Amon Düül II – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Gustave Doré’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood).

More illustrated Perrault. Gustave Doré’s intention to produce definitive illustrations for his editions certainly paid off when he turned his attention to the French fairy tales. Doré’s work may lack the light touch required for some of these stories but a couple of the engravings—Red Riding Hood in bed with the wolf, Puss-in-Boots—are reproduced endlessly whenever picture editors need a suitable illustration. Doré’s characters can be rather wooden at times but the expressions on the face of the wolf and the girl are perfect.

Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood).

Elsewhere Doré contributes some original details: the court in Sleeping Beauty is usually shown besieged by thorns or bracken but Doré has giant fungi growing all over the floor; in Little Tom Thumb the children are described as knocking on the door of the ogre’s house then being let inside but Doré shows the ogre’s wife greeting them with a shaft of lamplight. These illustrations were published in several editions throughout the 1860s which makes that lamplight beam a very advanced pictorial effect. Incidentally, for those who read the Amon Düül II cover art post a couple of days ago, the figure of Tom Thumb stealing the ogre’s seven-league boots may be glimpsed outside the spacecraft window in the centrespread of Dance of the Lemmings.

Wikimedia Commons has more of the Doré illustrations; there’s also a set at Gallica although the quality of their scans isn’t always so good.

La Barbe bleue (Blue Beard).

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Falk-Ulrich Rogner album covers

All The Years Round (7-inch single, 1972).

I mentioned earlier that Falk-Ulrich Rogner’s cover art for Amon Düül II was worthy of a post so here you are. Amon Düül II were slightly ahead of the pack in the German music scene of the 1970s, starting earlier and (arguably) finishing their prime period earlier. They were also closer in musical style and group ethos to the psychedelic/early prog groups in Britain and America, especially Hawkwind with whom they shared a record label and a bass player. Other German groups were often psychedelic to some degree but Amon Düül II went all-out for a German take on psych rock, with extended guitar-heavy jams played against oil-on-water projections.

Falk-Ulrich Rogner was one of the longer lasting members of the group’s shifting personnel, playing organ and electronics, writing lyrics and creating artwork that’s a perfect match for what I always think of as Amon Düül II’s Gothic Surrealism: a blend of lyrics and themes running through songs titled like Max Ernst paintings: Flesh-Coloured Anti-Aircraft Alarm, Archangel’s Thunderbird, Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight, Green Bubble Raincoated Man. The cover art is generally a collage of photographs, old paintings and other graphics, a familiar technique for psychedelic album covers. What gives Rogner’s work an edge is the way he blends multiple collages together by either photographic exposure or the photographing of projected transparencies. This has the effect of softening hard edges and transitions, and makes the resulting images all the more hallucinatory and dream-like. Effects like this are easy to achieve today with Photoshop but in the early 1970s they required a considerable effort.

Phallus Dei (1969).

At first glance the cover of the gloriously titled debut album looks like a painting but it’s a photograph of a tree silhouette juxtaposed against some vague collage business. This doesn’t really communicate the lysergic intensity of the music within which may explain why the cover was changed to something more typically psychedelic for its UK release.

The back cover inaugurates a pattern of placing the band on the back of the album, a reversal of the usual state of affairs even today.

The first CD release of Phallus Dei on the Mantra label featured what may be another Rogner photomontage, one that I’ve not seen anywhere else.

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The kosmische design of Peter Geitner

Cyborg (1973) by Klaus Schulze.

More German music design. Once you start delving into the music produced in Germany between 1969 and 1975 you eventually notice that a) the good albums generally have decent cover designs, and b) there are many justly forgotten albums with astonishingly tasteless artwork. Most of the well-known names were smart enough to craft a visual identity: Kraftwerk’s efforts have been explored here recently but there was also the Gothic Surrealism of Falk-U Rogner’s photo montages for Amon Düül II (worthy of a post in themselves); Neu! followed the lead of Kraftwerk with strikingly minimal presentation; Faust’s debut album was released on transparent vinyl in a clear sleeve while their second album was an all-black sleeve with a series of strange pictures inside, one for each song. Can are a notable exception in having no clear identity.

