One of the very best Krautrock albums, this has been a favorite of mine since 1972. I don’t remember what drew me to this album, except that the cover looked pretty spacey!
On side 1, the album leads off with “Wolf City” which seems to be about a social condition in Germany. It features “bubbly” effects and repeated vocals. The next song “Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse” has echo’d bells which lead to a fugue-like repeated pattern and is wholly instrumental. Next is “Deutsch Nepal” which tells the story of a colonial mistake, where a people took over a land where they didn’t belong. This is a very heavy song with a gutteral vocal. Side 1 ends with “Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge” which is an uptempo instrumental with good guitar and synths.
Side 2 opens with “Surrounded By The Stars” which is as mysterious as it sounds, like those stars are the ones that play with “Laughing Sam’s Dice”. “You knock at the gates of life, no answer” Next is “Green-Bubble-Raincoated-Man” which is a story of compassion for a hippie-type individual, similar to the Grateful Deads’ “St.Stephen”. The album ends with “Jailhouse Frog” which lets it all out with wild guitars and a accusing vocal, dissolving into the bubbles and space noises, which sound like birds on an exotic planet. It finally ends with a Jethro Tull-ish soprano sax dissolve.
The vocals throughout are split between male and female and sound appropiately Teutonic. This album is a real trip if your head’s in the right place, as mine was those 32 years ago.