AMON DÜÜL Paradieswärts Düül (CD)

Amon Düül II

Amon Düül ll broke away in September 1968 in Herrsching, Germany, from the tribe of the shortly before founded musicians' commune AMON DUÜL. The renegades no longer wanted to accept an ideolo-gically orthodox coloring of the game plan and from then on single-handedly avoided any "superficial agitation through lyrics related to the present day" (PR note). Instead, they played their way back to the time of gods, graves and scholars and took a fantasy trip into Roman times with their amplifiers. Dieter Serfas (dr, perc), Peter Leopold (dr), Schrat (bongos, vi, voc), Renate Knaup (voc, perc), John Wein-zierl (b, bg), Chris Karrer (vi, g, sax), Falk U. Rogner (org), Dave Anderson (bg) played in the religious science fiction band named after the Egyptian sun god Amon of Thebes and a Turkish fantasy figure.

On their first album Phallus Dei (1969) they performed electro-distorted Gregorian chants in antiquated German, mixed reports of futuristic disasters with Old Testament catastrophes, had a hard time with feedback effects, idiosyncratic sound magic and bland copies of PINK FLOYD music. They over-extended their concerts with monotonous swells and bland chord progressions, so that the critics registered only "a half-hour musical nothing" (<Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-tung>) at their first appearance at the Essen Song Days in 1968. Gradually they enhanced their underground oratorios with jazz improvisations, hard rock interludes and sound exotica.

Between the at first naively copied PINK FLOYD, the orchestrated shock-electronics of MOTH-ERS OF INVENTION and the Psycho Rock of JEFFERSON AIRPLANE AMON DüüL II settled in so virtuously that the English <Melody Maker> certified the musicians in 1972 that they were "the first German group to make their own contribution to the international music scene". The musicians felt influenced in their "art music within rock" (group quote) rather by --> Stockhausen than by the established synthesizer rockers and wanted to "return to Beethoven's world of imagination on a popu-lar level" (Weinzierl). At least they managed to reach the level of the San Francisco rock bands of 1967/68 with their music.

The line-up of the group fluctuated constantly around the core of Karrer, Rogner, Weinzierl, Knaup. In 1975 AMON Düüt, II consolidated into a studio band. The LP productions of later years offered hardly any echoes of the once pioneering eclecticism of the ensemble. Instead, the Bavarian old hippies produced international industrial pop with sometimes banal disco overtones.