Biography
A decade prior to the musically untrained Half Japanese issuing their first album as a sprawling three-record box set, the similarly untutored German outfit Zweistein executed an identical maneuver, yet surpassed them by securing release through the major imprint Philips. This episode stands among the most peculiar chapters in Krautrock, a scene hardly celebrated for moderation. Although details surrounding the enigmatic collective remain scarce, the project centered chiefly on Jacques Dorian, independent of contributions from his spouse and children, alongside studio engineer Peter Kramper. In 1970 the group issued the Philips single "I'm a Melody Maker b/w 'A Very Simple Song,'" a brace of acoustic folk numbers. The label's staff producer, smitten with either Dorian's wife or another female participant, persuaded superiors to green-light a full-length release. Under cover of night, with all adults except the children dosed on LSD, the participants laid down sufficient tracks for the ambitious three-LP conceptual work Trip Flipout Meditation, intended to chronicle the successive phases of an acid experience. The resulting amateurish, overindulgent, and poorly captured recordings wallowed in excess, largely abandoning folk roots in favor of studio manipulations, cosmic textures, sustained eerie organ drones, and warped vocal distortions, punctuated only sporadically by rudimentary songs. Compounding the indulgence, the package appeared in an ornate metallic gold-and-silver box featuring an embedded mirror on its lid. Upon the album's arrival later that same year, the producer was promptly dismissed for the expensive debacle, and Philips swiftly excised Trip Flipout Meditation from its catalogue. While some have dismissed the effort as an overblown debacle, others have celebrated it as a flawed yet singular artifact of eccentricity. Zweistein produced no further albums, although engineer Kramper subsequently performed on keyboards and Moog with Amon Düül II and its offshoot Utopia, while the remaining members disappeared entirely from music.
Albums