pagan rock gods, good to dust to

I guess getting excited about ‘Krautrock’was a bit of a 1990s thing, but even back then nobody ever got very excited about the mighty Amon Düül 2.

they’re not great technicians like Kraftwerk, or great musicians like Can, or great magicians like Faust. on the other hand; they had really good album covers; they had singer Renate Knaup with her extraordinary voice, somewhere beween foghorn and icepick, and not always very in tune; and their vital historical importance is highlighted in one of the most joyful pieces of scholarship yet to appear on the Interweb.

originally a freeform ongoing psychedelic jam session/commune in Munich

we are eleven adults and two children which are gathered to make all kinds of expressions, also musical

which split in the autumn of 1968: a purist faction recording extended jam sessions – evidently, open to anyone capable of rolling a joint and/or shaking a tambourine – under the name Amon Düül (the album titles are priceless – Collapsing (1970), Disaster (1973))

meanwhile, the breakaway faction went on to be a proper rock band.

anyway, I was looking for something to do housework to yesterday afternoon, dug out the 1972 albums Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City.

ok the playing’s not, by anybody’s standards, particularly good. and the writing is patchy – these albums represent AD2 at their most accessible and structured, they are still strung-out sequences of rock episodes, at times theatrical verging on pompous, at times eclectic to the point of silliness (wild gipsy fiddling, raga rock, guitar battles).

what they do very effectively is to create strange textures and geographies – the pagan choirs at the opening of Carnival in Babylon, for example; or the strange duets that pair Knaup’s foghorn/icepick routine with an unearthly screeching male falsetto; or the sudden burst of instrumental sweetness that introduces ‘Sleepwalkers Timeless Bridge’ on Wolf City.

there is a sincere and intense longing in this music for an otherworld, a longing to be anywhere but Germany in the second half of the 20th century. perhaps ‘Krautrock’ is best understood as a series of attempts to embody alternatives in sound; a perfect machine heaven (Kraftwerk); a hypercool sci-fi Stone Age (Can); a space where such distinctions as ‘music’ and ‘noise’, or ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, cease to matter (Faust); or, here, a psychedelic rock metropolis in semi-mythical antiquity.

in all these cases, it is the emotional impetus, the longing for elsewhere, that lifts the ‘psychedelic’ experimentation above the level of frivolity and indiscipline: less revealing the soul, as guiding it out of the trap that modernity turned out to have been all along.