Amon Düül II
Vive La Trance

It is well known that the moon (Duul) usually speaks only with lovers, and if the God of Sun and Winds (Amon) keeps to himself and acts mysteriously, naturally that dialectic and quarrelsome love is born, which is the salt and sulfur of Amon Düül II. The Version One had tried everything, really everything... to seek a path, a rough one of evolution, but essentially it did not go beyond that staggering combo of idle bongo players, regular visitors of a commune in the suburbs of Munich. The Version Two was instead like that damn more beautiful and intelligent brother, the one with impossible-to-find photos jealously kept and locked up in the lockers of all the college cheerleaders. But Venus and Minerva had not completely reckoned with the extreme and bohemian deity of Dionysus, with his madness and his diabolical chocolates distributed at school. Those with little phrases wrapped inside, what could be better than a friend? A friend with chocolate... of course, only that due to a "technical" problem, the Made in Germany habits had drastically changed for a while, and crumpling up a pistachio chocolate, you might happen to read on the paper There is no elevator to Eden, but only a hole in the sky or When the eye (that scrutinizes you from anywhere...) asks you who the emperor of the sky is, immediately take that flight Archangel Thunderbird...

And you can be as beautiful and virtuous as you want like Chris Carrer, leader of ADII, a pure and jazz-enlightened adolescence, with those visions for Coltrane and Coleman. But when, in the family, twenty years after those horrors in Germany, the silences at the dinner table become increasingly deafening, and things do not go as they should with the reconstruction of a country that still seems to always transit through those dangerous and dominant roads, it is Pleasant Time to get lost in the Madness of Amon Düül II.

In that fantastic flight among distant fractals and distorted and out-of-tune nightmares.

We were talking about the leader of the Band, and here a separate chapter should be opened before discussing Vive la Trance, titled "Renate Knaup," maybe one could quote Timothy Leary when he stated that women who try to be equal to men lack ambition. An intense study of cultural anthropology would be necessary to try to decipher the importance of the female component in ADII, to try to grasp the latent and superhuman power of that operatic vocality of Knaup in that orgy of sounds. Renate's voice was potentially a supernova locked away in a drawer; in the early Duul albums, she was only allowed a few timid outings, but only in the afternoon, accompanied by her parents, and only to showcase some light clamor, a Dionysian shout, or a circus chorus, a ballet on tiptoe in suspension between the usual hellish clangors of the band. It would only be in Wolf City and within the perfect ballistics of that sound that Knaup would be allowed to range with her vocality – for a coin – in the dark fresco of the Wolf City because among those Gothic walls and in that Babylon of smoke, a song of Grace would carry the best melodies of ADII. Like in Green Bubble Raincoated Man, which boasts a melancholic intro that should in theory sublimate into meditation until an unexpected wah-wah solo midway through the track revolutionizes the sound habitat with a surge of brilliant inspiration, a reservoir full of mellotron that flames the entire psychedelic spectrum of the West Coast in flashes and ash in a one-way flight from Grace Slick & C to Munich to explore forests and hunt wild mushrooms and green gnomes.

Taking a spin on Vive la Trance is like taking a spin on the Roulette; we are in the hands of the game and the mood of the croupier. It takes just a second to get distracted and let the needle accidentally land on the groove of Pig Man, and what a fan of ADII would never want to hear might happen – namely, witnessing helpless the degeneration and post-Fallus Dei castration of that amber and medieval sound and the forced teleportation into the Abbey Road Studios in London in forced presence of Paul McCartney who, in a white shirt, sways Love Me Do. At this point, the statistical chances that that vinyl might even violently be catapulted outside the window are, so to speak, very high. The only hope, at this point, to reintegrate this Vive la Trance into the circle is to hope confidentially in some sort of soft landing, perhaps a grassy field nearby or an outdoor mattress display of your favorite hawker. Because with a bit of patience and hoping that in the meantime an emigrated Yeti from Tibet has not nibbled at your vinyl, one could try to give ours a second chance, for example by selecting the longest track, that of Mozambique. And then one might be surprised by the reintegration in the chorus, because this track might be an ADII must, after an afrodelic intro with those bongos on loan from Amon Duul I, Knaup is a muse of drift and freedom Clap your hands / Because you're gonna die / Every victim is searching for his hangman / Every hunter is stalking his prey / Victim find a victim and hang, proceeding lyrically, sometimes dramatically, culminating in a long space rock jam Hawkind oriented.

It was that Gothic, sideral landscape, cradle of those estranging but also decadent thoughts.

Like that jewel of Skolimowski's Deep End, a film passed off as British but almost entirely shot around Munich, Susan/Jane Asher, like the Cosmos, was there, within reach, you could go out with her even if you were underage and she 25, you could give her the first kiss in the cinema, but like the Cosmos, she could never essentially be yours. She was always there just a step away, but in the end always elusive, you could imagine her, perceive her... but she would always be distant, just a step away... like that Cosmos... like that Music... It brought, in a sense, the human soul to exasperation, the sense of possession that was pre-Alexandrian was at the mercy of dreams that enchanted and wrapped all nights.

And damn Watson, what a problem when in 73/74 all those krautokrukke bands began slowly waking up from those dreams, some more disillusioned, some less. The cosmic couriers had sailed... on land, Susan a dot ever smaller in the heliosphere and what a crash for our Duuls, what a bang, they can say what they want, that they landed softly thanks to that trancaise atmosphere, but the noise was heard indeed...

However, it must be said, this vinyl has seven lives, indeed it is a frisbee; the more you throw it out the window, the more it comes back to you, the cosmic dust of Tanz Der Lemminge is not entirely gone, and it's enough to let oneself be enchanted by a superb Renate Knaup in Babooshka version in Jaulosie.

Or by the splendid Im Prater Blühn wieder Die Baüme, a suggestive organ base by Falk interspersed with snare breaks, that old spring Austrian song that talked about trees blooming again in the Prater of Vienna.

The title of the track, casually translated, might say: In the crater... (after the crash from the Cosmos...) the flowers have bloomed again.

What a Bang, anyway.