Peter Geitner is unique in this scene in being the only graphic designer you can find who was creating any kind of consistent identity for a label and a group of artists. Almost all the work here is for Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s short-lived Kosmische Musik which replaced the earlier Die Kosmischen Kuriere. Both labels were offshoots of Ohr Records (Tangerine Dream’s original home), and catered mostly to the musicians based in Berlin, with a later detour to Switzerland. All the releases feature Geitner’s recurrent motifs of radiating stars and sunburst graphics. I think one of the reasons I like Geitner’s design is because I have a tendency to use similar spiky sunbursts in my own work. Whatever Geitner did after the collapse of Kosmische Musik I’ve yet to discover.

The standard design for the vinyl labels. Many of the albums were released as quadrophonic mixes so the star logo also signifies multi-directional sound. Klaus Schulze’s album is nothing if not cosmic, four sides of treated strings and swirling synth noise.

Seven Up (1973) by Timothy Leary & Ash Ra Tempel.

This is a reissue design that replaces the more common sleeve with its Walter Wegmüller doodles and poor layout. I didn’t used to like the music very much either, two sides of bluesy jams with Tim Leary and cohorts bellowing over the top. But it’s a historical oddity, a rare connection between the US psychedelic scene and the German music which took psychedelia in new directions.

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Weekend links 219

Grendel Monster (2013) by Anna & Elena Balbusso.

• Rick Poynor looks at the Guide de la France mystérieuse (1964), a fantastic (in every sense) doorstop of a volume whose collage alphabet by Roman Cieslewicz can be seen on the cover of Carnival In Babylon (1972) by Amon Düül II.

• Boolean mathematics, Charles Howard Hinton, The Voynich Manuscript, and the effects of surveillance on the political process: Adam Curtis firing on all cylinders as usual.

• At Strange Flowers: The Picture of John Gray, remembering the minor fin de siècle figure who gave Oscar Wilde a surname for his most famous creation.

In “32 Cardinal Virtues of Dennis Cooper,” Wayne Koestenbaum remarks: “Cooper’s quest for the unseeable is virtually religious. I mean: sedulous, abstract, perpetual, unrewarded, unreasonable.” There’s much more to be said of Gone, its power, its pain, its odd intrigues, but perhaps it will suffice to say that it is revealing: unlike Burroughs’ scrapbooks hidden away by some private collector, never to see the light of day, Gone (and its sister texts at the Fales Library) illuminate in perpetuity Cooper’s obscure quest for the unseeable.

Diarmuid Hester looks at Dennis Cooper’s scrapbooks

• The Sallow Tree, a single by Lutine. More music: An hour of Julia Holter‘s St John’s Sessions performance.

• At Dangerous Minds: Christian televangelists listen to Stairway To Heaven forwards.

• Cathy Camper reviews Fearful Hunter, a graphic novel by Jon Macy.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 452 by Claude Speeed.

• Roman Cieslewicz at Pinterest.

• The Adobe Illustrator Story

• The House of Julian

• Unofficial Britain

• Amon Düül II singles: Rattlesnakeplumcake (1970) | Between The Eyes (1970) | Light (1971) | Lemmingmania (1971)

The sphinx of Wolf City

Wolf City (1972) by Amon Düül II.

Behold another favourite album cover by a favourite band, one of several superb designs for Amon Düül II by Falk-U Rogner who was also the group’s keyboard player. Rogner’s suitably hallucinogenic cover images are worth a post of their own but this one requires attention today since I happened to solve the mystery of the location of the Düül sphinx during the recent hiatus.

Ever since I began these blog posts I’ve had a feeling that the endless trawling of image archives might one day turn up the location of this stone creature. It was only ever going to be something you’d find by accident, and that’s precisely what happened with the discovery of the drawing below in volume 4 of Materials and Documents of Architecture and Sculpture (1915) by A. Raguenet, a set of books I’ve been plundering recently for architectural details.

Compare with this photo.

The notes for the drawing offer enough information to trace the location to the Brunswick Monument in Geneva, a mausoleum built in 1879 for the Duke of Brunswick. The monument is a typically Gothic edifice guarded by a number of stone lions plus this splendid sphinx on a plinth by a pool of water. On the opposite side of the monument there’s a matching bird-headed sculpture. Amon Düül II were a German group so it was always likely that the sphinx would be in Europe somewhere, if not Germany itself. The photo below is a detail from this Flickr shot which is the best match I’ve found for the angle of the cover photo. Jean Franel was the monument architect but statues are often the work of specialist artists, and I’ve yet to find a name attached to these examples.

Photo by Till Westermayer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frémiet’s Lizard