DEUTSCH NEPAL

For the last few years one of my biggest musical influences has been the German Psychedelic freakout band Amon Duul 2. Started as simply Amon Duul, in the mid 60's by a group of like minded souls interested in communal living and freaking out, they later split off with some members continuing on a more freeform path; putting social experimentation and politics on an even ground with the music they were playing, while the other members wanted to continue into a more structured psych format, dropping the overt hippy dippy stuff, politics and what have you - all the while, trying to get a little recognition, and probably a little cash to boot.

Thus Amon Duul 2 was born, cause apparently they liked that name, a lot. (Just for the record, I don't know how to put umlauts over the U's but their are, infact, umlauts over the U's. Both of them.) (update: figured it out, it's "alt+numbers." go forth, spread the word.)

While they are quite prolific musically, releasing over twenty albums in the last forty or so years, they're exists very few visual documents of the band, of the few there are, i will link to at the bottom. Recently I found this video, scored by Amon Duul 2, but consisting of animation done by the infamous Ralph Bakshi, the man responsible for (in some peoples minds anyway.) totally butchering The Lord of the Rings, as well as the much despised Rotoscope animation technique, which is pretty much tracing, but is kind of trippy regardless.

Anyway, before LOTR Bakshi directed a film called "Wizards" which was about an epic battle in a post apocalyptic world concerning humanities fight against technology using, of course magic, and thus blogging was formed. (No that's not true actually, the blogging bit...) But he ran out of money half way through and because of that he had to use stock footage of WWII as the basis for his animations, so as you can imagine, and can see in the video, there is a very overt and bizarre Nazi theme to the whole shabang. Footage from Wizards, was used by Amon Duul 2, for this video.

Enjoy.

Amon Duul 2 video collection