Breaking off from a commune to make music
Yeti is the second album by the German band Amon Düül II, released as a double LP on Liberty in April 1970 and produced by saxophonist Olaf Kübler alongside the band itself. The core group, Chris Karrer on violin and guitar, John Weinzierl on guitar, Falk Rogner on organ, Renate Knaup on vocals, Dave Anderson on bass and Peter Leopold on drums, had split off two years earlier from a larger political commune, Amon Düül, taking the more musically minded members with them. The album mixes shorter, structured songs with side-long improvised pieces, a format the double-LP length made room for in a way a single disc could not have. Willy Schmidt engineered, with what the credits describe as a little extra help from Siegfried Loch.
Two modes on one record
The record moves between two modes without pretending they are the same thing: tracks like “Archangels Thunderbird” and “Soap Shop Rock” hold to something closer to song structure, built around Karrer’s violin and Weinzierl’s guitar, while the closing side, credited outright as improvisation on tracks like the title piece and “Yeti Talks to Yogi”, lets the band stretch out with no fixed arrangement guiding them. Guests from the band’s earlier, more collective incarnation, guitarist Rainer Bauer, bassist Ulrich Leopold and flautist Thomas Keyserling, appear on “Sandoz in the Rain”, tying the record back to the looser commune the core band had recently stepped away from. The sheet gives little detail on where or how the sessions themselves were run, which is itself a small clue to how loosely documented this end of the German underground scene was at the time.
Where the two halves argue for each other
What the record does well is let its two halves argue for each other. The structured songs give a listener a foothold, Renate Knaup’s vocals in particular carry real melodic shape against the more chaotic playing around her, while the improvised pieces cash in the goodwill those songs build by taking the band somewhere considerably stranger. “Archangels Thunderbird” is the clearest example of the band finding a genuine hook without sanding down the raggedness that defines the record as a whole. The cover art, a collage built around a photograph of the band’s late sound man, adds a genuinely mournful undertone that the largely instrumental second half seems to be responding to, deliberately or not.
What a double LP of improvisation costs
The trade-off of a two-hour-plus double LP built partly from open improvisation is that the record does not sustain the same level of interest throughout. The longer pieces, “Yeti Talks to Yogi” and “Sandoz in the Rain” among them, ask for a tolerance of loose, unresolved playing that the more compact songs on the first sides do not require, and a listener drawn in by “Archangels Thunderbird” may find the shift into pure improvisation abrupt rather than earned. With minimal documentation available about how particular sessions came together, some of the record’s mystique is a function of what simply was not written down at the time rather than a deliberate artistic choice.
Discipline and openness left unresolved
Yeti sits at a hinge point for a band that had just separated itself from an explicitly political commune to focus on music, and the record’s split structure, half song, half improvisation, reads as an argument that those two impulses, discipline and openness, did not need to be reconciled so much as placed side by side. The cover’s tribute to a crew member who died from exposure while using LSD gives the album’s title, a mythic, half-glimpsed creature, an unexpectedly literal echo: something briefly seen, then gone. The record does not resolve that tension into a single statement, and it is more honest for not trying to.
Who this suits
This is for listeners already curious about the wilder, less commercially minded end of the German rock scene from this period, and for anyone who wants a record that treats structured songwriting and open improvisation as equally valid rather than picking a side. It rewards patience with long, loosely defined pieces and a willingness to sit with a record that gives up relatively little context about how it was made. It is not for listeners who want every track resolved into a clear song, or who find extended, directionless-sounding improvisation more tiring than exploratory across a full double album’s runtime.
Worth it, mostly for the first half
Yes, selectively, and mostly on the strength of its first half: “Archangels Thunderbird” and the other structured songs justify seeking the record out even for a listener who ultimately skips past the longer improvised pieces. The album’s reputation as a cornerstone of the wider German underground scene it emerged from holds up on the evidence of those songs alone. Whether the improvised second half rewards repeat listening depends entirely on a listener’s tolerance for loosely structured playing, and that is a fair trade to ask of anyone approaching a double album built, quite openly, from two different working methods rather than one.