a quick violin solo, the track finally takes on the shape of a percussive jam, accompanied by Karrer's increasingly delirious vocalizations. The result is an "acid nirvana" orgy worthy of the Velvet Underground. The instruments all play out of sync and dissonantly, first and foremost the violin (the devil's instrument), which together with organ, choirs and African percussion seems to lead the listener by the hand through this imagined journey into the circle of the damned, in search of the murkiest depths of the human soul.

A titanic record, a volcano of endless sonic resources, "Phallus Dei" can rightly be considered the German answer to American acid-blues and to the nascent British progressive rock. It would be followed by two other cornerstone albums of Teutonic rock, "Yeti" (1970) and "Dance Of The Lemmings" (1971).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

26/10/2006