TRIPS UND TRAUME

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Absolutely trippy, pastoral and gorgeous, this album belongs without restriction to these marvellous "acid" folk items which emerged from 70's German underground. It contains funny songs, cool explorations in bluesy psych folk and nice acoustic experiments. "Lasst Uns Auf Die Reise Gehn » is a folk ballad with a really popular German sensibility. "Trippo Nova" is one of these songs whose the two guys have the secret; a bluesy folk invention, acoustic "trip" with some dreamy aspects in the harmonies and German lyrics. A beautiful, relaxed and humorous atmosphere with catchy acoustic guitar parts. The rather calm tempo of the composition finally accelerates into a dancing improvisation dominated by acoustic percussions and folk guitars. "Orienta" is a psychedelic folk composition with a delicate, mysterious "eastern" felt. It starts with a simplistic, "moody" repetitive melody for the flute to progressively reach you into an oriental journey with voices in the background, a Celtic & traditional folk theme for the guitar. With this tune, Witthuser & Westrupp totally invent the concept of progressive folk. "Illusion I" is a beautiful, melancholic composition with a basic use of acoustic guitars and violin parts, its melody slowly grows in you. "Karlchen » is an other mysterious, transcendent mood with flute / guitar combinations and female recitatives. A high poetic, introspective moment with a nice "humorous" section for brass instruments. "Englischer Walzer" sounds as a drunken, traditional folk song with funny piano / violin parts. A nice listening experience and essential for all progressive-folk lovers.

This unassuming little album is pure magic delivering some lovely tripped out cosmic folk music. This was Witthuser + Westrupp's second release and is really hard to exactly peg but best parallel may be to imagine a more folky and slower moving ASH RA TEMPEL. In their day they were know to their fans as the "Cosmic Buskers" and built up quite a strong following. "Trips + TrÄume" is a very relaxed album and pretty well works on a cosmic folk acoustic base offering some great guitar and keyboard work. Vocals are sung in native German and suit the music quite well. Overall a superb bit of cosmic folk !

4.5 stars really!!!

This German folk duo is almost by itself the inventor of Cosmic folk, but were also so typically "kraut-folk" (if you'll allow this genre invention of mine), being fairly close to Ougenweide, Emtidi and Parzival. And this second album (although the debut is attributed to only Witthuser, this was a duo effort) is of the calibre of the albums I mentioned just above. The duo will have the honour of having released albums on two of the most collectable labels of their country: the early Ohr label for their first two and then the really rare Pilz label.

Although it is not that easy to categorize this album because the styles oscillate between medieval, more traditional German folk, cosmic ambiances and a singer-songwriter approach. The cosmic ambiances mixed in with some slow acoustic blues of Trippo Nova are counterbalanced by the music-hall-like opening track, the medieval ambiances and the hippy feel of Orienta are giving an excellent, bizarre twist to the album (not that far from the Incredible String Band), while the superb Lord-like organs (reminiscent of the Purple's suite April) of Illusion I and the lengthy haunting flut lines underlining the German spoken monologue of Karlchen brings such a special atmosphere that no other albums even comes close (to my knowledge anyway). The last two shorter track are close to Baroque music and if that was not weird enough already, the last one veers into a weird barroom sing- along: Nimm Eine Joint is rolling a doobie and somehow resembles Fraternity Of Man's Don't Bogart Me track.

Even if the genre cosmic folk is a bit doubtful, this album is one hell of a UFO , coming from outer space. I'd love to have smoked what these guys did back then.

Krautrock has always had its great partnerships: Ralf and Florian; Moebius and Roedelius; Rother and Dinger...and while the duo of Bernd Witthuser and Walter Westrupp may not have the same brand-name recognition, they still opened a unique path across otherwise familiar territory, approaching the psy-fi mind warp of the era from a more accessible folk music direction.

"Trips und Traume" was the name of their first official LP together, and fortunately the music leaned more toward the 'traume' (see the album "Der Jesuspilz" for a trippier side of their alliance). The lysergic cover illustration describes only part of the band's hybrid style: a psychedelicized pagan Folk Rock, tapping into an almost atavistic undercurrent of older German cultures.

(On an unrelated side note, the artwork also recalls experiments made alongside my art- nerd classmates using the library Xerox machine in high school. Shift your face across the moving scanner and you'll get a similarly skewed self-portrait: see the CAN album 'Rite Time' for another example.)

Maybe the trips of the album title were more aesthetic than chemical (...yeah, right). Side One of the original vinyl follows what might have been an ongoing musical epiphany, beginning with the more traditional Teutonic folk melody of "Laßt uns auf die Reise Gehn", beautifully illuminated by the evocative shimmer of Walter Westrupp's bowed zither. The bluesy, dreamlike aura of "Trippo Nova" (daffy Latin for "New Trip") signals the beginning of a celestial journey, reaching its apogee in "Orienta", where the mandolin and recorder set up a cosmic chant that works like secondhand smoke to your psyche.

The pipe dream continues on Side Two with "Illusion 1", a tune later recycled for WALTER WEGMÜLLER on his epic 1972 album "Tarot", and concludes with the dumb fun of "Nimm Doch Einen Joint, Mein Freund". Dopey is the obvious adjective for this last bit of nonsense: simply listening to it can put you at risk of a contact high.

The language barrier is clearly a bonus; otherwise the team would be just another pair of counterculture folk singers with a weakness for soft drugs. But anyone tuned in (or turned on) to the same wavelength will discover a fabulous pathway to the milder edge of the always subversive Krautrock spectrum.