The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Amon Düül II
- Released
- 1971
- Album
- Third studio album
- Original format
- Double LP, four sides
- Record two
- Chamsin Soundtrack
- Producer
- Olaf Kübler
Why it matters
Long form becomes composition, montage and film music
Tanz der Lemminge does not repeat Yeti's clean division between composed and explicitly improvised records. Its first LP organizes short movements into two side-length suites, making montage and recurrence the principal compositional tools. The second LP changes context again: four pieces form the Chamsin Soundtrack and place instrumental atmosphere beside the vocal theatre of the opening record. The format lets the band move from tightly cut episodes to extended environments without claiming that both methods are identical.
Jimmy Jackson's organ and choir-organ and Al Gromer's sitar widen the first record beyond the standard rock ensemble. The album also documents a transitional personnel moment: Renate Knaup appears as a guest vocalist rather than being silently folded into an inaccurate fixed lineup. Its importance within the catalogue lies in scale and organization, not simply duration; each side proposes a different way for many contrasting events to cohere. The following Carnival in Babylon would return to a shorter single-LP frame, making this the most extensive studio architecture of the band's opening three-album sequence.
1971
A third album built after Yeti's double-LP breakthrough
Amon Düül II released Phallus Dei in 1969 and the double album Yeti in 1970 before undertaking Tanz der Lemminge. The group had already established a vocabulary of electric guitar, violin, organ, layered percussion, theatrical voices and extended form. Yeti made a printed distinction between structured pieces and three improvisations; the 1971 album reorganized those concerns into suites and soundtrack music. The German title translates as Dance of the Lemmings, the name used for the British Liberty edition.
Olaf Kübler produced the album, with Peter Kramper and Karl-Heinz Hausmann documented in engineering and mix roles. The first LP depends on a network of short named sections that different releases have indexed in different ways. The second LP derives from music connected with Chamsin, a 1970 film, and is explicitly grouped as the Chamsin Soundtrack. Carnival in Babylon followed in 1972 and condensed the group into a single-album sequence rather than extending this four-side plan.
Amon Düül II
A changing core surrounded by carefully bounded guests
Karrer moves between cutting electric attack, acoustic texture, bowed sustain and selected vocal parts, making timbre a structural signal. Weinzierl supplies a second independent guitar voice and also contributes vocals, while piano appears in the soundtrack-record palette. Rogner's organ and electronics can provide harmonic weight or turn the background into unstable environmental sound. Meid anchors the first record with electric and double bass and takes documented vocal roles in individual movements.
Leopold drives the suite record through drums and percussion, then contributes piano to the Chamsin material. Jackson's choir-organ produces an orchestral breadth that should not be miscredited to a Mellotron or to the permanent lineup. Gromer's sitar belongs to the first-record color scheme and does not justify describing the complete album as an Indo-rock project. Knaup and Zacher are credited for particular vocal appearances; keeping those contributions bounded prevents guest credits from leaking across every track.
Suites and soundtrack
Electric suites give way to instrumental cinema
The first side makes continuity from abrupt contrasts: amplified riffs, acoustic clearings, vocal scenes and keyboard masses arrive as connected movements. Its recurring material matters more than conventional verse and chorus, allowing a short episode to alter the meaning of what precedes it. The second side is more restless, repeatedly interrupting a stable groove with changes of register, texture and dramatic address. Organ and choir-organ enlarge the harmonic field while guitars remain rough enough to stop the suites becoming polished symphonic rock.
Sitar is a distinct color inside the arrangement rather than a continuous exotic surface. The Chamsin record reduces the importance of lead voice and lets piano, electronics, percussion and guitar construct space. Those four pieces are cinematic without requiring an invented scene-by-scene synchronization; their contrast in density supplies a self-contained LP sequence. Across all four sides, production preserves separation between acoustic detail and overloaded ensemble peaks, so scale does not become uniform loudness.
Track guide
Six major works across four original sides
Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies
The first original side is a suite rather than one uninterrupted song in the ordinary sense. German editions divide it into named movements including In the Glassgarden, Pull Down Your Mask, Prayer to the Silence and Telephonecomplex, while other releases group the side more broadly. March rhythm, acoustic passages, voice and sudden electric pressure create a sequence about transition rather than a single repeated hook. The arrangement keeps revising its own scale: intimate detail can become public spectacle within a few bars. Treating the complete side as one listening unit preserves those returns even when a digital edition supplies several track numbers.
Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child
Side two is another composite work, with German indexing naming episodes such as Landing in a Ditch, Dehypnotized Toothpaste, A Short Stop at the Transylvanian Brain-Surgery, Riding on a Cloud, Paralyzed Paradise and H.G. Wells' Take Off. Those titles create a volatile chain of technological, bodily and airborne images, but not a documented linear plot. The music repeatedly changes its center: heavy guitar can yield to keyboards, voices can act as characters, and short connective material can redirect the suite. Its restlessness is formal, not merely descriptive. The side closes the vocal first record without resolving its competing perspectives into one narrator.
The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church
The Chamsin Soundtrack begins the third side with a long instrumental environment. Its title combines celebrity memory and religious architecture, yet the piece works through sonority rather than a literal memorial scene. Piano, organ or electronics, percussion and string texture occupy different depths, allowing motifs to appear like objects within a wide frame. After two movement-packed vocal suites, the reduced need for verbal direction changes how duration is perceived. The track establishes that the second record is not leftover improvisation: it is a separately grouped soundtrack sequence with its own pacing and instrumental priorities.
