Krautrock 2 - Walter Wegmüller's Tarot Album

KRAUTROCK 2 (USA, 2021, 120 minutes) - NTSC All Regions
Walter Wegmüller was a Swiss painter and record artist. As a recording artist, he was best known for Krautrock's Tarot album, which was released on the Cosmic Couriers label in 1973 and which we explore in the film. Wegmüller designed 22 tarot cards as a visual artist. His friend Timothy Leary introduced him to Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser von Ohr, who was seeking forward-thinking voices for a new label, Cosmic Couriers. It spawned a series of serious cult albums, with with of-the-moment ideas chanted to far-out jams by the best of German progressive rock bands. Leary shared his thoughts on Ash Ra Temple's Seven Up, for which Wegmüller created artwork. Wegmüller soon followed him. As a tarot student, he leveraged his cultural heritage to create a Gypsy pack and he describes every card in the Tarot album. It contained contributions from artists such as Ash Ra Tempel and Wallenstein.
For instance, Walter Wegmüller's version of The Tower (depicted in the image) in this 1982 tarot deck gives the card a mind-blowing twist that signifies destruction and sudden change. The all-seeing Eye of Providence and the iconography of dollar bills cast lightning bolts at a tower-hungry monster. The exposed brain is a gray metropolis with humming gears, high-rise buildings with oversized television antennas, and environmentally damaging factory smokestacks. The base is a pile of eggs, the ancient symbol of rebirth. The red tongue is reminiscent of the "tongue and lips" logo of the Rolling Stones.
Today the tower is written in our cultural consciousness as a sign of an unforeseen catastrophe. Wegmüller's shot of an airliner heading for his industrial building puts another unsettling twist.
ABOUT THE FILM - KRAUTROCK 2 is the second part of the Krautrock Trilogy.
Fifty years ago, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, creativity exploded in the German music scene. This globally audible supernova was called "Krautrock". This movement-not just a branch, but a whole family of psychedelic, ethnic, electronic, folk & rock styles fashioned without the radio in mind- created new musical elements that had not existed before and from which the musicians were able to create new worlds of sound. Its pioneering bands created eminently logical magic: They took the fierce, undomesticated essence of the old gods of rock and roll, and infused it with a truly progressive and revolutionary spirit
In order to organize the large amount of material that we filmed over the past three years, we have divided Romantic Warriors IV into three parts. Part 1 focuses on the bands from the Cologne- Düsseldorf region. Part 2 focuses on bands from Southern Germany. Part 3 will mainly focus on bands from Hamburg and Berlin, and one major band from Munich. All these documentaries are feature length, standalone films.
Krautrock Part 2 focuses on bands from Munich, Wiesbaden, Ulm, and Heidelberg. The film highlights the following bands:
GURU GURU • AMON DÜÜL II • XHOL CARAVAN • KRAAN • WITTHÜSER & WESTRUPP • POPOL VUH
Among the musicians of the Krautrock Scene (that were active in the 70s), the following have been interviewed for Part 2 of this film:
SKIP VAN WYCK III • MANI NEUMEIER • RENATE KNAUP • CHRIS KARRER • DANIEL FICHELSCHER • HELMUT HATTLER • JAN FRIDE • WALTER WESTRUPP
In addition, we'll hear the opinions of Krautrock specialists and authors Alan Freeman and Steve Freeman, and experienced musicians such as Dirk Jan Müller, Dirk Bittner & Georg Monheim of Electric Orange.
You are invited to visit our crowdfunding page: www.indiegogo.com/campaigns/r...
Please visit www.progdocs.com/rw-iv1/ to learn more about the Krautrock Trilogy and the Romantic Warrior Progressive Music series.
A ZEITGEIST MEDIA LLC PRODUCTION
AN ADELE SCHMIDT AND JOSÉ ZEGARRA HOLDER FILM
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For more info on the series, please visit our website at WWW.PROGDOCS.COM
WWW.ZEITGEISTMEDIA.TV LANGUAGE: ENGLISH AND GERMAN SUBTITLES: ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND ITALIAN PICTURE: 16:9 SOUND: 2.0 STEREO TOTAL TIME: 120 MINUTES