In today’s Psych Ward piece, we look back at Amon Düül II’s influential 1971 album Tanz der Lemminge (Dance of the Lemmings). The band formed as an artist commune in Munich, West Germany during the late 60s under the name Amon Düül. The commune was a collection of artistically and politically driven, burnt-out Duetsch university students that would, while getting high and finger painting, sit around in a circle and play music. Eventually, the more ambitious and musically experienced among them began taking this form of expression seriously, resulting in a division in the commune and the creation of Amon Düül II, a band that would later become an integral piece of the Krautrock movement that left deep impressions on artists like David Bowie and Brian Eno. The remaining members of the original Amon Düül also went on to release music of their own, but any success they had was mostly due to an attempt on the part of studio executives to ride off the more meritorious curtails of Amon Düül II.

Tanz der Lemminge is an incredibly unique, operatic, and distinctly unmarketable LP that comes in at over one hour with just six tracks. The album is constantly shifting between moods, while often a song will jarringly cut at four or five different points, completely foregoing all of the buildup it had been committing to for an entirely different sound. The whole experiment of the album is sonically diverse with a remarkable amount of instrumental variance, from sitars to string sections to synths.