Chewinggum Telegram
A more compact soundtrack piece joins two deliberately incompatible images: disposable sweetness and urgent communication. The music responds with sharper gestures and a clearer forward impulse than the preceding long environment. Rather than supplying a hidden narrative message, its title helps frame the collision of everyday object and electronic transmission. In the original side order it functions as contrast within the Chamsin record, preventing atmospheric breadth from becoming static. Its economy also demonstrates how this album uses short form inside a large physical package: a concise cue can rebalance an entire LP side.
Stumbling over Melted Moonlight
The fourth-side opening returns to a more suspended scale. The title's impossible physical action is matched by music that seems to lose and recover footing through pulse, keyboard color and drifting guitar. This is close-listening interpretation, not a claim that the film contains a literal moonlight scene. Its placement gives the second soundtrack side a gradual entrance before the final piece. Compared with the first record's crowded vocal episodes, space between sounds becomes compositional material. The track invites attention to decay, overlap and the point at which an atmospheric layer begins to function as rhythm.
Toxicological Whispering
The final soundtrack work closes the double album through uneasy low-intensity detail rather than a reprise of the opening march. Whispering in the title suggests reduced volume, while toxicology adds threat; the arrangement sustains that contradiction without spelling out a story. Electronics and instrumental fragments create proximity and distance, and percussion prevents the texture from becoming inert. As the fourth Chamsin piece it completes a record whose dramatic logic differs from the two suite sides. The ending leaves the album dispersed in atmosphere, an effective counterweight to the first record's named characters, vocal interventions and hard edits.
Image and motion
Masks, machines, motion and an imagined landscape
The album is not one continuous concept narrative; its first and second records have different organizing frames. The two opening suites repeatedly join mechanical language, altered bodies, travel and public spectacle. Masks and silence suggest unstable identity and communication without assigning every voice to a fixed character.
References to Transylvania and H. G. Wells turn popular-cultural memory into quick theatrical signals.
Clouds, flight and takeoff make upward motion recur across the second suite. The Chamsin titles replace vocal theatre with combinations of celebrity, religion, consumer objects, communication and environmental danger. Film context helps explain the second record's spatial pacing, but no unsupported scene map is imposed on it. Dance in the album title describes collective and formal motion more securely than any invented story about literal lemmings.
Liberty double LP
A gatefold built for a divided double album
The original format is a gatefold double LP, and that physical division supports the album's two-record design. The front presentation uses collage-like psychedelic imagery rather than explaining the music through a literal lemming illustration. Interior and label information are important because the suite movements are more finely identified on some issues than on others. The British title Dance of the Lemmings translates the German title rather than identifying a separate album.
National editions can vary in typography, catalogue number and the way internal movements are printed. Modern cover thumbnails often conceal the fact that the programme was designed around four side breaks. The second record's Chamsin grouping belongs to the original package and is not a later compilation subtitle. A faithful presentation should therefore retain the German album title while explaining the translated British title and side architecture.
Third album
Liberty presents a demanding third record
Liberty released Tanz der Lemminge in 1971 as Amon Düül II's third studio album. The double format followed Yeti but did not simply reproduce its composed-versus-improvised labeling. Its British release used the translated title Dance of the Lemmings. The album asked listeners to navigate suite subdivisions, soundtrack grouping and four physical sides.
No unsupported chart peak or precise contemporary sales figure is attached to the record here. Critical discussion has often emphasized its ambitious scale and the contrast between the suite record and Chamsin material. Later digital indexing made the same music appear as six long tracks or as a much longer list of movements. That variation affects navigation and citation, but it does not change the identity of the original double album.
Early peak
The expansive end of the band's early trilogy
The album is commonly placed with Phallus Dei and Yeti as the expansive opening phase of Amon Düül II's catalogue. Its distinction is the integration of composed suites and an independently framed soundtrack record. The first LP demonstrates that long form can be constructed from compact, sharply contrasted episodes rather than continuous soloing. The Chamsin LP broadens the group's history beyond the usual description of theatrical psychedelic rock.
Choir-organ, sitar, electronics and piano enlarge the documented palette without erasing the guitars and percussion at its center. Later editions have kept the work available while making its track count appear inconsistent. Its influence is best discussed through form and ensemble color rather than an unverifiable claim that it invented a genre. Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City would become more compact, so Tanz der Lemminge remains a singular four-side summit rather than a permanent template.
Original four sides
Do not mistake indexing for new music
The original argument occupies four LP sides. Record one contains two suites with named internal movements. Record two contains four pieces grouped as the Chamsin Soundtrack. A six-track digital presentation preserves the major works but suppresses some internal movement markers.
A longer German index exposes those movements without creating additional compositions. Track-number differences should not be reported as alternate musical content unless the audio actually differs. Vocals are substantial on the first record, so Instrumental is an inaccurate album classification. Later bonus material, where present, remains outside the 1971 four-side programme.
A listening path
Hear each original side as a complete statement
- Hear the opening suite as one side before consulting its internal titles.
- Notice how acoustic clearings make the electric returns feel larger.
- Use the second suite's named episodes as landmarks rather than separate unrelated songs.
- Pause at the record break before entering the Chamsin material.
- Compare the spatial opening of The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church with the first record's vocal density.
- Follow the last three pieces as one soundtrack-side progression.
- On a second pass, compare a finely indexed German sequence with a six-track digital edition without assuming either contains extra music.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Tanz der Lemminge release family and original-edition indexing — MusicBrainz
- Tanz der Lemminge album record and personnel overview — AllMusic
- Authorized Tanz der Lemminge double-LP reissue record — Sound of Liberation
- Tanz der Lemminge modern six-work programme — Apple Music
- Amon Düül II discography and album chronology — MusicBrainz