8. Amon Düül IIYeti

This is going back some, to my hippy dippy days when the sixties were becoming the seventies and my hair was down to my waist. We’d sit around in a room full of joss sticks, eating hash cakes, swaying our hairy heads along to the Yeti LP. Compared to my friends I was more into German music, Amon Düül II, Klaus Schulze, Faust, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster and the like. But a lot of them were big Hawkwind fans. I didn’t mind Hawkwind but I thought they sounded too rock & roll for my sensitive hip ears. To me Amon Düül II were always the more interesting and had a mysterious air about them, and I loved Renate Knaup’s wonderfully eerie voice.

Yeti has some marvellous improvisational pieces, they make it sound so easy and fluid, because well, it’s not always. This was one of the first albums I’d heard that had heavy vocal manipulation going on. It was probably through a fuzz box and definitely through a ring modulator too, though not in a cheesy Dalek way. I rediscovered this album in my dusty vinyl collection about 15 years ago and since getting it on CD I still play it regularly, well now it’s in my iTunes library, but you know what I mean.